“In their leisure moments the German soldiers amused themselves with practical joking at the expense of the prisoners. They announced that an extra portion of food would be given out, and when the Russians hurried to the kitchen, a whole pack of dogs were let loose on them. The animals flew at the prisoners and dispersed them in all directions, while the Germans looked on and roared with laughter. Sometimes the prisoners were offered an extra ladle of soup, or piece of bread if they would expose their backs to a certain number of blows with a whip. Our hungry and tormented soldiers often bought an extra piece of bread at this price, and it was thrown to them as if they had been dogs.”
The Germans appear in the case of the Russian, as in that of the British, Belgian, and French prisoners, to have taken a malignant and bestial delight in outraging their feelings of self-respect, and men were herded together day and night in cattle-trucks deep in manure, and forced to perform their natural functions where they stood, packed together so close that they could not sit and dared not lie down. At each station they were exhibited like a travelling menagerie to the curiosity and insult of the populace. The quality of mercy was not shown even where one might most expect to find it, namely, at the hands of the German surgeons and nurses who wore the Red Cross. Here is the deposition of Vasili Tretiakov:
“Having received no food for two days, the Russian prisoners, who fully expected to get some bread at this station, were gazing with hungry and longing looks into the distance, when they saw women dressed as Sisters of Mercy distributing bread and sausages to the German soldiers. One of these Sisters went up to the truck in which I was standing, and a Russian soldier at the door stretched out his hand for something to eat, but the woman simply struck it and smeared the soldier’s face with a piece of sausage. She then called all the prisoners ‘Russian swine’ and went away from the side of the train.”
Well may the Russian Government say in their covering communication that “the forms of punishment”--if we can speak of punishment when no offence had been committed--“remind one of the tortures of the Middle Ages.” Other documents in my possession recite how the prisoners were harnessed to ploughs and carts, like cattle, and lashed with long leather whips; how a man who fainted from exhaustion was immediately bayoneted, while another who fell out of the ranks to pick up a rotten turnip shared a like fate; how wounded men were forced to stand naked for hours in the frost until gangrene set in, tied up for hours to posts with their toes just touching the ground until, the blood rising to the head, copious hæmorrhage took place from the nose, mouth, and ears; how yet others who, exhausted with hunger and fatigue, could not keep up on the march were bayoneted or clubbed where they lay. As for the conduct of the German populace let the following speak for itself: