The exalted mood did not last long, and by next morning we had sobered
down. Few of us, I believe, expected to come out of that barracks
alive. Already, in little more than a year, seventy thousand prisoners
of war were said to have died of disease in Russia. Comrades of ours,
who came from Novonikolaievsk, told us that in this camp forty-five
per cent. of their numbers, or more than twelve thousand men, had died
of typhus within a few months. The figures are probably exaggerated,
but there is no doubt that the death-rate had been appalling. No one
will ever know exactly how many lives were lost, because the Russian
organization broke down under the strain of providing for so many
prisoners, and we do not even know how many there were to die. From
men who had been through such epidemics we heard terrible stories of
how the sick were neglected in the hospitals, and of how the illnesses
arose and spread. One medical student who was taken ill with typhus
was put in a so-called “general hospital.” The building dignified by
such a name consisted of a long, low, narrow room, in which were packed
men, women, and children suffering from every kind of disease. On one
side of my friend was a girl in the last stages of tuberculosis, on
the other a woman expecting her first child. They received no medical
treatment; no doctor ever visited the patients. My friend set about
doing what he could for the people around him. Then delirium seized
him, and when he recovered he found that the girl had died, and that
the baby had come into the world and died too. He was used to hospital
life, but the scenes of helpless, untended misery he saw shook even his
nerve.
[SN: TYPHUS]
Or again, men from the camp at Barnaul who had been sent to Stretensk,
described to us how the typhus swept through whole barracks at a time.
Men died where they lay, and it was hours before anybody came to remove
them, meanwhile the living had to get used to the sight of their dead
comrades. We were told how the disease started at one end of the
barracks, and you watched it gradually approaching you, man by man in
the line being struck down, and only a few left here and there. You
would wonder how long it would take to come to you, and see it creeping
nearer day by day. Then one night you would wake up and find the man on
your left dead of the disease, and some one on your right in the throes
of delirium, and you would conclude that the disease had passed you by,
and that for the present you were safe. The men from Barnaul pointed
out that all the conditions favourable for typhus were present--hunger,
bad air, and dirt. The disease is often called “hunger-typhus” in
German, and nothing encourages its development so much as malnutrition.
None of us were well enough fed to satisfy the keen appetite engendered
by the severe Russian winter. As for the bad air--ventilation was
difficult in the barracks, because the outside air was so very cold.
When we opened a window, it came pouring in, condensing at once into
a thick, fog-like vapour, which made everything clammy and moist. We
could never open the window long enough to let the bad air escape. The
atmosphere of the barracks was heavy with the smell of unwashed men, of
damp, unswept floors, of clothes hung out to dry, of oily soups, and
with the acrid reek of coarse tobacco. The men hardly ever went out,
but preferred to lie on their benches all day, doing nothing but smoke.
As for the dirt--we were supposed to bath regularly, but the attendant
at the bath-house demanded a tip before he admitted anybody. The result
was that some went every day, while others never had a bath at all. It
was difficult to get in a daily wash. We were forbidden to wash in the
barracks, because that made the floor dirty, and it was impossible to
go outside in the cold and wash. The problem was solved by most men
not washing at all, while others got up in the middle of the night,
when it was quite dark, and had a wash on the sly. For a week or two I
cleaned myself with tea, as I could get no other water.
There were over eight thousand prisoners at Stretensk when the disease
broke out, and to combat it there were two Austrian doctors. They had
at their disposal a room capable of holding fifteen beds, and for
medicine a quantity of iodine and castor oil. I once strolled into
the hospital by mistake. I saw a number of beds on which men were
lolling fully dressed, other patients were leaning against the wall,
others were in various postures on the floor. It all looked so casual
that I thought it was the waiting-room. An orderly drove me away, and
explained that the men on the beds were dying of typhus, and that the
other men were waiting their turn to get a bed and die too.
Our barracks had been built for occupation by Russian soldiers. It was
a long, one-storied brick erection. Inside it was “double-decked,”
_i.e._ there were parallel rows of double platforms, one above
the other. It would comfortably take about a hundred men, while
four hundred of us were crammed into it. At night I slept with my
neighbour’s knees in my back, and my knees in the next man’s back.
