Page:Albert Beaumont - Heroic Story of the Czecho-Slovak Legions - 1919.djvu/12



MILAN, March 26.

Captain “N.“ then told me the incidents and adventures after he and his regiment were taken prisoners. The enthusiasm with which they had surrendered was subjected immediately afterwards to a severe ordeal, when, despite their being Czechs and Slavs who were longing to fight for independence, they were treated as simple prisoners of war. Their fate was the same as that of the others, Germans and Magyars, and they were destined for the distant prisoners’ camps in Eastern Russia or Siberia. It is the story of all the Czechs who were taken prisoners in the early days of the war. They were placed, often despite their indignant protests, in the same cars as the Magyars and Austrians. They were moved for days and weeks in trains that crawled slowly along, and seemed to have no particular destination, first through Kieff, then through Northern Ukraina, to Kursk, Perm, Pensa, and Sysran. Stations that might have been reached in twenty-four hours were reached in twenty four days. Still the lazy prisoner trains crept along, through the Ural regions and into Siberia, where the first great centre was Omsk. Other trains, like that in which Captain “S.“ travelled, deviated after leaving the regions of the Volga, and eventually landed them in Samarkand or elsewhere in Turkestan after three or four months’ journey. From these stations they were sometimes transported still farther into the unknown districts of Siberia, and landed in camps the names of which were never heard in Europe.

Often, before they reached their final destination, the Russians had to wake up to the fact that there was a difference between the Czecho-Slovaks and the others. They had to separate them from the Magyars or Austrians, the Ruthenians or Poles. One of the trains stops at a Siberian station. Two prisoners roll out of a car, fighting, punching,