During my second day in Moscow I met some English prisoners walking quite freely in the streets. I went up to a group of three and told them I was an American, and asked how they were getting on. They said they wanted to go home because the food was scarce, but aside from the lack of food they had nothing to complain of.
“Of course food is scarce,” said one, “but we get just as much as anyone else. Nobody gets much. You see us walking about the streets. No one is following us. We are free to go where we please. They send us to the theatre three nights a week. We go to the opera and the ballet. That’s what they do with all prisoners.”
Another broke in enthusiastically to say that if there were only food enough he would be glad to stay in Russia. Several of their pals, they told me, were working in Soviet offices.
They belonged to a detachment of ninety English who had been captured six months before, on the Archangel front. Before they went into action, they said, their commanding officer told each one to carry a hand grenade in his pocket, and if taken prisoner to blow off his head.
“The Bolsheviki,” he told us, "would torture us—first they would cut off a finger, then an ear, then the tip of the nose, and they would keep stripping us and torturing us until we died twenty-one days later.
“Well, before we knew it the Bolsheviki had us surrounded. There was nothing to do but surrender—and none of us used his bomb. The Bolsheviks marched us back about ten miles to a barrack, where we were told to sit down. Pretty soon they brought in a samovar and gave us tea and bread, and when we were about half through eating they brought in bundles of pamphlets. The pamphlets were all printed in English, mind you, and they told us why we had been sent to Russia.”
I recognized in his description the thing I had seen myself on the Western Front a few days before. I asked him if that was the usual way of treating prisoners.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s the way they do it. They don’t kill you. They just feed you with tea and bread, and this—what they call on the outside ‘propaganda’ and they say to you, ‘you read this stuff for a week,’ and you do, and you believe it—you can’t help it.”
It was bitterly cold in Moscow, though the Bolshevists made light of the September weather and laughed at my complaints. “Stay the winter with us,” they said, “and you will learn what cold is.” The city was practically without heat. The chill and damp entered my bones and pursued me through the streets and into my bed at night. One can stand prolonged exposure and cold if there is only the sustaining thought of a glowing fire somewhere, and a warm bed. But in Moscow there was no respite from the relentless chill. One was cold all day and all night. The aching pinch of it tore at the nerves. I marvelled at the endurance of the undernourished clerks and officials in the great damp Government office buildings, where it was often colder than in the dry sunshine outside.
All the large department stores and the clothing and shoe shops had been taken over by the Government. Here and there, however, were small private shops, selling goods without regard to Government prices.