“Then, will you please tell me if a prisoner should be abused by an officer for doing so?”
“Certainly not.”
I then related what had occurred, and requested the official to give me particulars in writing next morning as to this officer’s name and position, so that I should know how to state my complaint about him.
Next day my gendarme told me this promising young lieutenant had been round more than once during the night, telling him and the policeman what they were to say if there were any inquiry. Evidently the young fellow was in some trepidation, as he had thus humbled himself before his inferiors. I felt rather sorry for him, and thinking he had a sufficient warning, I took no further steps in the matter.
My case, meanwhile, was running its course. About the middle of September the examining magistrate read me the document that was the outcome of his labours. According to paragraph so-and-so of the statute-book, it set forth, he must hand me over to the Prosecutor of the Military Court. I at once entered a protest, calling attention to the extradition treaty, which enjoined my being tried by the ordinary civil law, not by any special tribunal. Whereupon the magistrate showed me a paper, in which the Minister of Justice informed him that after the conclusion of the examination he must act according to such and such a paragraph, which enacted that crimes committed by any person belonging to the army must be dealt with by a court-martial.
“When the crime of which you are accused was committed,” said the magistrate, “you were serving in the army.”
This makes another retrospective digression necessary, that I may tell the reader something about my youth and my brief military career.
Led by the spirit of the times and my own convictions, I had donned peasant’s dress and gone “among the people,” to return home in the autumn of 1875 disenchanted and discouraged after my propagandist efforts. Like many youths of those days, I was filled with impetuous longings. I wanted to use my young strength, and yearned after great deeds; but what I should begin upon I hardly knew.
When I returned from my campaign I found very few of my old companions in Kiëv. Some were in prison, others were scattered to the four winds. It was just at this time that insurrections had broken out in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Numbers of young men, among whom were many Socialists, had joined the volunteer corps, and I found a very warlike spirit abroad. The fight for freedom on the heights of the Balkans was the topic of the day. A youth of twenty was naturally carried away by this tide; and I was preparing to go off to the war and fight in the struggle to release an oppressed people from the Turkish yoke, but I was too late, the waves were retreating. Volunteers wrote from the scene of action letters that were only disheartening. The situation was of such a nature that young people—for the most part not inured to the hardships of guerrilla warfare—were not only useless, but an encumbrance to the fighters; and our friends advised that no more such should be sent out. So I had to give up my project.