It seems plain that in France, Germany and Great Britain there has been an honest, if not always a very sympathetic attempt to treat prisoners decently. But we hear little about the condition of prisoners elsewhere. It is curious to note how, in spite of all the horror perpetrated repeatedly by Turkish authorities in times, not of war, but of peace, British feeling is never very indignant against the Turk; and how prisoners of war are faring in Turkey we scarcely know. Not till July, 1917, does there seem to have been any definite application for the inspection of Turkish internment camps. On July 18, 1917, an announcement appeared in the Press to the effect that, in response to a request from the British Government, the International Committee of the Red Cross at Geneva had applied to the Turkish Government for the necessary permission.
Yet here, as in all war matters, we come upon “reprisals.” The following is a cutting from the Daily News of July 20, 1917:
Mr. James Hope, for the Foreign Office, stated in the Commons yesterday that five British officers had been for over three months imprisoned in Constantinople as a reprisal for the alleged imprisonment of Turkish officers in Egypt. The United States Ambassador was requested on April 25 to explain to the Porte by telegram that only one of the five Turkish officers in Egypt had been under arrest, and that for attempted escape. He regretted to say that one of the five British officers had died. They had just received a message from the Danish Minister at Constantinople stating that the four surviving officers returned to camp on July 4.
Statements about enemy reprisals are usually less frank than this. The neutral observer has usually to watch each side describing its most drastic actions as reprisals upon the other for similar deeds.
Serbia.
The condition of Austrian and German prisoners in Serbia has been touched upon by Dr. F. M. Dickinson Berry, Physician to the Anglo-Serbian Hospital Unit. I give the following quotations from an article by Dr. Berry in the Nation of August 21, 1915.
“There is no doubt that the prisoners suffered badly during the winter.... Typhus decimated them earlier and more universally, probably owing to the way in which they were crowded together. Outside the town our prisoner pointed out a cottage adjacent to a brick-kiln, where he, with 250 men, had stayed some months without beds, blankets, or even straw to sleep on, and with the scantiest of food.” But the villagers showed kindness, said the prisoner, and bestowed on them the food placed by Serbian custom on the graves of the dead. “Many of the prisoners fell sick and were taken off to the hospital. Here, too, they lay on the floor with nothing to cover them but a great-coat, if the fortunate possessors of such. Few who entered the hospital ever came back; if not ill with typhus when they came in, they were pretty safe to get it there, and they passed on to the cemetery beyond the town, where, as in so many Serbian cemeteries, however remotely situated, there is a portion covered thickly with plain wooden crosses, marking the graves of Austrian prisoners. Our informant told us that of those with him 50 per cent. had died; of eleven Italians whom he had under his charge one only survived. Asked whether they had any guards, he said no; each sergeant (he himself was one) was put in charge of fifty men, and was answerable with his life in case any should escape.” There were, however, some compensations for the primitive barbarity of these arrangements. The Serbian people did not attack their prisoners, they fed them. They might have learned a less human attitude under more civilised conditions. “As we motored through the town we were amused at the number of greetings our prisoner received; he was evidently a well known and popular person. As we passed he pointed out the houses of acquaintances and other objects of interest. On one side lived a municipal official, who, finding that he held the same sort of post in Bohemia, greeted him as a colleague and used to ask him to his house. Further on was the fountain where he had come to wash his clothes in the bitter winter weather, and close by the house of the kind but match-making old lady who washed his clothes for him, and having a daughter’s hand to dispose of, wished to keep him as a son-in-law.”
Russia.
Of what happened in Russian prison camps we have only rumours, and the usual individual statements. The old Russian régime was scarcely likely to be very efficient or very humane in its treatment of prisoners, but any one who has examined war stories will be very cautious of believing all that is told. What the “unofficial information and rumours” were may be sufficiently gathered by referring to the Cambridge Magazine of August 26, 1916, Supplement “Prisoners.” It may be well to add this: in November, 1918, Erzberger, interviewed by Dr. Stollberg, of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, asserted that out of 250 thousand prisoners in Russia only 100 thousand remained alive.