TEACHING ENGLISH

A strange turn of Fortune’s wheel delivered me from the worst of the epidemic. There was at Stretensk an officers’ camp, jealously guarded, to which ordinary prisoners were not allowed access. The Hungarian officers, when they heard of me, petitioned the colonel in command that I might be allowed to go and give them lessons in English. The colonel refused even to consider it. Then one day a Hungarian officer came to me with the following proposal: We will transfer you to our camp by putting you down on the list of officers’ servants; once you are with us, however, you will live as an officer and be treated quite as one of ourselves. I lost no time in accepting, was immediately transferred, and became for the Russians an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.

At that time no letters had arrived from home, the Red Cross work was still unorganized, and very few prisoners knew of the existence of Frau von Hanneken’s organization, so that there was a great dearth of amusements, and people were only too eager to learn English. I soon had five classes a day. I had no grammars and no books of any sort to teach from and had to make up every lesson out of my own head. But the hard work was an undisguised blessing, it enabled me to forget where I was, and the days began to pass more quickly.

The cheat we were practising could not long be concealed from our guards. Every officer had to sign his name in a book twice a day. The soldier, whose business it was to bring this book round, was bound to notice that I never signed it. He was easily pacified. The Russian state paid him seventy kopecks (about 1s. 6d.) a month for his services. I bought them for a rouble a month, with occasional tips for odd jobs. He was only dangerous when in his drunken fits, which were not infrequent. Then he would burst suddenly into the class and point at me and say, “You are not an officer, you are a teacher; you are a naughty man, but I will forgive you. Come, let us shake hands.” After we had shaken hands, he would minutely examine his greasy palms to see what might be found there. Once he came in maudlin sorrow and said, “You make me very unhappy, you give my conscience no rest. I want to go to church to-night and cannot. God does not love me, God will be very angry with me—unless you give me twenty-five roubles at once.” “Well,” I said, “how about twenty-five kopecks?” His purple face lighted up with joy and he was again my friend. He was not always to be bought, however. One night he came storming into our rooms, more drunk than usual. He called us to get up (it was about two o’clock) and said he would take us into the town on the spree. Then he caught sight of me, and shouted, “No, I cannot take you, you have that wicked man among you. I must go to the colonel and tell him all about it.” In his drunken frenzy he seemed quite capable of carrying out his threat, and no bribes or cajoleries of ours had any effect. At last we hit upon the expedient of treating him as his own officers did, and bullied him hard. We beat his soft will to pulp, and before long, trembling with fear, he began to fall on his knees and kiss our hands, begging us to overlook his offence.

Such scenes gave me a distaste for the life I was leading. I felt that immunity from typhus could be too dearly bought. Further, while the Hungarian officers treated me with finished courtesy, even with a sort of deference as to their teacher, the Germans took a pleasure in embittering my life in all the ways they could. Proverbially we can find strength to support the afflictions of our friends, it is their good fortune that is so hard to bear. The Germans simply could not forgive me my stroke of luck. When, therefore, the Austrian doctors approached me with an offer that I should live with them, going into the officers’ camp every day to give my lessons, I was very glad. My evenings and Sundays I spent with the doctors. Every morning a doctor went to visit the officers, I, with a Red Cross band round my arm, marching behind, ostentatiously carrying a big bottle of medicine. Every day the sentry challenged me, and every day the doctor answered in the only two words of Russian he knew, “My servant.” Every afternoon he came to fetch me back, every afternoon the sentry challenged us, and every afternoon he answered in the only two words of Russian he knew, “My servant.” The medicine had originally been intended for some officer, but it proved to me such a magic “Open Sesame,” that he had to go without. From time to time the Russians were seized with a suspicion that unauthorized people were on the premises and they would make surprise visits. They would order everybody out of the buildings and call the roll in the courtyard. In the meantime the soldiers would search the empty barracks for people who ought not to be there, see me quietly reading, give me a brotherly grin, and pass on to the next room. Once during these proceedings I was carelessly standing at the window, when a soldier down below recognized me. He made frantic signs to get out of the way, lest his officers should catch sight of me. Wrongheadedness and topsyturvydom could go no further.

