During the day it was so dark that they could not see each other's faces. In the morning they were told that, if they wanted to wash, they might go to the pump from which they also got their drinking water. This pump stood in the middle of a manure heap, and could only be reached by wading knee deep through the liquid pool surrounding the manure heap. The quality of the drinking water can be rather imagined than described. The treatment was most rough; the only argument a guard ever used was the butt end of his rifle—if not the bayonet. Not many words were wasted on the "Schweine - Engländer," (Swine - English.)
One day some high officials came to inspect Illmau, and after they had seen the above-ground portion, the Englishmen, who were shut up in their cellar, could hear them asking if no one was shut up in the cellars, as by rights they ought to inspect the cellars, too. But the guard officer assured them on his solemn word of honor that the cellars were empty. And those who were there did not dare to call out—they knew what their punishment would be—"stringing up" at least. This is an old punishment, where the wrists are fettered behind the back, a cord attached and passed through a ring in the wall over the prisoner's head. This cord is then pulled tight, till the man is forced right on to his toes. He is then kept so for about an hour, or till he faints. This was often done at Illmau.
After the Englishmen had been in their wet cellar for a week, and were nearly all ill with the terrible cold, they were told they could go into an upstairs room. These rooms were occupied by Serbs and Poles, nearly all very ill with consumption and very dirty. Each man received a blanket of a kind of checked pattern. When these blankets were hung up in the yard to air it was impossible to recognize their pattern—they were all a crawling mass. The room into which the Englishmen were put was so full that when they lay down at night they were almost one on the top of the other. The consumptives were always expectorating, and "sanitary arrangements" were unknown.
Drosendorf was a camp where, especially during the first months, prisoners endured the greatest hardships. They slept in sheds, in stables, sometimes on wet straw, sometimes without, and were treated as brutally as in other camps. "Here were also some women," says the correspondent, "and a lady I knew personally. When the latter was brought there with other prisoners, male and female, after walking for miles, they were shut into a large room—men and women together. There the 'sanitary arrangements' consisted of a large pail put down in the middle of the room. This lady was kept in this room with the men for some days, and not allowed to leave it. In this camp at present there are principally Russians, and rarely a day passes that a death does not occur from starvation. Here, as also in the large camp of Katzenau, the rations are as follows:
Breakfast.—Tea made of a mixture of dried birch and strawberry leaves, and sixty grams (about two ounces) of bread.
Midday.—Soup made of turnips, or potatoes boiled and served in the water they are boiled in, (no salt or fat,) and another sixty grams of bread.
Evening.—Same as breakfast. At some places the same vessels are used for washing the floors and for boiling the soup.
Estergom in Hungary was at the beginning a much dreaded place. It is surrounded on three sides by the Danube and barbed wire on the fourth. At the beginning there were over 30,000 prisoners—men, women, and children—there, but not sufficient accommodation, so many spent the nights out of doors in the rain and endless mud. Some lived in tents. Of course striking a match in the dark was strictly forbidden, and when once some one did strike one, the guards rushed in, striking about them blindly with their fixed bayonets. Once one unfortunate Scotchman was attacked very badly with dysentery in the middle of the night, and came out to ask the guard to take him to a doctor. The guard simply ordered him to go back to the tent and be quiet. When the sick man begged again, the guard knocked him down with the butt end of his rifle.
One camp, which was even lately mentioned as a disgrace in the Austrian Parliament, is Thalerhof, near Graz, the capital of Styria. Here they kept principally their own refugees from Galicia.
The London Telegraph correspondent writes of Thalerhof:
"One Polish lady who had been there for eight months is now in Raabs. She was taken away from her own house in Galicia in the clothes she stood in, allowed to take nothing with her. Eventually she reached Thalerhof. Through her sufferings there the poor woman is so broken down that it is almost impossible to get her to speak of what she has been through. A little she told me. When they—she and other ladies, priests, peasants, men of all classes—were brought to Thalerhof, the ladies (not the peasant women) were told they must come and bathe. It was many degrees below freezing point, but they were taken to a shed, open all round, down the middle of which a long row of troughs half filled with dirty water was arranged. The water had already been used by soldiers for washing their clothes. Then they were ordered to undress.
"The soldiers with fixed bayonets surrounded these ladies, while they completely undressed in the open, and forced them to bathe in the troughs, threatening them with fixed bayonets all the time and torturing them with coarse jokes. The low-class women were left quiet, not forced to bathe like this. After the bath was over they were shut up in a room crowded with people full of vermin. The ladies were always chosen for the dirty work—never the peasant women, just as the priests were set to clear up the 'sanitary arrangements,' which there consisted of a long open ditch with a board along one side of it.