Outwardly we were the merriest crew imaginable. We had our professional clowns, who every night brought out the same hits of last season’s music-halls. We had our professional “raconteur,” a Pole, with a real gift both for story-telling and repartee, and who could make the dullest party lively. We had our soldiers’ songs, reminiscences of the field and of the garrison, eternal discussions about Catholic and Protestant, Socialism and Capitalism, and a thousand other things to keep us going. And there was one unceasing subject of interest that rarely let us think of anything else, namely, when were we going to get our next meal. It is an uncertainty that would add piquancy to almost any situation.
STRETENSK
At last, somewhere early in December, we arrived at our journey’s end—a small Cossack station the other side of Lake Baikal, called Stretensk. Our stay began well. The Commandant asked us if we had any claims to make on account of money or food that had been withheld, and he actually allowed all we put in. Then we were marched across the frozen river to the camp. So far as we could see, this was a collection of low wooden and brick buildings stretching for about a mile on a plateau above the river. We were taken to a big brick barracks, and there left for the night. No preparations had been made to receive us; our new home was thick with dirt; outside, the temperature was many degrees below zero, while inside, the stoves could not be lighted till the next day. We were a collection of scarecrows, so pitifully clad that it would have been a shame to expose us to a German winter, and we were in the wilds of Siberia; we were indescribably filthy; our bodies were a mass of festering sores; and yet the whole night the barracks was jubilant with song, chorus answered to chorus, and company vied with company in seeing who could sing longest and loudest; and our ragged regiment appeared rather to be celebrating carnival than its arrival at a prison. For three months we had not been able to send a letter, and now we had come to a place from which at last we could write home.
CHAPTER VII
SIBERIA
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.
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.