The other Towns lay in ruins; so also most of the Hamlets (HOFE) of the open Country.

Bromberg, the city of German Colonists, the Prussians found in heaps and ruins: to this hour it has not been possible to ascertain clearly how the Town came into this condition.

[_"Neue Preussische Provinzialblotter,_ Year 1854, No.

4, p.
259."] No historian, no document, tells of the destruction and slaughter that had been going on, in the whole District of the NETZE there, during the last ten years before the arrival of the Prussians, The Town of Culm had preserved its strong old walls and stately churches; but in the streets, the necks of the cellars stood out above the rotten timber and brick heaps of the tumbled houses: whole streets consisted merely of such cellars, in which wretched people were still trying to live.

Of the forty houses in the large Market-place of Culm, twenty-eight had no doors, no roofs, no windows, and no owners.