As these unfortunate people slowly trudged along, the heartless guards on horseback whipped them and often prodded them with bayonets. Sometimes both men and women fell fainting and dying along the wayside. As two were nearly always chained together, the living was unlocked from the dead, the body kicked out of the way and even left unburied. In the heat of summer the dust nearly suffocated them and in the late autumn and early spring (they stopped in winter quarters in the coldest months), they often floundered along through mud nearly knee deep. Often the mud was frozen in the morning and their feet would break through. Perhaps their shoes were completely worn out, but no mercy was shown them and they had to make their way barefooted.
There was one thing the guards could not do, however, and that was to keep them still. As they went on their way they kept up a kind of a wail that was said to be the saddest chant that human ears ever heard. For miles and miles this mournful wail could be heard by the few people who lived in villages along the way. Sometimes, however, these villages were fifty or a hundred miles apart. But this wail was kept up continually. Every plan imaginable was used to stop it, but this could not be done and the guards and officers grew accustomed to it and let it go. No wonder that even yet in Siberia the call of the milkmaid is something like the wail of the exiles.
One of the most thrilling events during the war was the opening of the Siberian prison doors in the spring of 1917, when more than one hundred thousand exiles walked out as free men and women. In the great Irkutsk prison a company of men were watching some of their fellow prisoners being flogged when a man appeared at the door saying: "Russia is a republic and you are all free." Instantly all was excitement. The officers fled for their lives. Even the prison blacksmiths fled, for they had welded the shackles on thousands of prisoners and they feared vengeance. Other smiths were pressed into service and were compelled to work all night long cutting these iron chains. Many were chained to wheelbarrows and of course could not get away until their irons were broken. A committee of public safety was formed at once and precautions taken. A banquet was prepared in the dismissed governor's palace and sixty men whose chains had not been cut loose sat down at the table with their chains rattling.
In one place the priest, while performing his duties in the church, heard the news and announced it. Fifty men rushed out to kill the local police captain who had been a regular tyrant. As they came to his home they were met by the captain's ten-year-old daughter, who stood in front of her father and calmly said: "You will have to kill me first," and thus she saved his life.
In five days after the revolution, six thousand exiles had reached Irkutsk from other prisons. By the way, Irkutsk is the capital of eastern Siberia and here the greatest prisons were located. It is said that as many as one hundred thousand prisoners have been in the great prisons in and around this city at one time. There were no trains for these freed exiles and they camped along the railroad track. Every day the company became larger. At one time it was said that fifty thousand sledges were rushing toward the railroad as fast as horses, dogs and reindeer could drag them. The snow was already melting and they were determined to get to the railroad before it was too late.
Those who think the great Russian Empire is nothing but cold, bleak, barren waste, will have to think again. In 1913 there were eleven million acres planted in potatoes, five and one-half million acres of flax and hemp and nearly two million acres in cotton. They even had one hundred and fifty thousand acres in tobacco. In all there were in cultivation nearly four hundred million acres of land. In 1914 Russia and Siberia possessed thirty-five million head of horses, fifty-two million head of cattle, seventy-two million sheep, and fifteen million head of hogs.