[SN: TEACHING ENGLISH]
A strange turn of Fortune’s wheel delivered me from the worst of the
epidemic. There was at Stretensk an officers’ camp, jealously guarded,
to which ordinary prisoners were not allowed access. The Hungarian
officers, when they heard of me, petitioned the colonel in command that
I might be allowed to go and give them lessons in English. The colonel
refused even to consider it. Then one day a Hungarian officer came to
me with the following proposal: We will transfer you to our camp by
putting you down on the list of officers’ servants; once you are with
us, however, you will live as an officer and be treated quite as one of
ourselves. I lost no time in accepting, was immediately transferred,
and became for the Russians an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.
At that time no letters had arrived from home, the Red Cross work was
still unorganized, and very few prisoners knew of the existence of
Frau von Hanneken’s organization, so that there was a great dearth of
amusements, and people were only too eager to learn English. I soon
had five classes a day. I had no grammars and no books of any sort to
teach from and had to make up every lesson out of my own head. But the
hard work was an undisguised blessing, it enabled me to forget where I
was, and the days began to pass more quickly.
The cheat we were practising could not long be concealed from our
guards. Every officer had to sign his name in a book twice a day. The
soldier, whose business it was to bring this book round, was bound to
notice that I never signed it. He was easily pacified. The Russian
state paid him seventy kopecks (about 1_s._ 6_d._) a month for his
services. I bought them for a rouble a month, with occasional tips
for odd jobs. He was only dangerous when in his drunken fits, which
were not infrequent. Then he would burst suddenly into the class and
point at me and say, “You are not an officer, you are a teacher; you
are a naughty man, but I will forgive you. Come, let us shake hands.”
After we had shaken hands, he would minutely examine his greasy palms
to see what might be found there. Once he came in maudlin sorrow and
said, “You make me very unhappy, you give my conscience no rest. I
want to go to church to-night and cannot. God does not love me, God
will be very angry with me--unless you give me twenty-five roubles at
once.” “Well,” I said, “how about twenty-five kopecks?” His purple face
lighted up with joy and he was again my friend. He was not always to
be bought, however. One night he came storming into our rooms, more
drunk than usual. He called us to get up (it was about two o’clock) and
said he would take us into the town on the spree. Then he caught sight
of me, and shouted, “No, I cannot take you, you have that wicked man
among you. I must go to the colonel and tell him all about it.” In his
drunken frenzy he seemed quite capable of carrying out his threat, and
no bribes or cajoleries of ours had any effect. At last we hit upon
the expedient of treating him as his own officers did, and bullied him
hard. We beat his soft will to pulp, and before long, trembling with
fear, he began to fall on his knees and kiss our hands, begging us to
overlook his offence.
[SN: WITH THE DOCTORS]
Such scenes gave me a distaste for the life I was leading. I felt
that immunity from typhus could be too dearly bought. Further, while
the Hungarian officers treated me with finished courtesy, even with a
sort of deference as to their teacher, the Germans took a pleasure in
embittering my life in all the ways they could. Proverbially we can
find strength to support the afflictions of our friends, it is their
good fortune that is so hard to bear. The Germans simply could not
forgive me my stroke of luck. When, therefore, the Austrian doctors
approached me with an offer that I should live with them, going into
the officers’ camp every day to give my lessons, I was very glad. My
evenings and Sundays I spent with the doctors. Every morning a doctor
went to visit the officers, I, with a Red Cross band round my arm,
marching behind, ostentatiously carrying a big bottle of medicine.
Every day the sentry challenged me, and every day the doctor answered
in the only two words of Russian he knew, “My servant.” Every afternoon
he came to fetch me back, every afternoon the sentry challenged us,
and every afternoon he answered in the only two words of Russian he
knew, “My servant.” The medicine had originally been intended for
some officer, but it proved to me such a magic “Open Sesame,” that he
had to go without. From time to time the Russians were seized with a
suspicion that unauthorized people were on the premises and they would
make surprise visits. They would order everybody out of the buildings
and call the roll in the courtyard. In the meantime the soldiers would
search the empty barracks for people who ought not to be there, see
me quietly reading, give me a brotherly grin, and pass on to the next
room. Once during these proceedings I was carelessly standing at the
window, when a soldier down below recognized me. He made frantic signs
to get out of the way, lest his officers should catch sight of me.
