EXPERIENCES OF AN ENGLISHMAN IN THE GERMAN ARMY AND IN RUSSIAN PRISONS By HEREWARD T. PRICE M.A. (Oxon.), Ph.D. (Bonn) LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1919 [ All rights reserved ] ERRATA. Page 2, line 19 , delete “of” at end of line. Page 54, line 1 , read “insolent expression of mocking pity,” not “piety.” Page 91, line 6 , read “oases,” not “cases.” Page 134, line 6 , insert “but” before “was.” Page 145, line 16 , read “justified,” not “satisfied.” Page 145, line 26 , read “Herrman,”

The present book reprints a series of articles which appeared in the China Illustrated Weekly from November, 1918, to February, 1919. This accounts for certain allusions, which I have not altered, as they are unimportant and fill no large space in the narrative. My thanks are due to H. G. Woodhead, Esq., the Editor of the China Illustrated Weekly , for the help he has given me in publishing these articles. H. T. PRICE. Tientsin. BOCHE AND BOLSHEVIK...

When war broke out I was picking late cherries in our garden near the Rhine. A boy came by with the news on a flysheet. I ran and bought a paper and then told our gardener’s wife. Her face went pinched and white, for she was the mother of many sons; but she only pulled her shawl a little tighter round her shoulders, and then, with the immemorial stoicism of the peasant, turned to her work again. She remembered the days of “seventy,” when, as she often used to tell us, the regimental bands had to

War having finally broken out, the Government, of course, did not relax its hold on the Press. The early days brought a fine crop of fantastic inventions. The utmost was done to heighten the people’s illusions. The semi-official telegrams declared that England would remain true to its time-honoured principle of making money out of other people’s difficulties and abstain from taking part. This was at a time when Germany had already sown mines in English waters, arrested every English sailor in Ge

It is curious how much sympathy there was for England even months after the beginning of the war. Ladies whom we knew had always had their dresses made in London, and asserted their intention of doing so again as soon as the war was over. Others, who were strongly attracted by the freedom of English life, still felt the charm in spite of all that had happened. And when they were in the company of people they could trust, they used to say how much they were longing for the war to end in order tha

Before I became naturalized I went into the question of military service with especial care. An old friend of mine had for many years been at the head of a Recruiting Department. I went to him and laid the case before him, and he assured me categorically that in no event should I ever be called upon to serve in a war against England. Other people I consulted confirmed what he had said, and their testimonies removed the chief obstacle in my mind to naturalization. When the war broke out, no one e

Well, then, in the middle of August, 1915, we started for the Russian front. Our equipment even at that time was so bad that I am surprised Germany has held out so long. My tunic was made of shoddy; it tore easily and cockled up most pitifully in the rain. Leather was scarce in Germany and had to be quickly tanned, so what we received was inferior in quality and soon perished. Our helmets were of a variety of materials, some of aluminium, some of cardboard, but none of the good stout leather tha

I think it of the greatest importance to set down exactly how the Russians treated their prisoners, because the German reports tell of abominable cruelties, and the Russian denials are often taken as a matter of course and are not believed. It is useless to ignore the fact that the prisoners of war suffered much, and indeed we had to undergo horrors which even now it appals me to remember. But of deliberate or methodical cruelty we encountered little, and when we did come across it, we usually p

The exalted mood did not last long, and by next morning we had sobered down. Few of us, I believe, expected to come out of that barracks alive. Already, in little more than a year, seventy thousand prisoners of war were said to have died of disease in Russia. Comrades of ours, who came from Novonikolaievsk, told us that in this camp forty-five per cent. of their numbers, or more than twelve thousand men, had died of typhus within a few months. The figures are probably exaggerated, but there is n

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

I have often been asked how I managed to endure the boredom of captivity, and few people believe me when I answer that, far from being dull, it was a period full of fascination. The camp in time became like a great university, there was scarcely a subject that was not studied, and on which you could not inform yourself, through the books the Red Cross sent us. And then there was the spectacle of the Siberian seasons. We were said to be living three or four thousand feet up, and rain only fell on

In dealing with the Russian Revolution I shall leave on one side those aspects that have already been treated by other writers. Not much has been written on Siberia yet, and what has been given to us is mostly the product of scared journalists, flying for their lives, and generally in far too much of a hurry to verify their facts. I shall always count myself fortunate that I was let out of my cage in time to see the Revolution before it had grown old. To experience that wonderful burst of joy, w

Such a fiasco would have been enough to discredit the movement in any other country. But the Bolsheviks die hard, and they are quick to profit, not only by other people’s mistakes, but by their own. They saw that it was useless to attempt anything in Irkutsk without getting the artillery over to their side. So they set to work systematically to detach each battery from its allegiance to the Provisional Government. I used to hear through the German agent how they were getting on, how first one ba