Everything comes to an end at last, and so did this double life. Five officers had planned to escape. They had arranged with the sentry that each should pay him twenty kopecks. The first four paid and got through, but the last one, being a Jew, objected to paying and scrambled by for nothing. The sentry promptly rang the alarm-bell. The colonel was the first to arrive and he found the sentry in tears. He demanded to know what was the matter. “Why, just think,” said the sentry, “five Austrian officers promised to give me twenty kopecks if I would let them escape (boo-hoo-hoo), and I did let them escape (boo-hoo-hoo), and then the last one did not pay me anything at all (boo-hoo-hoo).” The colonel, quite properly I think, boxed his ears, and degraded him on the spot. The Russians were very angry with the escaped officers and wished to make an example of them. They could not find out their names because all the books had already been signed up, and they were not equal to the task of going through each room and finding out who belonged there and who was missing. But they set round the officers’ quarters double guards and enjoined on them the necessity of keeping a sharp watch. In spite of the care they took, all the fugitives managed to slip back into the camp that night unperceived. Then the Russians, determined to have no more nonsense from the officers, built all round their camp a wooden enclosure some ten or fifteen feet high, and strengthened it at short intervals with towers from which sentries could overlook the whole section. There was only one entrance, a massive gateway, and this was always watched by four or five men. My career as a teacher of officers was at an end, and from that time till I left Stretensk I lived with the doctors. All the Russians in the camp except the colonel knew that I was there per nefas, but it made no difference. I even gave lessons in the families of Russian officers. At first the attitude of the Russians puzzled me, and I put it down to that peculiar element in the Russian character which, according to the circumstances in which we meet it, we call good nature, or fatalism, or simply laziness. But in the end I found out that nearly all the officers were there for a special reason; they were Poles, or Jews, or Germans, or political suspects, and had been sent to Siberia partly as a punishment, partly to get them out of harm’s way. A few of them favoured the German cause, some came from districts occupied by the Germans, and would naturally not be inclined to do anything to prejudice their position with their German rulers. There was a Polish officer who rejoiced at every German victory, and wished disaster to the Russians more heartily than the prisoners themselves.

The Russians were subtler than we gave them credit for. They ringed in the officers with a high fence in order to prevent escape, but they also used finer means. They told us fearful and wonderful tales of the Buriat tribes swarming between us and the Chinese frontier. These men were so fierce, they said, that they would murder you for the sake of a button, and then they would bury you somewhere in the vast desert, and no one would ever know your fate. The Chinese smugglers and bandits were still worse, for, with a refinement of cruelty denied to the less developed Buriats, they would put you to exquisite torture before killing you. These stories the Russians would pour in upon us with such a ready, unpremeditated air, such wealth of gesture, with so much humour and goodfellowship, that they inevitably carried conviction. Chinese tobacco-smugglers used to come to us and offer to convey us across the frontier for three hundred roubles; but we never dreamt of listening to them. People who know the country intimately have since told me that these stories were pure inventions, that the Buriats are a comparatively harmless race, on whose honesty one could rely, and that the smugglers would probably have kept their part of the bargain if we had kept ours. A spice of danger there would naturally have been in adventuring with them, but not more than was pleasant. The officers were eager to escape, because those who succeeded got a step in rank. It was perfectly easy to buy from a Russian soldier his uniform and equipment, but not his mastery of the Russian language. Most of the enterprises failed because the prisoners were forced sooner or later to buy food, and the moment they began to speak with the natives, their accent betrayed them.