Wrongheadedness and topsyturvydom could go no further.
Everything comes to an end at last, and so did this double life. Five
officers had planned to escape. They had arranged with the sentry
that each should pay him twenty kopecks. The first four paid and
got through, but the last one, being a Jew, objected to paying and
scrambled by for nothing. The sentry promptly rang the alarm-bell.
The colonel was the first to arrive and he found the sentry in tears.
He demanded to know what was the matter. “Why, just think,” said the
sentry, “five Austrian officers promised to give me twenty kopecks
if I would let them escape (boo-hoo-hoo), and I did let them escape
(boo-hoo-hoo), and then the last one did not pay me anything at all
(boo-hoo-hoo).” The colonel, quite properly I think, boxed his ears,
and degraded him on the spot. The Russians were very angry with the
escaped officers and wished to make an example of them. They could not
find out their names because all the books had already been signed
up, and they were not equal to the task of going through each room
and finding out who belonged there and who was missing. But they set
round the officers’ quarters double guards and enjoined on them the
necessity of keeping a sharp watch. In spite of the care they took,
all the fugitives managed to slip back into the camp that night
unperceived. Then the Russians, determined to have no more nonsense
from the officers, built all round their camp a wooden enclosure some
ten or fifteen feet high, and strengthened it at short intervals with
towers from which sentries could overlook the whole section. There
was only one entrance, a massive gateway, and this was always watched
by four or five men. My career as a teacher of officers was at an end,
and from that time till I left Stretensk I lived with the doctors. All
the Russians in the camp except the colonel knew that I was there _per
nefas_, but it made no difference. I even gave lessons in the families
of Russian officers. At first the attitude of the Russians puzzled me,
and I put it down to that peculiar element in the Russian character
which, according to the circumstances in which we meet it, we call good
nature, or fatalism, or simply laziness. But in the end I found out
that nearly all the officers were there for a special reason; they were
Poles, or Jews, or Germans, or political suspects, and had been sent
to Siberia partly as a punishment, partly to get them out of harm’s
way. A few of them favoured the German cause, some came from districts
occupied by the Germans, and would naturally not be inclined to do
anything to prejudice their position with their German rulers. There
was a Polish officer who rejoiced at every German victory, and wished
disaster to the Russians more heartily than the prisoners themselves.
The Russians were subtler than we gave them credit for. They ringed in
the officers with a high fence in order to prevent escape, but they
also used finer means. They told us fearful and wonderful tales of the
Buriat tribes swarming between us and the Chinese frontier. These men
were so fierce, they said, that they would murder you for the sake of
a button, and then they would bury you somewhere in the vast desert,
and no one would ever know your fate. The Chinese smugglers and bandits
were still worse, for, with a refinement of cruelty denied to the less
developed Buriats, they would put you to exquisite torture before
killing you. These stories the Russians would pour in upon us with
such a ready, unpremeditated air, such wealth of gesture, with so much
humour and goodfellowship, that they inevitably carried conviction.
Chinese tobacco-smugglers used to come to us and offer to convey us
across the frontier for three hundred roubles; but we never dreamt of
listening to them. People who know the country intimately have since
told me that these stories were pure inventions, that the Buriats are
a comparatively harmless race, on whose honesty one could rely, and
that the smugglers would probably have kept their part of the bargain
if we had kept ours. A spice of danger there would naturally have been
in adventuring with them, but not more than was pleasant. The officers
were eager to escape, because those who succeeded got a step in rank.
It was perfectly easy to buy from a Russian soldier his uniform and
equipment, but not his mastery of the Russian language. Most of the
enterprises failed because the prisoners were forced sooner or later to
buy food, and the moment they began to speak with the natives, their
accent betrayed them.
[SN: FUGITIVES]
The climax of these attempts to escape was such a story as has never
been heard of outside “Alice in Wonderland,” or the “Arabian Nights.”
After several other enterprises had been frustrated by difficulties
about food, some officers conceived the idea of carrying with them on
their own persons enough to last them into China. We used to compute
the distance at nearly two hundred miles. Our maps were very primitive,
and our only idea of the route was to strike south. The officers began
to collect tinned meats gradually, so as not to excite suspicion.
