I have said so much against the Germans that it is a pleasure to bear witness to the courage of two of their numbers. Heinze, the student already mentioned, was surpassed by no one in his attention to the sick. He had caught so many diseases during the various epidemics he had fought, that people would think I was romancing if I were to give the list. And there was a young student of philosophy from Bonn who had the orderlies under him at a particular hospital. He waged a perpetual warfare with the Jews, doing his utmost to prevent them from robbing the patients of food and money. He spared himself neither day nor night, and was so heedless of danger that at last his doctor had to give him an express command to keep out of the sick-room. In the end the Jews were too strong for him, and they intrigued him out of his position.
It will never be known how many the epidemic carried off, because at first the men died so quickly that they could not be counted. The doctors estimated that in three months eight hundred men, or ten per cent. of the prisoners, died. The disease being not particularly virulent, the mortality was only about twenty per cent. of the patients. We may reckon that about half the camp caught typhus. We have only guesswork to go upon, because the dishonest doctors intentionally falsified their sick-lists. The Jewish hospital orderlies, who had undertaken the work merely to enrich themselves, nearly all perished. Some time in the winter of 1916 a prisoner found smuggled in a parcel he had received from home, a German newspaper containing the Red Cross Report on conditions in Siberia. It accused the Russian hospital attendants of infamous cruelty, scandalous neglect of their duties, and shameless thieving. The Austrian doctors got hold of the report and read it to one another with shouts of laughter. “Why,” they said, “it wasn’t the Russians who did that, it was our own men. The Russians wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I suppose the same thought has occurred to all my readers. This story makes the horrors of Wittenberg intelligible. You cannot expect the Germans to be kinder to the English than to their own soldiers.
CHRISTMAS CHEER
It was always a puzzle to us afterwards how we could have passed through that time so light-heartedly. We saw our comrades, suddenly stricken with the disease, stagger off to hospital, a day or two afterwards we saw their corpses flung on to the sledge and hurried away to be buried with less ceremony than a dog. Or, if they came back, it was as broken and crippled men, shadows of their former selves. We knew that any moment the same thing might happen to us. And yet we were outwardly as merry as the day was long, and we were never without a song or a jest on our lips. That peculiar numbness of prison life, which I mentioned in my last chapter, kept us from feeling our position too acutely. But when everything was over, a strange horror of it all took possession of us, and we could not bear to look back. One incident stands out especially in my memory. It was months after the epidemic had finished. We had just been celebrating Christmas; the dinner had been excellent, probably far better than any of our families at home had been able to procure, and we were in that warm and comfortable frame of mind which a good Christmas dinner usually brings about. Suddenly some one observed, “Why, of all us ten, Price is the only one who didn’t get fleck-typhus.” Our talk and laughter instantly stopped, and our evening’s amusement was killed. Once more the grave seemed lo open at our feet, and Death to take his place beside us, a familiar guest.
CHAPTER VIII
CAMOUFLAGE
TEACHING ENGLISH
A strange turn of Fortune’s wheel delivered me from the worst of the epidemic. There was at Stretensk an officers’ camp, jealously guarded, to which ordinary prisoners were not allowed access. The Hungarian officers, when they heard of me, petitioned the colonel in command that I might be allowed to go and give them lessons in English. The colonel refused even to consider it. Then one day a Hungarian officer came to me with the following proposal: We will transfer you to our camp by putting you down on the list of officers’ servants; once you are with us, however, you will live as an officer and be treated quite as one of ourselves. I lost no time in accepting, was immediately transferred, and became for the Russians an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.
At that time no letters had arrived from home, the Red Cross work was still unorganized, and very few prisoners knew of the existence of Frau von Hanneken’s organization, so that there was a great dearth of amusements, and people were only too eager to learn English. I soon had five classes a day. I had no grammars and no books of any sort to teach from and had to make up every lesson out of my own head. But the hard work was an undisguised blessing, it enabled me to forget where I was, and the days began to pass more quickly.
The cheat we were practising could not long be concealed from our guards. Every officer had to sign his name in a book twice a day. The soldier, whose business it was to bring this book round, was bound to notice that I never signed it. He was easily pacified. The Russian state paid him seventy kopecks (about 1s. 6d.) a month for his services. I bought them for a rouble a month, with occasional tips for odd jobs. He was only dangerous when in his drunken fits, which were not infrequent. Then he would burst suddenly into the class and point at me and say, “You are not an officer, you are a teacher; you are a naughty man, but I will forgive you. Come, let us shake hands.” After we had shaken hands, he would minutely examine his greasy palms to see what might be found there. Once he came in maudlin sorrow and said, “You make me very unhappy, you give my conscience no rest. I want to go to church to-night and cannot. God does not love me, God will be very angry with me—unless you give me twenty-five roubles at once.” “Well,” I said, “how about twenty-five kopecks?” His purple face lighted up with joy and he was again my friend. He was not always to be bought, however. One night he came storming into our rooms, more drunk than usual. He called us to get up (it was about two o’clock) and said he would take us into the town on the spree. Then he caught sight of me, and shouted, “No, I cannot take you, you have that wicked man among you. I must go to the colonel and tell him all about it.” In his drunken frenzy he seemed quite capable of carrying out his threat, and no bribes or cajoleries of ours had any effect. At last we hit upon the expedient of treating him as his own officers did, and bullied him hard. We beat his soft will to pulp, and before long, trembling with fear, he began to fall on his knees and kiss our hands, begging us to overlook his offence.