The climax of these attempts to escape was such a story as has never been heard of outside “Alice in Wonderland,” or the “Arabian Nights.” After several other enterprises had been frustrated by difficulties about food, some officers conceived the idea of carrying with them on their own persons enough to last them into China. We used to compute the distance at nearly two hundred miles. Our maps were very primitive, and our only idea of the route was to strike south. The officers began to collect tinned meats gradually, so as not to excite suspicion. They also managed to get hold of several pounds of a hard sort of sausage, called in German, “Dauerwurst.” Besides, they reasoned out that, as they were not to go near any building all the way, they would be obliged to wear enough clothes to keep them warm while sleeping in the open. So they started off, bulging mountainous with the extra clothes they wore, swathed round with sausage, packed tight with tins of corned beef and Bismarck herring, till they looked more like knights in a pantomime than anything else. The Russians soon discovered that some prisoners had escaped, and ordered the officers out in order to count how many they were. Arithmetic is a thing the Russian does not shine at; the officers did their best to create confusion by continually moving about and making a noise, and in the end the Russians, instead of counting seven too few, made it twenty-five too many. They did not know what to do, so they sent in a report that they had counted twenty-five too many, which they explained by supposing that twenty-five officers were away ill in hospital. This calculation was beyond me, but as I also am weak at mathematics, I leave it where it is. Meanwhile the Cossacks had been alarmed, and they started off in pursuit, plunging through the camp on their hardy Siberian ponies, and we soon saw their scattered parties scouring the hills. Even a fox-hunt will seem tame to me now, after I have smelt the excitement of a man-hunt. The fugitives had bribed a soldier into letting them have a sledge and horses, but that only took them a day’s journey. Then they proceeded on foot, sleeping by day and marching by night. In that glittering, smooth expanse of snow their tracks were easily picked up, and, burdened as they were, they could not hope to shake off their pursuers. The Cossacks surrounded them, but dared not attack them, and so the two parties lay for some time intently watching one another. Finally the fugitives stood up and showed that they were unarmed, and the Cossacks were emboldened to approach them. Then began a characteristic scene. They began trying to bribe the Cossacks into letting them go. But the Cossacks were coy, and made a great show of offended honour, and by artful bargaining put the price up until they had wrung the last kopeck out of the fugitives. Then, penniless, but still rich in clothes and sausages, the prisoners were ordered to march back to camp.

So far as I remember, only one attempt at escape on a large scale was really successful. That was when some officers hired a motor-boat to take them down the Amur till they reached Chinese territory. At the same time two other officers were to put the Russians on a false scent by starting off by train and getting captured some way down the line. The trick succeeded to perfection; the Russians continued to search for the other fugitives on the railroad, and the men in the motor-boat got clear away to Manchuria, and eventually to Tientsin. In the spring of 1917, after the first Revolution, an order from the Austrian and German Governments was circulated through the Siberian camps that no more prisoners were to escape to China, as they would only be interned, and the camps there were much worse than in Russia. Whether there was any political motive behind this order I do not know, but in the summer of 1917 those prisoners who wanted to escape went westwards through Russia. There was a brisk trade in forged passports, Russian or English by preference, and it was easy to get to Petrograd. I do not think it would have been so easy if there had been more English consuls in Siberia to look after matters of this sort. How the prisoners managed to cross the frontier from Petrograd I do not understand. It was quite impossible on an Allied passport. But the letters we received from Germany proved that somehow or other they did get home at last.

The frequent attempts at escape, like my surreptitious life, can only be understood by those who know the venality with which the Russian state was honey-combed. Chehof has a sparklingly malicious story of a Russian gentleman who goes to a Government office to make some inquiries. He is shown into a room where several officials are busy writing. He wanders about for a long time, ignored by every one. Finally he receives a hint from the porter that a gratification is expected. He lays a banknote on the desk of one of the officials, who adroitly slips a book over it and goes on writing. At first he does not understand this manoeuvre, but light breaks in upon his mind, and he lays a banknote for a much larger sum on the desk. The official wakes up as from a trance, recognizes his visitor, does the necessary little piece of business, and escorts him to the corridor. The gentleman is so overwhelmed by his politeness and condescension that he feels obliged, on leaving, to convey to him still another gratification.... Such, or something like this, is Chehof’s story.

