In fairness to the Russians it must be said that as soon as they realized the danger, they did everything in their power to fight the epidemic. They sent a special hospital staff with doctors, nurses, and beds complete. Some of the Russians contracted the disease themselves while nursing the prisoners of war. The Russian doctor was constantly in and out of the hospitals, although he was a married man with a wife and children to whom he might easily have brought the disease. German, Austrian, and Turkish doctors were gathered from various parts of Siberia and sent post haste to Stretensk. In a short time there were twenty doctors and medical students at work. The Swedish Red Cross provided medicines and stores, and gave a large amount of money. Theoretically it was always possible to obtain more by telegraphing to the Central Red Cross Bureau at Petrograd, but I doubt if a telegram would have gone through. A number of buildings were fitted up as hospitals and observation wards, so that it became possible to separate the various infectious diseases from one another. But at the best everything remained primitive and rough. The prisoners used to say that the Russians were doing it on purpose in order to kill them off as soon as possible. They forgot that they were living in the wilds of Siberia, and that the Russian soldiers themselves would have been no better off if an epidemic had broken out amongst them. The sanitary conditions were indescribable. At the height of the plague there were three patients to two beds, and you might wake up one night to find a dead man on either side of you, and so you would lie through the long hours till morning came. The corpses were taken to a little wooden house and there kept for weeks. There was a gruesome story of an Austrian who went to plunder the dead and got shut up for a whole day among the stacks of corpses. The ground was frozen too hard for a spade to turn, so all night we could see the glare of the fires on the hills burning a hole into the frozen ground to make graves for the dead. Only officers were buried with a religious service. We used to see the dead bodies of our comrades fetched out of the morgue and flung like so many sides of bacon on to a sledge and borne off to the graveyard, where they were thrown into the earth without any ceremony. “Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ’em? Mine ache to think on’t.” [SN: JEWS AS ORDERLIES]