It was called a “camp,” but the refugees in the place to which Christy went—there were many others round Petrograd—were housed in the old Imperial Barracks—an immense white-washed building on four sides of a hollow square. It was worth seeing, as Christy said, but not pleasant to see. Outside the thermometer told forty degrees below zero. Inside there was no heat except that of human bodies lying huddled together on bare boards. There were thousands of peasants with straw-coloured beards and blue eyes from Samara, and Saratoff, and other places which soon to Bertram were to have a frightful significance. They had with them their women folk and children who squatted about in the barrack rooms or lay sleeping in tangled heaps like those in the station at Moscow. A meal was being served from the kitchen—thin potato soup, and a square hunk of black sour-smelling bread, provided by the Soviet Republic for these people of the sun-burnt valley, once the richest granary of Russia. The soup was ladled out to those who lined up in queue, with mugs and bowls, but Bertram saw that many did not take their place in the line. They lay on the bare boards, flopping their heads from side to side, or very still, with glazing eyes.
“Typhus—dysentery—weakness,” said Christy, after some words in German to a Russian doctor.
The doctor was a black-bearded man in a white surgical coat. He had grave, thoughtful eyes behind his glasses.
“We do what we can,” he said, in German. “But the food is hardly enough, and there are no medicines, no soap, no change of clothes, no fuel for heat. Disease is spreading. But we do our best.”
Passing through the courtyard with Bertram and Christy, he pushed back a wooden door, and beckoned them to look.
Inside was a great pile of dead bodies, thrown one on top of the other, men, women, and children, mixed up together in a huddle of death, with brown, claw-like hands protruding from the mass of corpses, and faces staring upwards, and here and there a bare limb revealed in its skin and bone. They had been tossed on top of each other, like rubbish for the muck-heap.
“Two days dead,” said the Russian doctor.
“The End of the Journey,” said Christy, in a low voice to Bertram.
Bertram was sick for a moment in the corner of the yard. This stench of death was worse than a battlefield.