Just so much space as we could cover lying on our sides was ours, and
this was our sitting-room, drawing-room, dining-room, and bedroom. As
the windows were coated with ice inches thick, the barracks remained
dark through the whole winter. The atmosphere, as I have already
mentioned, was always foul. We were organized into groups of thirteen
men, each of whom elected a corporal as leader; a certain number of
groups again were under a sergeant. The labourers, of course, always
elected one of their own number as corporal, and the educated men had
a foretaste of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The labourer’s
dream of heaven is to lie on his bed all day, do nothing, and have his
meals brought to him. They were now able to enjoy this paradise, with
the additional relish of making the hated bourgeois fetch and carry
for them. If you tried to avoid being made use of in this manner, and
kept away from your place, they would fetch the dinner and eat your
portion because you were not there. Appeal to the sergeant was useless,
because he too nursed a grievance against the “upper” classes. The
educated N.C.O.s were just as bad in their way. I tried an experiment
on them by describing myself in the official lists as a “teacher.” They
thought that meant elementary school teacher, and treated me with that
brutality which the middle classes show to a man a shade below them
in position. They soon found out their mistake, and then came fawning
to me, abjectly apologetic. It is the plain truth that there was no
feeling of responsibility or good comradeship among our N.C.O.s. They
invariably treated us more roughly than the Russians did.
[SN: OUR TASKS]
We had many different kinds of work to do. Sometimes we were
water-carriers, and had to get up at four in the morning, go down to
the river, and keep on ladling up water from a hole in the ice until we
had filled a big barrel. This journey had to be repeated several times
a day. Or we would have to stand for hours chopping wood, or make long
journeys to the wood-stacks to fetch fuel for the camp. In the intense
cold these tasks would have been severe enough in any case, but we were
ill prepared for them. At the best we had only summer clothes on, none
of us had any protection for the ears or nose against frostbite, many
had no gloves, while a few had not even soles to their boots. It was
no use reporting these things, our sergeant used to drive us away in a
fury. The Russians were humaner and would often send us back with our
tasks half done, because they saw that the cold was too much for us.
Our life at Stretensk was full of tragedies, but I think the first is
the most awful to remember. One of us, who had no gloves, had been
forced to carry wood long distances through the cold, and his hands
were badly frostbitten. The sinews perished and seemed to shrivel up,
and he became unable to use his fingers. As a consequence he could
not louse himself, as his fingers could neither grasp anything nor
press even a louse to death. He became so verminous that in places
the insects stood on him ten deep. His “corporalschaft,” fearing for
themselves, expelled him from their midst. He pilgrimed all over
the barracks, seeking a place where he might lay his head, but was
everywhere driven off with contumely and insult. The floor being too
wet even for him to sleep on, he at last found an asylum in a sort of
dustbin, in which the refuse of the barracks was removed every morning.
He lived absolutely alone, like a leper. His food was set apart for him
every day, and he was jealously watched lest he should come too near.
The self-loathing peculiar to verminousness seemed to eat up his moral
fibre, and he acquiesced in his isolation as if it were quite proper.
Now and again, indeed, he would make timid advances, with a pitiful
smile, but he was always repulsed. The last time I saw him, he was
sitting on the snow in the full blaze of the noonday sun, clad in a
smart uniform he had just received, and feebly trying with his palsied
hands to brush off the lice that had already begun to collect on his
new clothes. That evening he was taken to hospital with high fever, and
in two days he was dead, literally destroyed by lice.
[SN: RED CROSS]
But one day the barracks was swept and tidied up as it never had been
before, and each of us was sprinkled with some disinfectant or other.
We were at a loss to interpret these signs, when it was suddenly
whispered that a German Red Cross sister had come on an official
tour of inspection. As she entered, we all stood up to honour her.
In that remote and inclement land, amid all the dangers with which
we were surrounded, not a man of us but was moved at the sight of a
fellow-countrywoman, speaking our own language, and bringing with her
into the squalor of our barracks some suggestion of home. Her opening
words deepened the impression. “I have come,” she said, “to remind
you that you are not forgotten in the Fatherland.” And then she went
on with the professional society lady’s fine air and as if she were
only repeating words learnt off by heart: “Your Kaiser does not forget
you, and the dear Crown Prince thinks of you every day.” A thrill of
contempt ran through our ranks. We had been expecting the bread of
sympathy, and she offered us the stone of an aristocrat’s patronage.
