Boche and Bolshevik / Experiences of an Englishman in the German Army and in Russian Prisons

by Hereward Thimbleby Price

One final touch of horror, and I have done with horrors. I only mention it as it is characteristic of that Russian morbidity of temperament which Englishmen find it so hard to understand. After the fighting was ended, the dead bodies were collected and stacked in various public buildings. For days this was one of the sights of Irkutsk, and people flocked to see it. Corpses of men, women, and children were piled in heaps for every one to look at. You could see fashionable women daintily lifting their skirts and picking their way between the dead bodies, or young girls and boys staring with naïve curiosity at the sight. In one building the room of the Army Paymaster was requisitioned, and he used to sit at his desk, faced by a wall of dead bodies, while men and women came to receive their money. The prisoners of war went too, and vowed that never should a revolution cause such scenes in Germany; they were prepared to suffer anything rather than that.

SOLDIERS’ COUNCILS

We thus see Bolshevism sitting throned on a pile of dead bodies. Since so many people are still inclined to regard the movement as to some extent an expression of the people’s will, it may be interesting to state exactly how the Bolsheviks came into power. It was only through the soldiers, and these soldiers they won over to their side only by the promise of peace. The elections for the Constituent Assembly at Irkutsk just before the second Revolution showed that the Bolsheviks had no following except in the army. The soldiers were bitterly hated by the people. I have seen peasant women shake their fists in the soldiers’ faces and curse them for the disasters they had brought on Russia. The soldiers merely laughed and shouted, “Peace, peace.” Many of the demobilized soldiers, when they arrived at their homes, were shot by the peasants. Once the Bolsheviks were in power, the soldiers insisted on their promises being kept and on being demobilized. They were implored to stay and fight for the good old cause of Socialism; but they answered roughly, “We are not Socialists. We are Bolsheviks.” They had not the slightest notion what the Bolsheviks were, and if you had told them they were extreme Monarchists, it would have made no difference, so long as they brought peace. A list of volunteers was opened at Irkutsk, and only fifty men enrolled themselves. The Bolsheviks began to feel the disadvantages of the Soldiers’ Councils they had created. The new Government issued an order that the demobilized soldiers were to give up their equipment and rifles. The Soldiers’ Councils met and passed a resolution that each soldier was free to take his equipment home with him. Soldiers were willing to sell their rifles for a song, and the bourgeois were thus enabled to equip themselves for the next struggle with the Bolsheviks. The most amazing scenes took place. A friend of mine was approached by a soldier and asked what he would give for a machine-gun. He thought the whole affair was a joke, and answered quite gravely that he had got in a sufficient stock of machine-guns for the summer, but he was rather short of field artillery. The soldier said he would talk to his comrades about it, and next day actually returned with an offer to steal and sell a field-gun at a stated price. The bargain was concluded, and although the Bolsheviks searched high and low for it, they never found where the gun was hidden. Government and regimental stores were openly plundered. The second-hand market was full of them for weeks. Sugar to the value of thousands of pounds was stolen from the 12th Regiment. One night the sentry set to guard the regimental chest disappeared, taking with him a month’s pay for the whole regiment. Such things as the Bolsheviks particularly wanted to keep were removed from the different storehouses to a common centre. On the way the waggons openly stopped at the second-hand market and a certain proportion of the stores was sold. So badly was the Bolshevik State organized that these thefts were never discovered by the officials in control, the reason being that they were mostly ignorant soldiers who could not even count. Bolshevism, as conceived by its leaders, may be something great and exhilarating. But the Bolsheviks were put into power by the soldiers, and the soldiers only wanted two things—peace and opportunities for plunder.

CONSPIRACIES

Conspiracies were constantly being formed against them. In one of these, the town was divided into eight districts, each under its leader. The eight leaders knew one another, but in the separate districts each conspirator knew only his leader, and he did not know who else belonged to the cause. It behoved one in those days to guard carefully one’s tongue. I had a pupil with whom I was on excellent terms, a business man in the town. He showed me the damage that the Bolsheviks had done to his house, without expressing an opinion about it, however. He did not know whether I might not be a Bolshevik spy. I, on the other hand, said nothing, because I had at last learned to hold my tongue. But one day during the lesson there came on a great fall of snow; I had incautiously gone out without an overcoat, and he offered to lend me his to go back home in. It was the only one the Bolsheviks had left him, a musty, mouldy, old green thing, not worth the stealing. I put it on, and the effect was too much for his caution. “Why,” he said, “you look just like a Bolshevik!” Our laughter broke the ice, and we became fast friends.

The Bolsheviks had no means of satisfying the discontent of the people. They had little food, and did not know how to obtain more. The peasants absolutely refused to sell to them. The prisoners of war used to organize expeditions to the surrounding villages to buy flour. The peasants would at first regard them with suspicion, and deny that they had anything to sell. The prisoners used to protest that they were not Bolsheviks, they were only prisoners of war—and they got as much as they wanted. The Bolshevik army was crumbling to pieces, and scarcely a man was left. They managed in time to collect a few men—ne’er-do-wells, criminals, former policemen, and some of the unemployed—and with these they made up a kind of army. And on one pretext or another they disarmed the whole of the bourgeoisie. But they had no means of resisting any strong concerted effort to put them down. And then some one had the brilliant idea of organizing the prisoners of war.

