GERMAN SOCIALISTS
We were a very mixed company, thirty, sometimes forty, men in a luggage van. We were mostly working-men, and the relations between them and the educated classes were very bad. They bore a grudge against us for being what we were, and tried by all sorts of pinpricks to make life a burden to us. The working-man dearly likes overheated rooms, possibly because it is a luxury he cannot afford at home. They would go on piling coal on the fire till the truck was like a furnace; in the pitiless, unbearable heat our brains would seem to be bursting, and we would throw off nearly all our clothes. When they had got us so far, the working-men would suddenly open the windows and let in on us the icy Siberian winter air with its temperature of twenty or thirty degrees below zero. We knew exactly what to expect from them if ever they should get the upper hand in the State. The Socialists ruled among them unquestioned. They would hold forth by the hour and no one of their class said a word against them. The chief use of the German Army seemed to be as an institution for the diffusion of Socialism throughout the whole nation. Our labourers were mostly inclined to be rough bullies, but they were cowards, and let anybody alone who showed fight. None of them were above cringing, fawning, or begging. It used to disgust me to see men wearing the uniform of a great army begging for pitiful odds and ends that they did not really need. Their philosophy was simple. If they wanted a thing, they must have it; if they could not beg or wheedle it out of its owner, they must steal it.
They were all expert thieves. Even in Germany the working-man has no particular scruples about stealing. A friend of mine once had his house decorated, and the workmen left their ladder behind. His groom noticed it and went to his master, full of joy, suggesting that he should paint the ladder green, so that the workmen should not recognize it when they came back to look for it. And he was astonished when my friend could not see how reasonable his proposal was. Our prisoners stole whatever they wanted or could lay their hands on. We “conveyed” coal to our wagon at every station. At another station we carried off a stove from some building because ours didn’t suit us. Peasant women used to come to the train, selling rolls of bread. One man would occupy her attention by bargaining with her keenly, while from behind others would fill their tunics with rolls and make off. Once when I had just paid an old woman a rouble, and was waiting for my change, she caught a man in the act of stealing. He at once races off; she sticks my rouble between her teeth, gathers up her skirts, and pursues, I behind her, anxious for my rouble. Everybody on the station stood and shook with laughter. As the train moved out, I succeeded in getting my change, but found the old lady as big a rogue as any of them, she had cheated me out of half of it.
It was no use telling the soldiers that these women were peasants like themselves. They remained quite indifferent. The remonstrances they made to one another were illuminating. “It’s all right to steal, but you might leave a little for your comrades.” “I don’t mind stealing so much; but you might share with us.” “It’s selfish of you to attract attention by stealing like that; we can’t steal now.” And the soldiers who spoke thus are now the masters of Germany.
RUSSIAN MAGNANIMITY
But there was one incident which shocked even them. On the way to Moscow our guards travelled in the truck with us. One Sunday they had been absent all day, and two comrades of theirs had taken their place. When they came back, they found that all their white bread had been stolen out of their knapsacks. With fine German tact we immediately suggested that their comrades had done it; but they quietly answered that no Russian soldier ever stole from a comrade. Upon this we offered to show them our knapsacks and prove our innocence, but with a certain dignity they put the matter aside. However, it mattered to us, so a general search of all knapsacks and baggage was ordered, without anything being found. One man was then observed to be getting rid of some white breadcrumbs, and on closer inspection we found remains of white bread by him. Upon this a Hungarian related that he had seen the theft, but, as he had no taste for tale-bearing, had held his tongue. We reported our discoveries to the Russian, who simply said God would punish the thief. We sent the culprit to Coventry, and he passed the time weeping bitter tears; but the Russian was pointedly kind to him all the while he was with us, and when he went away shook hands with him in front of us all. There was not one of the Germans who did not feel the moral superiority of the Russian, and acknowledge that such a fine temper would have been impossible in a German guarding prisoners of war.
The thief happened to be a schoolmaster, and the incident made it impossible for educated men to exert their influence any longer. We had to sit and listen for days to jeers at the morality of the educated classes. The German soldier, unlike the Russian, makes no fine distinctions about not stealing from comrades. This same schoolmaster stole all my sugar once, and as his appetite was insatiable, he ate it up in a single night. Other “Kameraden” at various times relieved me of my towels and soap. Not that they desired a wash. They stole these things only to sell them again to educated men in the other trucks. Captivity mercifully numbs a prisoner’s senses, and few things hurt. But the misery of continual association with companions of this kind tells upon a man as certainly as pain.
Indeed, I do not think it possible to paint the horror of this journey. Hunger, dirt, and lice—that was the burden of our thoughts. I did not get a bath or an exchange of linen between September 11 and December 9. And even in September I had been laughed at as a mad Englishman for plunging into the cold river. Once I paid a rouble for hot water; but when the soldiers understood that I was going to waste it on a bath they commandeered it for their tea. We could keep our hands and faces fairly clean—if only by washing in the snow by the side of the railway. But our working-men never troubled, and our particular part of the transport was so dirty that the others called us the “Nigger Minstrels.” We could not even get them to sweep the truck out periodically, but they used to let the dirt accumulate from week to week.
VERMIN
And then the lice. I shall never forget the first one I discovered on my collar-band. The horror of that moment never diminished, familiarity only bred deeper disgust. Every day we took off all our clothing and searched it; towards the end it was necessary to do so three or four times a day. We never found less than a hundred lice at a search. Verminousness breaks a man’s spirit more completely than any other affliction; he loathes himself, and from self-loathing quickly falls into despondency and despair. Besides, we all knew that the louse was the carrier of that dread disease, hemorrhagic typhus, of whose ravages we had heard so much. Considering that the whole transport was in the same condition with regard to lice as ourselves, it is a wonder that no disease broke out on the journey.