They also managed to get hold of several pounds of a hard sort of
sausage, called in German, “Dauerwurst.” Besides, they reasoned out
that, as they were not to go near any building all the way, they would
be obliged to wear enough clothes to keep them warm while sleeping
in the open. So they started off, bulging mountainous with the extra
clothes they wore, swathed round with sausage, packed tight with
tins of corned beef and Bismarck herring, till they looked more like
knights in a pantomime than anything else. The Russians soon discovered
that some prisoners had escaped, and ordered the officers out in
order to count how many they were. Arithmetic is a thing the Russian
does not shine at; the officers did their best to create confusion
by continually moving about and making a noise, and in the end the
Russians, instead of counting seven too few, made it twenty-five too
many. They did not know what to do, so they sent in a report that they
had counted twenty-five too many, which they explained by supposing
that twenty-five officers were away ill in hospital. This calculation
was beyond me, but as I also am weak at mathematics, I leave it where
it is. Meanwhile the Cossacks had been alarmed, and they started off
in pursuit, plunging through the camp on their hardy Siberian ponies,
and we soon saw their scattered parties scouring the hills. Even a
fox-hunt will seem tame to me now, after I have smelt the excitement
of a man-hunt. The fugitives had bribed a soldier into letting them
have a sledge and horses, but that only took them a day’s journey.
Then they proceeded on foot, sleeping by day and marching by night.
In that glittering, smooth expanse of snow their tracks were easily
picked up, and, burdened as they were, they could not hope to shake
off their pursuers. The Cossacks surrounded them, but dared not attack
them, and so the two parties lay for some time intently watching one
another. Finally the fugitives stood up and showed that they were
unarmed, and the Cossacks were emboldened to approach them. Then began
a characteristic scene. They began trying to bribe the Cossacks into
letting them go. But the Cossacks were coy, and made a great show of
offended honour, and by artful bargaining put the price up until they
had wrung the last kopeck out of the fugitives. Then, penniless, but
still rich in clothes and sausages, the prisoners were ordered to march
back to camp.
So far as I remember, only one attempt at escape on a large scale was
really successful. That was when some officers hired a motor-boat to
take them down the Amur till they reached Chinese territory. At the
same time two other officers were to put the Russians on a false scent
by starting off by train and getting captured some way down the line.
The trick succeeded to perfection; the Russians continued to search
for the other fugitives on the railroad, and the men in the motor-boat
got clear away to Manchuria, and eventually to Tientsin. In the spring
of 1917, after the first Revolution, an order from the Austrian and
German Governments was circulated through the Siberian camps that no
more prisoners were to escape to China, as they would only be interned,
and the camps there were much worse than in Russia. Whether there
was any political motive behind this order I do not know, but in the
summer of 1917 those prisoners who wanted to escape went westwards
through Russia. There was a brisk trade in forged passports, Russian
or English by preference, and it was easy to get to Petrograd. I do not
think it would have been so easy if there had been more English consuls
in Siberia to look after matters of this sort. How the prisoners
managed to cross the frontier from Petrograd I do not understand. It
was quite impossible on an Allied passport. But the letters we received
from Germany proved that somehow or other they did get home at last.
The frequent attempts at escape, like my surreptitious life, can only
be understood by those who know the venality with which the Russian
state was honey-combed. Chehof has a sparklingly malicious story of
a Russian gentleman who goes to a Government office to make some
inquiries. He is shown into a room where several officials are busy
writing. He wanders about for a long time, ignored by every one.
Finally he receives a hint from the porter that a gratification is
expected. He lays a banknote on the desk of one of the officials, who
adroitly slips a book over it and goes on writing. At first he does not
understand this manœuvre, but light breaks in upon his mind, and he
lays a banknote for a much larger sum on the desk. The official wakes
up as from a trance, recognizes his visitor, does the necessary little
piece of business, and escorts him to the corridor. The gentleman is so
overwhelmed by his politeness and condescension that he feels obliged,
on leaving, to convey to him still another gratification.... Such, or
something like this, is Chehof’s story.