Our colonel was a nobleman who had seen much service, and when he was in full dress, his uniform was decked out with a fine array of orders and medals. In person he was diminutive and bandy-legged, but he had the aristocrat’s clear-cut, energetic features, flashing eyes, and delicate, well-kept hands. But he was chiefly distinguished by his long, white, exquisitely silken whiskers. Diminutiveness, whiskers, energy, bandy-legs combined to make him irresistibly comic to our men, who used to call him the “Hampelmann” (monkey on a stick). In drunkenness he yielded nothing to his soldiers, and I have seen him reeling through the camp, after a night spent over the bottle, denouncing punishments on everybody who crossed his path. When he was angry he used to draw his sword and strike with a scythe-like sweep at our legs. We easily ran away from him, and, once we were at a safe distance, there was not a soldier would have lifted a finger to bring us back to him again. For an officer and a nobleman his career had been peculiar. He had been commandant of the camp at Dauria, where suspicion had fallen upon him of embezzling state funds. His accomplice, a Greek civilian, was sentenced to a long term of penal servitude, while he himself had been punished by being removed to Stretensk. Here he transferred his attentions to the money of the prisoners. All the sums sent to us were kept in the bank a certain period, until he had received his percentage on them. He was always issuing regulations cutting down the amount of money we might receive a month. At one time it was no more than five roubles. His accomplice at Stretensk was a banker from China, who, I regret to say, belonged to the Church of England. He was probably what the Jews call an Old-Protestant, i.e. one who has been baptized comparatively late in life. This amiable pair used to buy sugar for the camp at low rates long before it was needed, and then sell on a rising market, and the prisoners would have to go without. Once, however, the general on his tour of inspection discovered that the prisoners had no sugar, and the colonel had to buy it all back again on a market that had meanwhile risen considerably. The meat rations of the prisoners were regularly cut down far below what the Government allowed, and the difference went to fill the pockets of the colonel and his friends. They also kept pigs in the camp, and it was believed that the bread supplied to us was so bad in order that we might the more readily be induced to feed the colonel’s pigs with it. As a rule, we found that the officers who were hard with us were worse to their own men, and it is certain that the Russians hated the colonel far more than we. They used to tell us that he was afraid of going out at night because he was sure to be killed if he did. This seems fantastic; but the fact remains that he never came to us after dark.

The colonel did not stand alone, there was corruption in every branch of the administration. The hospital kitchen was in the hands of a Polish Jew and his wife. They had begun the war with almost nothing, and they were now said to be worth thousands of pounds. No money was paid by the kitchen but some stuck to their palms. His staff collected money for a water carrier, and gave it to him to disburse. He put it in his own pocket, and used to pay the man out of Government funds. His soldiers were so angry with him that at the outbreak of the Revolution he was one of the first they impeached. He was sent to Irkutsk to await his trial, but the case dragged on interminably. After the Bolsheviks came in he was released, and when I last heard of him he was occupying some position under their Government.

Like master, like man. The minor officials squeezed all the money out of us they could. If a window was broken in a barracks, they fined every prisoner who lived there, and reaped a sum sufficient to glaze all the windows in the camp. The Russian clerks in the colonel’s office treated us just as if we had been Russians ourselves. Every petition had to be accompanied by a tip adapted to the importance of what you wanted, otherwise it simply found its way to the waste-paper basket. The prisoners took advantage of these customs to spin intrigues against one another with the Russians. A German medical student made application to be considered as such, i.e. that he should be removed from the stuffy barracks to the doctors’ quarters, receive a salary, and enjoy considerable privileges. He accompanied this application with ten roubles for the clerk. Heinze, the medical student I have already mentioned, was jealous of his colleague, so he overtipped him, and gave the clerk twenty roubles to keep the application back. The clerk, of course, pockets the twenty roubles, and then after some time informs the first man how the matter stands. So by whetting the one against the other he reaped a golden profit. All our letters and parcels had to be paid for by tips. If we stopped tipping, we received nothing. The prisoners were, of course, forbidden to send letters except through the prisoners’ censorship, but all the while I was at Stretensk I conducted with friends in England an extensive correspondence that never went through our censor’s hands. To put the Russians off the scent I used to describe myself as a fur-merchant. In one letter I pretended to be a lady, wrote in a very round hand, underlined every other word, and described how good Russian eau-de-cologne was for my headaches. My correspondents were mystified; I had offers of capital for my fur business, and a letter of very tender sympathy about my headaches.

