A TASTE OF PRISON LIFE
Outside in the corridor the man from Schirmskad was waiting, and the
two drove me to the railway station and hustled me into a railway
carriage. They would not say where I was being taken, but I did not
care much, and five minutes after I entered the train, I was fast
asleep.
When I awoke it was daylight. A bleak, desolate, grey morning, for the
snow had come at last, and was falling heavily. I was cold and stiff
from the cramped position, and sore from the jolting of the train--one
never understands how a train can jolt until after an experience in
what they call a fast train in Russian Poland--and as I sat up, yawned,
and rubbed my eyes, every bone in my body seemed to ache.
My guards were both asleep. Had I been minded I could have taken their
weapons and shot them both as they rolled in their corners, snoring
loudly enough to have drowned the sound of the shots.
I roused them both, and with a great shew of politeness told them what
I could have done. They both swore at me.
“It’s really very wrong of you to go to sleep in such a case,” I said
amiably. “You had no right to subject a prisoner to such a temptation.
I fear I shall be compelled to report you.”
“You’re a cool hand,” growled the Schirmskad man.
“Not nearly so cold as _you_ would soon have been if I had done it,” I
retorted, and the grimness of the joke seemed to appeal to them. “But
Englishmen don’t do that kind of thing.”
“To hell with the English,” he said.
“That’s not pretty, but it’s nothing to what you’ll feel like saying
before you are through with me. One of you took me for a spy, or a
conspirator, and the other for a thief or a murderer. It was brilliant.”
“Who are you, then?” growled the Warsaw man. They were both sleepy and
ill-tempered, and thus very easy to bait.
“If I had been either spy or murderer, I suppose even you can see that
I should have shot you just now instead of going on contentedly to
explain things.” The train ran through a station then, and I caught
sight of the name Tischnov. I knew the place to be some twenty miles
from Warsaw. I began to chuckle, and presently burst into a loud laugh.
“What is it now?”
“I am thinking of your promotion,” I grinned. “They tell me that the
man who makes the biggest mistakes gets promoted instantly for fear the
blunder should be known and police prestige suffer. I expect you’ll be
heads of departments by to-morrow, you two, with decorations.”
“We’ve had enough of your insolence.”
“You asked me why I smiled. Why, when your Minister of the Interior
hears from my dear old friend, General von Eckerstein--he used to
represent Germany at Petersburg, you know--how you’ve treated me,
you’ll get such a sweet message from him.”
The Schirmskad man swore, but his companion looked serious. I continued
to chaff them with much enjoyment for ten miles; and the Warsaw agent
grew more and more uneasy at every word I dropped relative to my having
well-known friends.
“What do you know about General von Eckerstein?” he asked at length.
“That he doesn’t like his friends to wear this kind of ornament;” and I
held up my handcuffs.
“If you’ll give me your word not to escape, I’ll take them off,” he
replied, very sheepishly.
“Not for the world, now. I shall be able to tell the General how it
feels to be dragged through the streets of Warsaw manacled like a
felon.”
The two whispered together for some minutes, and then the Warsaw man
said: “We’re not afraid of your escaping. I’ll take them off.”
I let him do it, of course. “A bit uncomfortable about it all, eh?
It’s beginning to dawn on you at last that I’m not a dangerous
revolutionary?” I said, as I rubbed my chafed wrists. “You’re only at
the beginning of your lesson, though.”
“I have done no more than my duty,” he muttered.
“We shall see about that before the day’s over, my friend,” I answered
sharply.
When we reached Warsaw I was driven to the police headquarters. I was
expected, and after a few minutes I was taken to a room where some half
dozen men were awaiting me, among them being the two who had brought me
to Warsaw. The chief was sitting at a heavily bepapered table.
“Stand there,” he said, pointing to a spot opposite to him.