[SN: “HAMPELMANN”]
Our colonel was a nobleman who had seen much service, and when he was
in full dress, his uniform was decked out with a fine array of orders
and medals. In person he was diminutive and bandy-legged, but he had
the aristocrat’s clear-cut, energetic features, flashing eyes, and
delicate, well-kept hands. But he was chiefly distinguished by his
long, white, exquisitely silken whiskers. Diminutiveness, whiskers,
energy, bandy-legs combined to make him irresistibly comic to our
men, who used to call him the “Hampelmann” (monkey on a stick). In
drunkenness he yielded nothing to his soldiers, and I have seen
him reeling through the camp, after a night spent over the bottle,
denouncing punishments on everybody who crossed his path. When he was
angry he used to draw his sword and strike with a scythe-like sweep
at our legs. We easily ran away from him, and, once we were at a safe
distance, there was not a soldier would have lifted a finger to bring
us back to him again. For an officer and a nobleman his career had been
peculiar. He had been commandant of the camp at Dauria, where suspicion
had fallen upon him of embezzling state funds. His accomplice, a Greek
civilian, was sentenced to a long term of penal servitude, while he
himself had been punished by being removed to Stretensk. Here he
transferred his attentions to the money of the prisoners. All the
sums sent to us were kept in the bank a certain period, until he had
received his percentage on them. He was always issuing regulations
cutting down the amount of money we might receive a month. At one time
it was no more than five roubles. His accomplice at Stretensk was a
banker from China, who, I regret to say, belonged to the Church of
England. He was probably what the Jews call an Old-Protestant, _i.e._
one who has been baptized comparatively late in life. This amiable
pair used to buy sugar for the camp at low rates long before it was
needed, and then sell on a rising market, and the prisoners would have
to go without. Once, however, the general on his tour of inspection
discovered that the prisoners had no sugar, and the colonel had to buy
it all back again on a market that had meanwhile risen considerably.
The meat rations of the prisoners were regularly cut down far below
what the Government allowed, and the difference went to fill the
pockets of the colonel and his friends. They also kept pigs in the
camp, and it was believed that the bread supplied to us was so bad in
order that we might the more readily be induced to feed the colonel’s
pigs with it. As a rule, we found that the officers who were hard with
us were worse to their own men, and it is certain that the Russians
hated the colonel far more than we. They used to tell us that he was
afraid of going out at night because he was sure to be killed if he
did. This seems fantastic; but the fact remains that he never came to
us after dark.
[SN: CAMP OFFICIALS]
The colonel did not stand alone, there was corruption in every branch
of the administration. The hospital kitchen was in the hands of a
Polish Jew and his wife. They had begun the war with almost nothing,
and they were now said to be worth thousands of pounds. No money was
paid by the kitchen but some stuck to their palms. His staff collected
money for a water carrier, and gave it to him to disburse. He put it in
his own pocket, and used to pay the man out of Government funds. His
soldiers were so angry with him that at the outbreak of the Revolution
he was one of the first they impeached. He was sent to Irkutsk to await
his trial, but the case dragged on interminably. After the Bolsheviks
came in he was released, and when I last heard of him he was occupying
some position under their Government.
Like master, like man. The minor officials squeezed all the money out
of us they could. If a window was broken in a barracks, they fined
every prisoner who lived there, and reaped a sum sufficient to glaze
all the windows in the camp. The Russian clerks in the colonel’s
office treated us just as if we had been Russians ourselves. Every
petition had to be accompanied by a tip adapted to the importance of
what you wanted, otherwise it simply found its way to the waste-paper
basket. The prisoners took advantage of these customs to spin intrigues
against one another with the Russians. A German medical student made
application to be considered as such, _i.e._ that he should be removed
from the stuffy barracks to the doctors’ quarters, receive a salary,
and enjoy considerable privileges. He accompanied this application with
ten roubles for the clerk. Heinze, the medical student I have already
mentioned, was jealous of his colleague, so he overtipped him, and gave
the clerk twenty roubles to keep the application back. The clerk, of
course, pockets the twenty roubles, and then after some time informs
the first man how the matter stands. So by whetting the one against the
other he reaped a golden profit. All our letters and parcels had to
be paid for by tips. If we stopped tipping, we received nothing. The
prisoners were, of course, forbidden to send letters except through the
prisoners’ censorship, but all the while I was at Stretensk I conducted
with friends in England an extensive correspondence that never went
through our censor’s hands. To put the Russians off the scent I used
to describe myself as a fur-merchant. In one letter I pretended to
be a lady, wrote in a very round hand, underlined every other word,
and described how good Russian eau-de-cologne was for my headaches.
My correspondents were mystified; I had offers of capital for my fur
business, and a letter of very tender sympathy about my headaches.