In fact, everything had its tariff. The Regulations existed only on paper. Those who wanted to, and had enough money to pay for it, could go into the town every day. It was simply a question of establishing a connection with the soldiers, and making your custom so valuable that they would not like to lose it. The clerks in the colonel’s office often came to me and threatened to denounce me, if I did not pay them a certain sum down. I pointed out that, if they did denounce me, they would lose a profitable source of income, because, once I had returned to the barracks, they would make nothing out of me. After that they left me alone. We were supposed, like everybody else in Russia, to have two meatless days a week. A certain amount of meat was weighed out and handed over to us, and officially we were not allowed to have any more. As a matter of fact, we never confined ourselves to our rations, we had meat every day and as much as we wanted. Russian soldiers would come and sell us a whole pig or a sheep at prices far below those ruling in the market. We had great fun getting these animals into our house without our guards noticing it. It had to be done at night, windows had to be wrenched from their frames, and sentries posted all around to give warning of the approach of obnoxious persons. Or if we wanted boots, soldiers would supply us with the leather and get them made for us at half what it would have cost an ordinary Russian. We had our own ideas as to how it was possible to supply us so cheaply, and we never asked where the goods came from. The peasant women kept us supplied with butter at a time when the housewives in Stretensk could get none. It was not done out of love for us, but because we were ready to pay any price they asked. The sale of alcohol was forbidden throughout Russia, but whenever we wanted wine we got it. The common prisoners were often cheated. One of the guards would come up in the twilight and offer a pound of sugar; you would buy it, and when you got in you would find that they had passed off on you a pound of salt or of sand. An enormous trade was done in smuggling beer and confectionery into the camp from the town, but it was nearly always ruined by tale-bearers. Sooner or later there would be a quarrel about the division of profits; or even the mere sight of a comrade getting rich would be enough to send some Austrian Jew sneaking off to the Russians.

The prevailing dishonesty had its bitter consequences for us. Our parcels from home scarcely ever arrived intact. They were regularly plundered, and the contents sold in the town. Once a Chinese coolie appeared in the barracks in order to sell us cigars from a box which still bore the address to one of our number. My wife in despair used to put a picture of St. Antony of Padua in her parcels. She had heard that the Russians were superstitious, and would respect parcels protected by the saint. But their sense of humour was still greater than their superstition, and I used to receive parcels out of which everything had been stolen but the picture of St. Antony.

We got strange and terrible glimpses of what all this corruption meant for private Russians. Our dentist was in need of instruments, and wished to ask a lady dentist living in Stretensk to lend him some. He could not approach her directly, and was obliged to ask the Russians to act for him. To his surprise they all refused point blank. He could not understand why it was, and after much pressure they told him the lady’s history. Some years before she had been denounced to the Secret Police, and they had made a raid on her lodgings. They discovered nothing to justify their suspicions, but they told her that if she did not pay them blackmail they would report that they had found certain incriminating documents in her house. She indignantly refused, and, relying on the justice of her cause, wrote an account of the whole matter to the Governor-General at Irkutsk. She so far succeeded in clearing herself as to escape punishment in a court of law. But from that time onwards she was a suspect, a marked person, and no one in the Government service durst have anything to do with her. Few of the officers had much affection for the old rÉgime, some were even Bolsheviks, and yet so great was the terror exercised by the Secret Police, that not one of them would speak to the lady.

The whole administration of the camp was corrupt. Of all the officers I know only two that were honest. One of these was a Bolshevik—the regimental doctor. He was a poor man, and might have acquired a fortune by declaring rich recruits unfit for service, and yet he remained resolutely and unchangeably loyal. Some men were ready to pay £500 for such services. Everything was forbidden and everything was allowed. We were prisoners, and lived like lords. Whatever of luxury or pleasure there was in Stretensk we could enjoy, only we had to pay a little more for it than ordinary mortals. Unlike ordinary mortals we knew nothing of rent, taxes, or insurance, we had neither wife nor child to clothe and feed, and so it generally happened that what we wanted we could pay for.

What a world! you say. A nobleman and officer cheating prisoners of their food; the common soldier falling in abject humiliation and kissing the hands of the enemy he was set to guard. Yes, that was Russia before the Revolution.

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