Two things were evident. The chief was a man high in authority--the
deferential manner of the rest shewed this--and the proceedings
were stage-managed with a view to impress me with the solemnity and
seriousness of the occasion. I took my cue accordingly, and was as
nonchalant as I could be. “Why stand?” I asked.
“You are a prisoner,” he rapped out, with a frown.
“On what charge?”
“Don’t question me. Your name?”
I looked at him steadily and kept silent. The frown deepened and he
repeated “Your name; do you hear?”
“Of course I hear you; but if I am a prisoner I decline to answer any
questions until I know the charge against me.”
“Don’t trifle with me. Refuse to answer and you go to the cells.”
“That as you please. Your agent there knows my name perfectly well and
that I am a British subject. I claim my rights as one.”
The reply only served to increase his anger. The flesh about his nose
and mouth began to grow white as it will with some men in passion.
He was a bully, and probably hated the English like so many of his
countrymen.
“Answer me, you----” The epithet was lost in the loud cough of a man
near him.
“You have the only answer I shall give until I know the charge.”
“Take him away,” he ordered, with a wave of the hand.
“I demand to communicate with the British Consul,” I said, “and with my
friend, General von Eckerstein.”
“Take him away,” he repeated; and I was led off and placed in a cell.
If he thought to frighten me, the effort had failed. He had put himself
in the wrong, and I knew that my turn would come.
It was a filthy, foul-smelling place they put me in, and they kept me
in it all day without food or even water.
In the evening I was taken again before the man, and the scene of the
morning was repeated in pretty much the same terms and with the same
result. But my back was up, and I vowed I’d rather starve than give in.
I passed a miserable night, famished with hunger, parched with thirst,
and half stifled with the reeking foulness of the place.
In the morning an official came to the cell to try a different method.
He was less of a ruffian than his superior, and sought to convince me
of the uselessness of contumacity.
I let him talk without once replying to his questions until he was
in the act of leaving. “I am a British subject,” I said then, “and I
have demanded no more than my rights. I have been treated like a dog
and shut up in this filthy place to be starved into submission to that
ruffianly bully. Go through with it if you dare. I can keep my end up,
and be hanged to you all. But if I’m left to rot here, there’ll be
questions which somebody will find it difficult to answer. You can’t
murder Englishmen with impunity. You know that.”
He shrugged his shoulders, hesitated whether to answer, then decided
not to and went away.
A couple of hours later I was taken again to be examined, and the man
who had visited me was with the bully.
“Is your name Robert Anstruther?” asked the latter.
“You knew that before you sentenced me to twenty-four hours’
starvation.”
“Are you prepared now to explain your part in this business?”
“What business? What do you charge me with?”
His colleague bent and whispered to him; and a short but very heated
altercation followed, which resulted in the bully ordering the other
man out of the room.
Then he turned to me. “You’ll have to answer me.”
“We shall see about that,” I returned with a grin.
“I shall gaol you till you do.”
“Then we shall both be a good deal older when we meet again,” I
retorted.
“You have a fancy to try a change of prisons?”
“I demand to see the British Consul and to be allowed to communicate
with my friends.”
“Your friends, now. Who are they?” he sneered.
“One will do to start with. His Excellency General von Eckerstein of
the German Legation at Petersburg. I wish him to know that you have
tried to starve me to submit to your infernal bullying.”
“Insolent English beast,” he roared, completely losing his head in his
fury. “Take the liar away.”
“I shan’t always be a prisoner,” I cried, as the man seized me. “But I
shall remember that insult until I’ve made you swallow your words.” I
was nearly as furious as he; but I had no time to say more, for the men
took their cue from him and hustled me violently out of the room.
They passed on word that I might be ill treated with impunity; and I
had a very rough and tumble time indeed while being carried to one of
the gaols.
With the minor police and gaol officials in Russian Poland, the
ill-treatment of prisoners is a carefully studied art; and they amused
themselves congenially with me. Twenty times on that short journey I
had to put the greatest restraint on myself to resist the temptation to
do what they strove to goad me to do--to commit some act of violence
which would have given them the excuse they sought to half batter me to
death.
