Page:Albert Beaumont - Heroic Story of the Czecho-Slovak Legions - 1919.djvu/32

 the town, though we would have liked to do so. But the prisoners’ rules were strictly enforced. Our train finally started on its long weary way to Siberia, and from the start we were unlucky. Many of the men got dysentery. I caught the malady myself. Several of our men died. I asked for a doctor, and was told it was not necessary. Dysentery was nothing very serious. They gave us some opium pills, which helped us a little. For eight days I lay in a state of lethargy, unable to eat, drink, or move. We passed the great bridges over the Volga, and got into the picturesque region of the Ural Mountains. By this time ten of our men had died.

We formed a convoy of thirty officers and about 1,000 soldiers. I recovered slowly, and in another week our train stopped at the first big town in Siberia, Kurgan. We were to stay here for a while, and were glad to get a rest. Kurgan is a typical Siberian town, of about 30,000 inhabitants, with big wide streets and all the houses built of wood or logs. Our soldiers were placed in a camp and separated from us, but we got a house in the town which was very comfortable. Now that we were in Siberia, far away from the actual tumults of the war, we had time to think and reflect. Many of us already talked of a scheme to join the Russian army. We did not anticipate staying very long, our idea still being that the war would be short. But some of us, as we had been in it at the beginning, would have wished to see it to the end. They only way was to join the Russian Army. But did Russia need us? She had so many millions of recruits to draw upon that she hardly knew what to do with them.

A small number of Czecho-Slovaks got permission to fight with the Russian Army. They were mostly men who had remained near Kieff and got into touch with officers from the front. They were organised into scouting and fighting columns of about thirty or fiiftyfifty [sic] men, and were called “Družina“, or “fighters to death“. They were not supposed to surrender on any condition. They were to fight or die. If captured by the Austrians they were, of course, bound to be executed as Austrian subjects. They fought well in numerous places, and later on they were taken as the first elements for our legions. But it was long before the Russians consented to their formation.

At Kurgan the prisoners were under the authority of the local commander, a Polish colonel, a sympathiser with Austria and an admirer of everything German. Kaiser Wilhelm would have found no more obedient servant than this colonel, and Kaiser Francis Joseph might have made him one of his Court chamberlains. When we got into a dispute with the Magyars, Austrians, or Croats, he sided with them, and