In fairness to the Russians it must be said that as soon as they realized the danger, they did everything in their power to fight the epidemic. They sent a special hospital staff with doctors, nurses, and beds complete. Some of the Russians contracted the disease themselves while nursing the prisoners of war. The Russian doctor was constantly in and out of the hospitals, although he was a married man with a wife and children to whom he might easily have brought the disease. German, Austrian, and Turkish doctors were gathered from various parts of Siberia and sent post haste to Stretensk. In a short time there were twenty doctors and medical students at work. The Swedish Red Cross provided medicines and stores, and gave a large amount of money. Theoretically it was always possible to obtain more by telegraphing to the Central Red Cross Bureau at Petrograd, but I doubt if a telegram would have gone through. A number of buildings were fitted up as hospitals and observation wards, so that it became possible to separate the various infectious diseases from one another. But at the best everything remained primitive and rough. The prisoners used to say that the Russians were doing it on purpose in order to kill them off as soon as possible. They forgot that they were living in the wilds of Siberia, and that the Russian soldiers themselves would have been no better off if an epidemic had broken out amongst them. The sanitary conditions were indescribable. At the height of the plague there were three patients to two beds, and you might wake up one night to find a dead man on either side of you, and so you would lie through the long hours till morning came. The corpses were taken to a little wooden house and there kept for weeks. There was a gruesome story of an Austrian who went to plunder the dead and got shut up for a whole day among the stacks of corpses. The ground was frozen too hard for a spade to turn, so all night we could see the glare of the fires on the hills burning a hole into the frozen ground to make graves for the dead. Only officers were buried with a religious service. We used to see the dead bodies of our comrades fetched out of the morgue and flung like so many sides of bacon on to a sledge and borne off to the graveyard, where they were thrown into the earth without any ceremony. “Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ’em? Mine ache to think on’t.”
JEWS AS ORDERLIES
But gloomy as the picture was, it was made still darker by the treachery of our own men. There was no trained hospital staff at first, and it was necessary to take for orderlies men who could speak Russian. The only prisoners who fulfilled this qualification were Austrian and Hungarian Jews. They could speak Russian, partly because a Jew can always learn a language when it is likely to bring him any advantage, but also because they were the first to desert and had been the longest in captivity. Where one Jew comes, others follow, and in time practically all the orderly work was in their hands. Whatever the patients brought with them to hospital was stolen as a matter of course. Their fine new uniforms were taken away on a pretence that they were to be disinfected, but they were never brought back. The Jews sold them, and gave the patients that recovered torn and shabby garments for which there was no sale. They ate the nourishing rations provided for the sick, and left their patients to starve. The biggest scoundrel was a man called Flesch. Sometimes Flesch would load a sledge with Red Cross stores, such as rugs or warm underclothing, drive off to the town and sell to the Russians the things of which his own comrades stood in such bitter need. By some queer stroke of cunning he managed to keep the orderlies in his hospital under subjection, and no one stole without his licence. Honour among thieves! When a man died, Flesch was fetched to dispose of his effects, and a certain ritual was always observed in these affairs. If he left much money, Flesch would say a long prayer for his soul; if little, he would turn away with a sneer and say that as he had left only a few kopecks, a short paternoster would be enough for him. The Catholics may find what consolation they can in the circumstance that this master rogue was of their Church, although he was undoubtedly of Jewish descent. There were horrible ghoulish stories at the hospitals of patients who did not die quickly enough, and of orderlies hovering round their bed, waiting for them to breathe their last, and then suddenly losing patience, rushing in on them and snatching their money from them while they still lived, or even taking their pillow and hastening their end by suffocation. Now and again the patients resisted, and, with a strength born of despair, would just be able to throw off their assailants before they died. And some recovered and lived to remember, as through the mists of an awful dream, in what terrors Death can be arrayed.