In one respect it saved the situation, for it calmed our feelings and
enabled us both to speak to her and watch her depart unconcerned. She
did obtain some alleviation of our lot; for instance, she persuaded the
Russians to dismiss and punish the soldier who kept the bath-house and
had to be tipped before he would allow us inside. Arrangements were
also made that the N.C.O.s and educated privates were to receive small
sums of money, varying according to their rank. The common soldier
was to receive nothing. Our working-men were justly incensed at this
favouritism, because their need was just as great as anybody else’s.
The working-men have good memories for injustices of this kind, and in
the final settlement with the bourgeois they will not be forgotten. The
arrangement did not last long, and after a month or so everybody was
thrown on his own resources, unless he chose to beg from the Red Cross.
I understand that the British Government allowed all of their prisoners
in Germany without exception a weekly sum. When our working-men heard
how much better the English prisoners were treated, they became very
bitter against their Government. I asked the sister to get the Russians
to separate the educated soldiers from the uneducated, as had been done
with the Austrians. I said we were quite willing to work, but we wanted
to be our own masters. She made some excuse, and the proposal dropped
for the time. When the working-men heard about it, they were furious
and threatened to kill the man who had brought it forward, if they ever
discovered his name.
[SN: PRISON OUTFIT]
And then one great day there arrived two Swedish Red Cross sisters with
unlimited money at their command and wonderful parcels for us all.
We received a complete outfit for prison life in Siberia, changes of
warm linen, knitted helmets, gloves, boots, soap, towels, spoon, fork,
basin, pencils, postcards, sewing-materials. Besides, there was for
every one who desired it a uniform and a mantle. The old blue uniforms
discarded for active service had been sent to clothe the prisoners of
war. The Russian soldiers were amazed. They said, “When war started,
we received a uniform and two changes of linen, and now these are all
in rags and our Government gives us nothing. But you are prisoners of
war, thousands of miles away from home, and you are as well looked
after by your Government as if you were still at the front.” A great
trade was done in the Red Cross gifts, especially when the parcels
began to arrive from home, and the spring came with the warmer weather.
Many a Russian soldier that year went to the front clad from head to
foot in garments which had been collected for us through the loving
self-sacrifice of the women of Germany. Those prisoners who kept their
things were much more smartly dressed than the Russians set to guard
them.
[SN: TYPHUS]
But all these improvements came too late. Typhus had already got such
a hold of the camp that it was impossible to stamp it out quickly; one
could only let it run its course. The disease began in another camp
on the hills overlooking Stretensk on the opposite side of the river.
This camp had been built as a temporary summer residence for refugees;
in winter it was next to impossible to heat the barracks or to fetch
water. For days men would only be able to quench their thirst by
breaking off the ice on the windows and sucking it. The first patients
came down to our camp to be treated, and not finding a doctor ready
to receive them, went all over the place looking for friends, and so
brought infection to every barracks.
The horrors of Wittenberg have made the disease known to all English
readers. The Germans call it “fleck-typhus,” _i.e._ spotted typhus,
because on the third or fourth day small red spots appear on the
forearm and other parts of the body. But until these spots appear, the
disease is often hard to distinguish from influenza, and the doctors
hesitated at first to put the patients in the typhus-ward, but kept
them in an observation hospital instead. One man in an observation
ward was sufficient to infect all the rest, so that many, who had only
influenza to begin with, caught typhus at the hospital. This got to
be known, and the men would not report themselves ill so long as they
could contrive to stay in the barracks, which of course only spread
the disease still further. There is a kind of delirium characteristic
of typhus, in which the patient gets out of bed and seeks some place
familiar to him. Often they used to get up, rush out into the icy
Siberian night and go back to their barracks, thus again spreading the
disease. Their comrades, in terror of their lives, used to chase them
out, and sometimes they would be unable to reach their hospitals,
their strength would fail, and they would fall dead on the path. Typhus
searches out the weak parts of the body and its sequelæ may be almost
as dangerous as the disease itself. Many men, after finishing with
typhus, went on to inflammation of the lungs, enteric, or tuberculosis,
others were partially paralysed, all will carry some mark of it down
with them to their graves. After the epidemic had passed, the camp was
full of cripples.