As it was I was hustled, struck and kicked; my clothes were nearly
torn off my back, and every foul epithet which Russian and Polish
malice could think of was spat at me with official brutality and
contemptuousness.
I kept my head, however. I was tough enough to bear a good deal of
ill-treatment; I had often taken much worse punishment in the boxing
ring, and I had played football in America; so I held my temper back
for the man who was the real cause of it all.
They flung me at length into a cell and locked the door upon me with a
last gibe that the English were dirty cowards, and I the meanest skunk
of them all.
I understood that day how men are made murderers. I brooded over my
wrongs and nursed my rage against the bully who was responsible for
this treatment, until if we had stood face to face I know I should have
found delight in dragging him down and choking the life out of him. A
fierce desire to fight him and punish him took possession of me; and
for an hour or two hunger, thirst, injustice, everything was forgotten
in that all but insane craving for revenge.
But rage cannot last for ever and when some rough prison food--gruel,
black bread, and a pannikin of water--was thrust into my cell an hour
or two later, the sight of it re-roused my hunger and blanketed my
passion. So famished was I by that time that I had to clamp down the
desperate impulse to cram it into my mouth with the unbridled voracity
of a starving beast.
It was excellent self-discipline to eat it slowly. But I succeeded. I
took it, just a mouthful at a time, with long intervals between, thus
spreading out the meal over perhaps two hours or more. And at the end
of the time I was myself once more, had regained my self-restraint, and
was able to think.
What they meant to do with me, I could not see; but what I would do
was clear enough. I would conform to every rule of the prison life and
wait for the chance of communicating with my friend or with the British
Consul. Let that bully break down my resolve, I would not, if I had to
stay in the prison till I was grey. And when my time came, I would have
a reckoning with him, even if the immediate result was only to bring me
back to the prison with a real crime for the reason.
On entering the gaol I had been searched, and my watch and money,
everything, indeed, taken from me. I could not, therefore, try the
bribery trick again, even if the chance had offered. So I made the
best of a very bad job, arranged my torn clothes in such fashion as I
could, rubbed the bruises where the brutes had kicked or struck me, and
got all the sleep that was possible.
The attempt to starve me was abandoned, and later in the day another
meal, black bread and water this time, was served. I was left to myself
that day and the whole of the next, except when the food was brought,
or when I was ordered roughly to clean the cell, or when a warder in
the corridor would open the grill in the door and after grinning at me
would utter some vile epithet. They were a genial pleasant set of men.
On the third day, however, a fresh course was attempted. A man I
had not seen before entered my cell, and after very little preface
hinted that if I would pay him, he would carry some communication to
my friends. Suspicious that it was a trick, I declined; and then he
urged me to make a full confession of all I knew and submit to the
authorities.
“What do you call this but submitting?” I retorted. “I don’t see what
other course is left to me. But I have done nothing, and have no
confession to make therefore.”
“By submission I mean answer the questions of Colonel Bremenhof.”
“Is that the man who interrogated me?”
“Yes. Will you not confess to----”
“I have no confession to make,” I cut in. “But I’m glad to know his
name. I shan’t forget it.”
He tried to work on my fears, then. This was not England, the times
were troubled, military laws prevailed, and suspects who would not
account for themselves might be treated very harshly.
“I have had ample proof of that myself, thank you,” said I, drily; “and
as soon as I am free, I shall see that some others learn to spell the
word.”
He gave me up then and left with a curt warning. “You will not be free
until you have submitted.”
It began to look as though it was to be trial of staying power; and I
had all that day and half the next to ponder his warning.
Then something happened.
I had had my midday meal and was trying to sleep when I heard the
shuffling of steps and the murmur of voices in the corridor.
There was a pause, the key was thrust into the lock, the door thrown
open and two warders entered followed by the bully and, of all people
in the world, the least expected--Volna.