Danzig, to be sure, indispensable to the Poles, maintained itself through these decades of disorder in aristocratic seclusion.  It remained a free city under Slavic protection, for a long time suspicious of the great King and not well disposed toward him.  Thorn also had to wait twenty years longer in oppression, separated from the other German colonies, as a Polish border city.  But the energetic assistance of the King saved the country and most of the German towns from destruction.  The Prussian officials who were sent into the country were astonished at the desolation of the unheard-of situation which existed but a few days’ journey from their capital.  Only certain larger towns, in which the German life had been protected by strong walls and the old market traffic, and some sheltered country districts, inhabited exclusively by Germans (such as the lowlands near Danzig, the villages under the mild rule of the Cistercians of Oliva, and the prosperous German places of the Catholic Ermeland), were left in tolerable condition.  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.  The entrance door opened into a room with a great fireplace and no chimney; heating stoves were unknown.  Seldom was a candle lighted, only pineknots brightened the darkness of the long winter evenings.  The chief article of the wretched furniture was a crucifix with a holy water basin below.  The filthy and uncouth people lived on rye porridge, often on herbs which they cooked like cabbage in a soup, on herrings, and on brandy, to which women as well as men were addicted.