Other towns lay in ruins, as did most of the
farmsteads of the open country. The Prussians found Bromberg, a German
colonial city, in ruins; and it is even yet impossible to determine
exactly how the city came into that condition. In fact, the
vicissitudes which the whole Netze district had undergone in the last
nine years before the Prussian occupation are completely unknown. No
historian, no document, no chronicle, gives reports of the destruction
and the slaughter which must have raged there. Evidently the Polish
factions fought between themselves, and crop failures and pestilence
may have done the rest. Kulm had preserved from an earlier time its
well-built walls and stately churches, but in the streets the
foundation walls of the cellars stood out of the decaying wood and
broken tiles of the crumbled buildings. There were whole streets of
nothing but such cellar rooms in which wretched people lived. Of the
forty houses of the main market-place twenty-eight had no doors, no
roofs, no windows, and no owners. Other cities were in a similar
condition.
The majority of the country people also lived in circumstances which
seemed pitiable to the King's officers, especially on the borders of
Pomerania, where the Wendish Cassubians dwelt. Whoever approached a
village there saw gray huts with ragged thatch on a bare plain without
a tree, without a garden--only the wild cherry-trees were indigenous.
The houses were built of poles daubed with clay.
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