GERMAN DOCTORS
But even worse remains to be told. I have already mentioned that the Swedish sisters left a large sum of money at Stretensk. If this had been properly spent, a great deal of suffering might have been prevented. Strong nourishing food might have been bought for those who were not yet ill, and the disease would not have spread so quickly. The Austrian doctors in our camp made good use of the little money they received. In the other camp on the hill there was a German Jew, Dr. Kallenbach, and he is said to have wheedled out of the sisters enormous sums. A portion of the money was ear-marked for definite purposes, but even this he contrived in part to embezzle. He was instructed to give every qualified doctor £10, he only gave them £5. He had orders to give a certain amount to the Turkish prisoners, who were worse off than any of us; most of this money he kept for himself, and then falsified his accounts so as to make it appear that the Turks had received everything. No one knows exactly how much he stole. A certain proportion, of course, found its way to the prisoners for whom it was intended. The rest Kallenbach is said to have invested with a chemist living at Stretensk, a Jew with whom he was on intimate terms. If so, the local Soviet has probably scattered it to the four winds by now. While the common prisoners in Kallenbach’s camp were starving, their doctors were enjoying the best of everything. Their banquets became a byword. The doctors down in our camp messed for eighteen roubles a month each, and for this sum lived as luxuriously as ever at home. The doctors on the hill messed for thirty-five roubles a month. It is a puzzle to me, with food as cheap as it was then, where they got the appetite to eat at all.
What knavery had begun, cowardice completed. The other German doctor, a Gentile this time, when he saw that the disease really was typhus, proclaimed himself ill and took to his bed. He stayed there for some months, until all danger was past. He asserted that he himself had typhus. The Russian doctors laughed and declared it was impossible, but with characteristic good nature they left him alone. He was the only doctor who had received the Iron Cross. He had a young medical student, Heinze by name, who waited on him all through his illness, practically taking sole charge of him. When he got home again, he was going to recommend this man for the Iron Cross too—“for devotion to duty in trying circumstances.”
UNSPEAKABLE TURK
Another arrant coward was the Turkish doctor, Remsi Seki. He was said to be a son of Abdul Hamid. Whether that is true I do not know; but at any rate his mother had been in the Sultan’s harem and had afterwards been married off to a high official. He was the most contemptible poltroon I have ever met. At a certain stage in the reconvalescence from typhus an abscess often forms in the neck, and death ensues from suffocation if it is not lanced in time. It is a very simple operation, which anybody can perform. When cases of this kind occurred, Remsi Seki used to stand wringing his hands, looking at the patient in terror, unable to move. At last, after a number of patients had died through his incompetence, the orderlies themselves, untrained as they were, would rush in and do the lancing. After a while he was dismissed from the hospital as utterly useless. He was the typical “unspeakable Turk,” a man of gentle and winning manners, affecting shyness as good form in Turkey requires, shrewd at judging the weaknesses of others, but incapable of strong action himself, though tenacious in his purposes, given over to unmentionable vice, and at heart terribly cruel. When he heard of the Armenian massacres he expressed his joy and said they were quite [justified]. None of his bad qualities prevented him from being a prime favourite with the Germans, who used to extol his fine and noble character.
ALL SOULS’ DAY
But it must not be supposed that all the doctors were like these Jews and Turks. There was another side to the medal. The Austrians worked manfully to stem the tide of disease. And there were examples of heroic self-sacrifice, worthy to rank with any deeds on the battlefield. There was the Austrian officer [Herrman], who at the outbreak of the epidemic volunteered to help in disinfecting the barracks. He was over forty, and he must have known that he had little chance of life if he caught the disease. He went from barracks to barracks, doing his utmost to better the circumstances of the men, always ready with a joke or a cheery word of advice. He fought the causes of the disease, the dirt, the bad air, the vermin, the prisoners’ sloth and the indifference they displayed to their condition. Such a fight could not last long, the inevitable happened, and he perished of the disease. Other Austrian medical students also succumbed. Of these we may surely use the phrase so hackneyed in Germany and say that they died a hero’s death for the Fatherland. Their gravestone stands on the bleak Siberian hillside, an enduring memorial to their courage, a reproach to their less worthy comrades. Every year on All Souls’ Day, the Catholics in Austria and Germany celebrate their Feast of the Dead. Lights are placed on the graves and sometimes food is set out. In old days the people thought that on this festival the spirits of the dead revisited the earth, and the lights were to guide and the food to sustain them on their long journey. On All Souls’ Day, 1916, the Russians, who under the old régime always respected religious observances, allowed the medical staff to leave the camp and go up to the graves on the hill. We found the candles burning just as at home, and we all stood with bared heads in reverence to the dead. The scene was penetrated with a mournful irony. Below slept the unfortunate and the brave, and there came to do them honour the cowards who had deserted them, the thieves who had robbed them, and the murderer who had killed them just as certainly as if he had driven a sword into their hearts.