The Better Germany in War Time: Being Some Facts Towards FellowshipPicton, Harold W. (Harold Williams)
History
The Better Germany in War Time: Being Some Facts Towards Fellowship
Picton, Harold W. (Harold Williams)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals, charities, etc.; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
The condition of Austrian and German prisoners in Serbia has been
touched upon by Dr. F. M. Dickinson Berry, Physician to the
Anglo-Serbian Hospital Unit. I give the following quotations from an
article by Dr. Berry in the _Nation_ of August 21, 1915.
“There is no doubt that the prisoners suffered badly during the
winter.... Typhus decimated them earlier and more universally, probably
owing to the way in which they were crowded together. Outside the town
our prisoner pointed out a cottage adjacent to a brick-kiln, where he,
with 250 men, had stayed some months without beds, blankets, or even
straw to sleep on, and with the scantiest of food.” But the villagers
showed kindness, said the prisoner, and bestowed on them the food placed
by Serbian custom on the graves of the dead. “Many of the prisoners fell
sick and were taken off to the hospital. Here, too, they lay on the
floor with nothing to cover them but a great-coat, if the fortunate
possessors of such. Few who entered the hospital ever came back; if not
ill with typhus when they came in, they were pretty safe to get it
there, and they passed on to the cemetery beyond the town, where, as in
so many Serbian cemeteries, however remotely situated, there is a
portion covered thickly with plain wooden crosses, marking the graves of
Austrian prisoners. Our informant told us that of those with him 50 per
cent. had died; of eleven Italians whom he had under his charge one only
survived. Asked whether they had any guards, he said no; each sergeant
(he himself was one) was put in charge of fifty men, and was answerable
with his life in case any should escape.” There were, however, some
compensations for the primitive barbarity of these arrangements. The
Serbian people did not attack their prisoners, they fed them. They might
have learned a less human attitude under more civilised conditions. “As
we motored through the town we were amused at the number of greetings
our prisoner received; he was evidently a well known and popular person.
As we passed he pointed out the houses of acquaintances and other
objects of interest. On one side lived a municipal official, who,
finding that he held the same sort of post in Bohemia, greeted him as a
colleague and used to ask him to his house. Further on was the fountain
where he had come to wash his clothes in the bitter winter weather, and
close by the house of the kind but match-making old lady who washed his
clothes for him, and having a daughter’s hand to dispose of, wished to
keep him as a son-in-law.”
RUSSIA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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