A friend of mine was walking unarmed on a lonely road near the front one day when a Bolshevik soldier came out of the woods and made a friendly approach. He asked my friend if it was safe to go in and give himself up as a prisoner and was assured that it was. They went in together, the guard at the barricade took charge of the prisoner, taking him to headquarters. Ten days later my friend learned that this prisoner had been shot, and the only reason given was that he had refused to give certain desired information as to the enemy. I have heard an officer tell his men repeatedly to take no prisoners, to kill them even if they came in unarmed, and I have been told by the men themselves of many cases when this was done. I saw a disarmed Bolshevik prisoner, who was making no attempt to escape and no trouble of any kind, and who was alone in charge of three armed soldiers, shot down in cold blood. The official whitewash on this case was that he was trying to escape. I have heard of many other cases of the shooting of Bolshevik prisoners. At one time this had become so common that the Officer Commanding troops issued and had posted up an order forbidding it and calling attention to the fact that there were many Bolshevik soldiers who wanted to come over and give themselves up but feared to do so because they had heard about our shooting prisoners, and warning our men that the Bolsheviki might retaliate by shooting our men whom they held as prisoners. I have seen at various times many prisoners brought in, but I have never yet seen one that was not robbed. The plunder belonged to the captor or the robber. We got as high as three thousand roubles off of some of them. Their boots and belt buckles were especially prized trophies. I have known cases where the captor was generous and left the prisoner some small thing, but it was only to have some other soldier take it away from him later. We used gas shells on the Bolsheviki, but that I understand is no longer an atrocity. We fixed all the devil-traps we could think of for them when we evacuated villages. Once we shot more than thirty prisoners in our determination to punish three murderers. And when we caught the Commissar of Borok, a sergeant tells me we left his body in the street, stripped, with sixteen bayonet wounds. We surprised Borok, and the Commissar, a civilian, did not have time to arm himself. The sergeant was quite exultant over it. He killed Bolsheviki because they were barbarians and cruel. This was the only thing his government had ever told him as to why they should be killed. And the only safe way to fight barbarians is with their own methods.