Beaupré was taken prisoner at the passage of the Beresina and remained in captivity for some time. His lot as a prisoner of war was an exceptionally good one. He tells us that prisoners when they were out of such parts of the country as had been ravaged by the armies, received regular rations of a very good quality, and were lodged by eight, ten, and twelve, with the peasants. In the provincial capitals, they received furs of sheep skin, fur bonnets, gloves, and coarse woolen stockings, a sort of dress that appeared to them grotesque as well as novel, but which was very precious as a protection against the cold during the winter. When arrived at the places in which they were to pass the time of their captivity they found their lot ameliorated, and the reception accorded to them demanded a grateful eulogy of the hospitality exercised by the Russians.
Quite different was the experience of a very young German, Karl Schehl, a private whose memoirs have been kept in his family, and were recently published by one of his grand-nephews. After a battle on the retreat from Moscow he, with many others, was taken prisoner by Cossacks, who at once plundered the captives. Schehl was deprived of his uniform, his breeches, his boots. He had a gold ring on his ring finger, and one of the Cossacks, thinking it too much trouble to remove the ring in the natural way, had already drawn his sabre to cut off the prisoner’s left hand, when an officer saw this and gave the brutal Cossack a terrible blow in the face; he then removed the ring without hurting the boy and kept it for himself. Another officer took Schehl’s gold watch. Schehl stood then with no other garment but a shirt, and barefoot, in the bitter cold, not daring to approach the bivouac fire.
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The Cossacks (on examining the garments of Schehl), found in one of the pockets a B clarinette. This discovery gave them great pleasure; they induced their captive to play for them, and he played, chilled to the bone in his scanty costume. But now the Cossacks came to offer him garments, a regular outfit for the Russian winter. They gave him food to eat and did all they could to show their appreciation of the music. What a rapid change of fortune within two hours, writes Schehl. Toward noon, riding a good horse, with considerable money in Russian bank notes and a valuable gold watch in his possession, all brought from Moscow, at 1 p.m. he stood dressed in a shirt only, with his bare feet on the frozen ground, and at 2 p. m. he was admired as an artist by a large audience that gave him warm clothes, which meant protection against the danger of freezing to death, and a place near the fire.
During that afternoon and the following night more French soldiers of all arms, mostly emaciated and miserable, were escorted to the camp by Russian militia, peasants, armed with long, sharp lances. It was the night from October 30th. to 31st., at the time of the first snowfall, with a temperature of -12 deg. Reaumur (about 5 degrees above zero Fahrenheit). Of the 700 prisoners, many of them deprived of their clothing, as Schehl had been deprived, who had to camp without a fire, quite a number did not see the next morning, and the already described snow hills indicated where these unfortunates had reached the end of their sufferings. The commanding officer of the Cossacks ordered the surviving prisoners to fall in line for the march back to Moscow. The escort consisted of two Cossacks and several hundred peasant-soldiers. Within sixteen hours the 700 had been reduced to 500. And they had to march back over the road which they had come yesterday as companions of their emperor. The march was slow, they were hardly an hour on the road when here and there one of the poor, half naked, starving men fell into the snow; immediately was he pierced with the lance of one of the peasant soldiers who shouted stopai sukinsin (forward you dog), but as a rule the one who had fallen was no longer able to obey the brutal command. Two Russian peasant soldiers would then take hold, one at each leg, and drag the dying man with the head over snow and stones until he was dead, then leave the corpse in the middle of the road. In the woods they would practice the same cruelties as the North American Indians, tie those who could not rise to a tree and amuse themselves by torturing the victim to death with their lances. And, says Schehl, I could narrate still other savageries, but they are too revolting, they are worse than those of the savage Indians. Fortunately, Schehl himself was protected from all molestations by the peasants by the two Cossacks of the escort. He was even taken into the provision wagon where he could ride between bundles of hay and straw. On the evening of the first day’s march the troops camped in a birch forest. Russian people are fond of melancholy music; Schehl played for them adagios on his clarinette, and the Cossacks gave him the best they had to eat. His comrades, now reduced to 400 in number, received no food and were so terror-stricken or so feeble that only from time to time they emitted sounds of clamor. Some would crawl into the snow and perish, while those who kept on moving were able to prolong their miserable lives. The second night took away 100 more, so that the number of prisoners was reduced to less than 300 on the morning of October 31st. During the night from October 31st. to November 1st. more than one-half of the prisoners who had come into the camp had perished, and there were only about 100 men left to begin the march. This mortality was frightful. Schehl thinks that the peasants killed many during the night in order to be relieved of their guard duty. For the Cossacks would send the superfluous guardsmen away and retain only as many as one for every four prisoners. They saw that the completely exhausted Frenchmen could be driven forward like a herd of sick sheep, and hardly needed any guard. In the morning we passed a village, writes Schehl, in which stood some houses which had not been burned. The returned inhabitants were busy clearing away the rubbish and had built some provisional straw huts. I sat as harmless as possible on my wagon when suddenly a girl in one of the straw huts screamed loud Matuschka! Matuschka! Franzusi! Franzusi Niewolni! (Mother! mother! Frenchmen! French prisoners!), and now sprang forward a large woman, armed with a thick club and struck me such a powerful blow on the head that I became unconscious. When I opened my eyes again the woman struck me once more, this time on my left shoulder and so violently that I screamed. My arm was paralyzed from the stroke. Fortunately, one of the Cossacks came to my rescue, scolded the woman, and chased her away.
On the evening of November 1st., the troops came to a village through which no soldiers had passed, which had not been disturbed by the war. Of the prisoners only 60 remained alive, and these were lodged in the houses.
Schehl describes the interior of the houses of Russian peasants as well as the customs of the Russian peasants, which description is highly interesting, and I shall give a brief abstract of it.
The houses are all frame buildings with a thatched roof, erected upon a foundation of large unhewn stones, the interstices of which are filled with clay, and built in an oblong shape, of strong, round pine logs placed one on top of the other. Each layer is stuffed with moss, and the ends of the logs are interlocking. The buildings consist of one story only, with a very small, unvaulted cellar.
Usually there are only two rooms in these houses, and wealthy peasants use both of them for their personal requirements; the poorer classes, on the other hand, use only one of the rooms for themselves, and the other for their horses, cows, and pigs.
The most prominent part of the interior arrangement of these rooms is the oven, covering about six feet square, with a brick chimney in the houses of the wealthy, but without chimney in those of the poor, so that the smoke must pass through the door giving a varnished appearance to the entire ceiling over the door.