In fairness to the Russians it must be said that as soon as they
realized the danger, they did everything in their power to fight the
epidemic. They sent a special hospital staff with doctors, nurses, and
beds complete. Some of the Russians contracted the disease themselves
while nursing the prisoners of war. The Russian doctor was constantly
in and out of the hospitals, although he was a married man with a
wife and children to whom he might easily have brought the disease.
German, Austrian, and Turkish doctors were gathered from various parts
of Siberia and sent post haste to Stretensk. In a short time there
were twenty doctors and medical students at work. The Swedish Red
Cross provided medicines and stores, and gave a large amount of money.
Theoretically it was always possible to obtain more by telegraphing to
the Central Red Cross Bureau at Petrograd, but I doubt if a telegram
would have gone through. A number of buildings were fitted up as
hospitals and observation wards, so that it became possible to separate
the various infectious diseases from one another. But at the best
everything remained primitive and rough. The prisoners used to say that
the Russians were doing it on purpose in order to kill them off as soon
as possible. They forgot that they were living in the wilds of Siberia,
and that the Russian soldiers themselves would have been no better off
if an epidemic had broken out amongst them. The sanitary conditions
were indescribable. At the height of the plague there were three
patients to two beds, and you might wake up one night to find a dead
man on either side of you, and so you would lie through the long hours
till morning came. The corpses were taken to a little wooden house and
there kept for weeks. There was a gruesome story of an Austrian who
went to plunder the dead and got shut up for a whole day among the
stacks of corpses. The ground was frozen too hard for a spade to turn,
so all night we could see the glare of the fires on the hills burning a
hole into the frozen ground to make graves for the dead. Only officers
were buried with a religious service. We used to see the dead bodies of
our comrades fetched out of the morgue and flung like so many sides of
bacon on to a sledge and borne off to the graveyard, where they were
thrown into the earth without any ceremony. “Did these bones cost no
more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ’em? Mine ache to think
on’t.”
[SN: JEWS AS ORDERLIES]
But gloomy as the picture was, it was made still darker by the
treachery of our own men. There was no trained hospital staff at
first, and it was necessary to take for orderlies men who could speak
Russian. The only prisoners who fulfilled this qualification were
Austrian and Hungarian Jews. They could speak Russian, partly because
a Jew can always learn a language when it is likely to bring him any
advantage, but also because they were the first to desert and had been
the longest in captivity. Where one Jew comes, others follow, and in
time practically all the orderly work was in their hands. Whatever
the patients brought with them to hospital was stolen as a matter of
course. Their fine new uniforms were taken away on a pretence that they
were to be disinfected, but they were never brought back. The Jews sold
them, and gave the patients that recovered torn and shabby garments
for which there was no sale. They ate the nourishing rations provided
for the sick, and left their patients to starve. The biggest scoundrel
was a man called Flesch. Sometimes Flesch would load a sledge with Red
Cross stores, such as rugs or warm underclothing, drive off to the town
and sell to the Russians the things of which his own comrades stood
in such bitter need. By some queer stroke of cunning he managed to
keep the orderlies in his hospital under subjection, and no one stole
without his licence. Honour among thieves! When a man died, Flesch was
fetched to dispose of his effects, and a certain ritual was always
observed in these affairs. If he left much money, Flesch would say a
long prayer for his soul; if little, he would turn away with a sneer
and say that as he had left only a few kopecks, a short paternoster
would be enough for him. The Catholics may find what consolation they
can in the circumstance that this master rogue was of their Church,
although he was undoubtedly of Jewish descent. There were horrible
ghoulish stories at the hospitals of patients who did not die quickly
enough, and of orderlies hovering round their bed, waiting for them to
breathe their last, and then suddenly losing patience, rushing in on
them and snatching their money from them while they still lived, or
even taking their pillow and hastening their end by suffocation. Now
and again the patients resisted, and, with a strength born of despair,
would just be able to throw off their assailants before they died. And
some recovered and lived to remember, as through the mists of an awful
dream, in what terrors Death can be arrayed.