[SN: VENALITY]
In fact, everything had its tariff. The Regulations existed only on
paper. Those who wanted to, and had enough money to pay for it, could
go into the town every day. It was simply a question of establishing a
connection with the soldiers, and making your custom so valuable that
they would not like to lose it. The clerks in the colonel’s office
often came to me and threatened to denounce me, if I did not pay them
a certain sum down. I pointed out that, if they did denounce me, they
would lose a profitable source of income, because, once I had returned
to the barracks, they would make nothing out of me. After that they
left me alone. We were supposed, like everybody else in Russia, to have
two meatless days a week. A certain amount of meat was weighed out and
handed over to us, and officially we were not allowed to have any more.
As a matter of fact, we never confined ourselves to our rations, we had
meat every day and as much as we wanted. Russian soldiers would come
and sell us a whole pig or a sheep at prices far below those ruling
in the market. We had great fun getting these animals into our house
without our guards noticing it. It had to be done at night, windows
had to be wrenched from their frames, and sentries posted all around
to give warning of the approach of obnoxious persons. Or if we wanted
boots, soldiers would supply us with the leather and get them made for
us at half what it would have cost an ordinary Russian. We had our own
ideas as to how it was possible to supply us so cheaply, and we never
asked where the goods came from. The peasant women kept us supplied
with butter at a time when the housewives in Stretensk could get none.
It was not done out of love for us, but because we were ready to pay
any price they asked. The sale of alcohol was forbidden throughout
Russia, but whenever we wanted wine we got it. The common prisoners
were often cheated. One of the guards would come up in the twilight
and offer a pound of sugar; you would buy it, and when you got in you
would find that they had passed off on you a pound of salt or of sand.
An enormous trade was done in smuggling beer and confectionery into the
camp from the town, but it was nearly always ruined by tale-bearers.
Sooner or later there would be a quarrel about the division of profits;
or even the mere sight of a comrade getting rich would be enough to
send some Austrian Jew sneaking off to the Russians.
The prevailing dishonesty had its bitter consequences for us. Our
parcels from home scarcely ever arrived intact. They were regularly
plundered, and the contents sold in the town. Once a Chinese coolie
appeared in the barracks in order to sell us cigars from a box which
still bore the address to one of our number. My wife in despair
used to put a picture of St. Antony of Padua in her parcels. She had
heard that the Russians were superstitious, and would respect parcels
protected by the saint. But their sense of humour was still greater
than their superstition, and I used to receive parcels out of which
everything had been stolen but the picture of St. Antony.
[SN: CORRUPT POLICE]
We got strange and terrible glimpses of what all this corruption meant
for private Russians. Our dentist was in need of instruments, and
wished to ask a lady dentist living in Stretensk to lend him some. He
could not approach her directly, and was obliged to ask the Russians
to act for him. To his surprise they all refused point blank. He could
not understand why it was, and after much pressure they told him the
lady’s history. Some years before she had been denounced to the Secret
Police, and they had made a raid on her lodgings. They discovered
nothing to justify their suspicions, but they told her that if she did
not pay them blackmail they would report that they had found certain
incriminating documents in her house. She indignantly refused, and,
relying on the justice of her cause, wrote an account of the whole
matter to the Governor-General at Irkutsk. She so far succeeded in
clearing herself as to escape punishment in a court of law. But from
that time onwards she was a suspect, a marked person, and no one in
the Government service durst have anything to do with her. Few of
the officers had much affection for the old _régime_, some were even
Bolsheviks, and yet so great was the terror exercised by the Secret
Police, that not one of them would speak to the lady.
The whole administration of the camp was corrupt. Of all the officers
I know only two that were honest. One of these was a Bolshevik--the
regimental doctor. He was a poor man, and might have acquired a fortune
by declaring rich recruits unfit for service, and yet he remained
resolutely and unchangeably loyal. Some men were ready to pay £500 for
such services. Everything was forbidden and everything was allowed. We
were prisoners, and lived like lords. Whatever of luxury or pleasure
there was in Stretensk we could enjoy, only we had to pay a little more
for it than ordinary mortals. Unlike ordinary mortals we knew nothing
of rent, taxes, or insurance, we had neither wife nor child to clothe
and feed, and so it generally happened that what we wanted we could pay
for.
What a world! you say. A nobleman and officer cheating prisoners of
their food; the common soldier falling in abject humiliation and
kissing the hands of the enemy he was set to guard. Yes, that was
Russia before the Revolution.