PRISONERS’ ASSOCIATIONS

I was able to follow this movement closely through all its stages until I left Irkutsk. I was at the first meeting called to discuss the question. The hall was filled with Austro-Hungarian and German prisoners of war, and with a miscellaneous public of Red Guards, Bolsheviks, and their sympathizers. A president, vice-presidents, and various other officials were elected from among the prisoners. The Germans were conspicuous by their reserve, and held aloof. Nominally, the meeting was under the leadership of an Austrian, but it soon passed into the hands of a member of the Soviet called Izaaksohn. Whenever it appeared to be going off the rails, he brought it back, and kept it on what was obviously a definitely thought-out course. The feeling between the Germans and the Austrians was very bad, and was not improved by the taunts hurled at the former for their cowardice in not speaking out. Finally, a resolution was passed condemning the German Government in round terms for its greed and aggression, and declaring the intention of the meeting to form an association of prisoners of war. The misdeeds of Austria were altogether ignored in the resolution. Prisoners’ Associations had been formed all over Siberia. At Stretensk the prisoners had torn the national cockade from their caps and replaced it with the red ribbon of the International. At Beresovka fighting had taken place between the Germans and the Hungarians, because the former still hung back. At Omsk the town was in the hands of the prisoners, who kept their officers in close confinement and had killed some of them. They also had the railway station in their power, and would not allow any prisoners to return home. A prisoner could either become a member of the Omsk Red Guard or be sent back to where he came from. The new German Association declared that they would go home first and prepare the ground for the Revolution, and then the bourgeois could follow. The German Government thought otherwise. Not a single prisoner of war was allowed through the German lines. I know of one sergeant who escaped and reached the German lines in Central Russia. He was warned to go back, but he could not believe his ears; he thought the Germans would be certain to welcome their own men. He insisted on advancing, and was shot dead. Later in the summer I was informed that the Germans were shooting all returned prisoners who could be proved to have had anything to do with the Bolsheviks. The success of the Revolution in Germany proves that some, at any rate, managed to get through. The Austrians put their Bolsheviks in internment camps.

Meanwhile strange things were happening at Irkutsk itself. Although peace had been signed, prisoners of war from Russia were being concentrated at Irkutsk. Two or three hundred of them were armed and were set to guard not only their own encampment, but also the munition stores of the Bolsheviks. The Russians had no faith in their own men, and insisted on having Germans. Many prisoners in the town were instructing the Red Guards and Anarchists in the various branches of war—artillery, cavalry, and the machine-gun. Two or three flying machines were brought to Irkutsk, to be flown, it was said, by German aviators. Transports of prisoners from the east were held up indefinitely in the town. They came with the soldiers, subject to military discipline as at the front. Within a day all that was changed. Saluting ceased and discipline existed no longer. In one case the leader of a transport was arrested because he was paying the officers more per day than the men. All his money, to the amount of several thousands of pounds, was taken from him. All the protocols that had been collected against the prisoners were destroyed. A German sergeant was killed in the streets of Irkutsk for refusing to remove the badges of his rank. The Allies took alarm at the concentration of such large armed forces, and sent officers to investigate the movement. They were put off with bare-faced lies. At a time when at least ten thousand prisoners were under arms, they were assured that only fifteen hundred of them were so. In April there was a great meeting of delegates from all the associations of prisoners in Siberia. The rules of membership were decided upon, and among them was the following: “The members are pledged to take up arms whenever the Central Committee calls upon them to do so, or if there is no time to appeal to the Central Committee, whenever the Local Committee calls upon them to do [so.”] In addition to those already enrolled in the Red Army, the Association gave the Bolsheviks an enormous number of men pledged to support them with arms when called upon. I say enormous advisedly. An Austrian with whom I talked reckoned the number at a million. This is certainly too large, but in any case the Association doubled, if it did not treble, the number of soldiers at the Soviet’s disposal.

This propaganda soon made itself felt. Simeonof had been able to do what he liked with the Red Guards; they never stood up to him. The Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs made a despairing speech, in which he candidly admitted that the Red Army was worthless. The prisoners changed the aspect of affairs altogether, and without them the Bolsheviks would not have been able to resist either Simeonof or the Czecho-Slovaks. By means of their propaganda the Bolsheviks killed two birds with one stone. They obtained help against their enemies, they also undermined the capitalist states of Central Europe. They were cleverer than the Germans. Suppose that the Germans after the Kaiser’s fall had treated our prisoners kindly, and preached to them the doctrines of Socialism. If it had been done in the proper way it might have been dangerous. But then the Russian Socialist leaders were true to the International, and really desired some higher ideal than country to guide their class. The German worker will fight to get privileges for himself, but I never found that he had a feeling of community with the workers outside Germany. He preached the doctrine of hate as cordially as his officers.