[SN: GERMAN DOCTORS]
But even worse remains to be told. I have already mentioned that
the Swedish sisters left a large sum of money at Stretensk. If this
had been properly spent, a great deal of suffering might have been
prevented. Strong nourishing food might have been bought for those who
were not yet ill, and the disease would not have spread so quickly. The
Austrian doctors in our camp made good use of the little money they
received. In the other camp on the hill there was a German Jew, Dr.
Kallenbach, and he is said to have wheedled out of the sisters enormous
sums. A portion of the money was ear-marked for definite purposes,
but even this he contrived in part to embezzle. He was instructed to
give every qualified doctor £10, he only gave them £5. He had orders
to give a certain amount to the Turkish prisoners, who were worse
off than any of us; most of this money he kept for himself, and then
falsified his accounts so as to make it appear that the Turks had
received everything. No one knows exactly how much he stole. A certain
proportion, of course, found its way to the prisoners for whom it was
intended. The rest Kallenbach is said to have invested with a chemist
living at Stretensk, a Jew with whom he was on intimate terms. If so,
the local Soviet has probably scattered it to the four winds by now.
While the common prisoners in Kallenbach’s camp were starving, their
doctors were enjoying the best of everything. Their banquets became
a byword. The doctors down in our camp messed for eighteen roubles a
month each, and for this sum lived as luxuriously as ever at home. The
doctors on the hill messed for thirty-five roubles a month. It is a
puzzle to me, with food as cheap as it was then, where they got the
appetite to eat at all.
What knavery had begun, cowardice completed. The other German doctor,
a Gentile this time, when he saw that the disease really was typhus,
proclaimed himself ill and took to his bed. He stayed there for some
months, until all danger was past. He asserted that he himself had
typhus. The Russian doctors laughed and declared it was impossible, but
with characteristic good nature they left him alone. He was the only
doctor who had received the Iron Cross. He had a young medical student,
Heinze by name, who waited on him all through his illness, practically
taking sole charge of him. When he got home again, he was going to
recommend this man for the Iron Cross too--“for devotion to duty in
trying circumstances.”
[SN: UNSPEAKABLE TURK]
Another arrant coward was the Turkish doctor, Remsi Seki. He was said
to be a son of Abdul Hamid. Whether that is true I do not know; but at
any rate his mother had been in the Sultan’s harem and had afterwards
been married off to a high official. He was the most contemptible
poltroon I have ever met. At a certain stage in the reconvalescence
from typhus an abscess often forms in the neck, and death ensues from
suffocation if it is not lanced in time. It is a very simple operation,
which anybody can perform. When cases of this kind occurred, Remsi
Seki used to stand wringing his hands, looking at the patient in
terror, unable to move. At last, after a number of patients had died
through his incompetence, the orderlies themselves, untrained as they
were, would rush in and do the lancing. After a while he was dismissed
from the hospital as utterly useless. He was the typical “unspeakable
Turk,” a man of gentle and winning manners, affecting shyness as
good form in Turkey requires, shrewd at judging the weaknesses of
others, but incapable of strong action himself, though tenacious in
his purposes, given over to unmentionable vice, and at heart terribly
cruel. When he heard of the Armenian massacres he expressed his joy and
said they were quite justified. None of his bad qualities prevented him
from being a prime favourite with the Germans, who used to extol his
fine and noble character.
