At last, somewhere early in December, we arrived at our journey’s end--a small Cossack station the other side of Lake Baikal, called Stretensk. Our stay began well. The Commandant asked us if we had any claims to make on account of money or food that had been withheld, and he actually allowed all we put in. Then we were marched across the frozen river to the camp. So far as we could see, this was a collection of low wooden and brick buildings stretching for about a mile on a plateau above the river. We were taken to a big brick barracks, and there left for the night. No preparations had been made to receive us; our new home was thick with dirt; outside, the temperature was many degrees below zero, while inside, the stoves could not be lighted till the next day. We were a collection of scarecrows, so pitifully clad that it would have been a shame to expose us to a German winter, and we were in the wilds of Siberia; we were indescribably filthy; our bodies were a mass of festering sores; and yet the whole night the barracks was jubilant with song, chorus answered to chorus, and company vied with company in seeing who could sing longest and loudest; and our ragged regiment appeared rather to be celebrating carnival than its arrival at a prison. For three months we had not been able to send a letter, and now we had come to a place from which at last we could write home. CHAPTER VII SIBERIA 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 no doubt that the death-rate had been appalling. No one will ever know exactly how many lives were lost, because the Russian organization broke down under the strain of providing for so many prisoners, and we do not even know how many there were to die. From men who had been through such epidemics we heard terrible stories of how the sick were neglected in the hospitals, and of how the illnesses arose and spread. One medical student who was taken ill with typhus was put in a so-called “general hospital.” The building dignified by such a name consisted of a long, low, narrow room, in which were packed men, women, and children suffering from every kind of disease. On one side of my friend was a girl in the last stages of tuberculosis, on the other a woman expecting her first child. They received no medical treatment; no doctor ever visited the patients. My friend set about doing what he could for the people around him. Then delirium seized him, and when he recovered he found that the girl had died, and that the baby had come into the world and died too.