[SN: ALL SOULS’ DAY]
But it must not be supposed that all the doctors were like these Jews
and Turks. There was another side to the medal. The Austrians worked
manfully to stem the tide of disease. And there were examples of heroic
self-sacrifice, worthy to rank with any deeds on the battlefield. There
was the Austrian officer Herrman, who at the outbreak of the epidemic
volunteered to help in disinfecting the barracks. He was over forty,
and he must have known that he had little chance of life if he caught
the disease. He went from barracks to barracks, doing his utmost to
better the circumstances of the men, always ready with a joke or a
cheery word of advice. He fought the causes of the disease, the dirt,
the bad air, the vermin, the prisoners’ sloth and the indifference they
displayed to their condition. Such a fight could not last long, the
inevitable happened, and he perished of the disease. Other Austrian
medical students also succumbed. Of these we may surely use the phrase
so hackneyed in Germany and say that they died a hero’s death for the
Fatherland. Their gravestone stands on the bleak Siberian hillside, an
enduring memorial to their courage, a reproach to their less worthy
comrades. Every year on All Souls’ Day, the Catholics in Austria and
Germany celebrate their Feast of the Dead. Lights are placed on the
graves and sometimes food is set out. In old days the people thought
that on this festival the spirits of the dead revisited the earth,
and the lights were to guide and the food to sustain them on their
long journey. On All Souls’ Day, 1916, the Russians, who under the old
_régime_ always respected religious observances, allowed the medical
staff to leave the camp and go up to the graves on the hill. We found
the candles burning just as at home, and we all stood with bared heads
in reverence to the dead. The scene was penetrated with a mournful
irony. Below slept the unfortunate and the brave, and there came to
do them honour the cowards who had deserted them, the thieves who had
robbed them, and the murderer who had killed them just as certainly as
if he had driven a sword into their hearts.
I have said so much against the Germans that it is a pleasure to bear
witness to the courage of two of their numbers. Heinze, the student
already mentioned, was surpassed by no one in his attention to the
sick. He had caught so many diseases during the various epidemics he
had fought, that people would think I was romancing if I were to give
the list. And there was a young student of philosophy from Bonn who had
the orderlies under him at a particular hospital. He waged a perpetual
warfare with the Jews, doing his utmost to prevent them from robbing
the patients of food and money. He spared himself neither day nor
night, and was so heedless of danger that at last his doctor had to
give him an express command to keep out of the sick-room. In the end
the Jews were too strong for him, and they intrigued him out of his
position.
It will never be known how many the epidemic carried off, because at
first the men died so quickly that they could not be counted. The
doctors estimated that in three months eight hundred men, or ten per
cent. of the prisoners, died. The disease being not particularly
virulent, the mortality was only about twenty per cent. of the
patients. We may reckon that about half the camp caught typhus. We have
only guesswork to go upon, because the dishonest doctors intentionally
falsified their sick-lists. The Jewish hospital orderlies, who had
undertaken the work merely to enrich themselves, nearly all perished.
Some time in the winter of 1916 a prisoner found smuggled in a parcel
he had received from home, a German newspaper containing the Red Cross
Report on conditions in Siberia. It accused the Russian hospital
attendants of infamous cruelty, scandalous neglect of their duties,
and shameless thieving. The Austrian doctors got hold of the report
and read it to one another with shouts of laughter. “Why,” they said,
“it wasn’t the Russians who did that, it was our own men. The Russians
wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I suppose the same thought has occurred to all my
readers. This story makes the horrors of Wittenberg intelligible. You
cannot expect the Germans to be kinder to the English than to their own
soldiers.
[SN: CHRISTMAS CHEER]
It was always a puzzle to us afterwards how we could have passed
through that time so light-heartedly. We saw our comrades, suddenly
stricken with the disease, stagger off to hospital, a day or two
afterwards we saw their corpses flung on to the sledge and hurried away
to be buried with less ceremony than a dog. Or, if they came back, it
was as broken and crippled men, shadows of their former selves. We
knew that any moment the same thing might happen to us. And yet we
were outwardly as merry as the day was long, and we were never without
a song or a jest on our lips. That peculiar numbness of prison life,
which I mentioned in my last chapter, kept us from feeling our position
too acutely. But when everything was over, a strange horror of it all
took possession of us, and we could not bear to look back. One incident
stands out especially in my memory. It was months after the epidemic
had finished. We had just been celebrating Christmas; the dinner had
been excellent, probably far better than any of our families at home
had been able to procure, and we were in that warm and comfortable
frame of mind which a good Christmas dinner usually brings about.
Suddenly some one observed, “Why, of all us ten, Price is the only one
who didn’t get fleck-typhus.” Our talk and laughter instantly stopped,
and our evening’s amusement was killed. Once more the grave seemed lo
open at our feet, and Death to take his place beside us, a familiar
guest.