Page:Albert Beaumont - Heroic Story of the Czecho-Slovak Legions - 1919.djvu/36

 did not know, but it was not so distant. It is about 120 kilometres north west of Omsk. To our great delight, the order included further instructions that all officers of the 28th Regiment of Prague were to get their liberty. We left for Ishim with about 2.000 soldiers. But our company of officers was reduced to eight; the rest were sent to other camps.

We hoped to find a different type of commander from the one we had known. But we were disappointed. The colonel at Ishim was worse than the one at Kurgan. The latter was mostly only tolerant and conniving to the Germans. The new colonel was openly their partisan. He had a German wife, and it was his wife who ruled supreme. We soon got to speak of her as “Frau Colonel“. And “Frau Colonel“ was a great busybody. She stuck her nose into everything. She really did command, as we later on learned, and her will was always appealed to by the German prisoners in the last resort. What “Frau Colonel“ wanted had to be done. She always spoke German to her husband in public, and he spoke to her in the same language. They made of Ishim a prisoners’ camp that would have been more at home in Mecklenburg than in Russia.

It seemed to rankle in the heart of Frau Colonel that we had our liberty by order of Petrograd. She could do nothing to us, nor could her husband, but they took revenge on our men. The Czech soldiers were kept as prisoners in barracks. They were badly fed and badly treated. They never got their pay, which went into the colonel’s pocket. The men felt most wretched. Disease broke out among them, and the colonel refused to do anything to improve their conditions. On the contrary he enforced iron rule and discipline.

A deputation of the Swedish Red Gross came, authorised by the Petrograd Government, with large supplies for the war prisoners generously offered by private donors to the Swedish Government. The colonel did not allow them to visit the camp, and told them that the men were very well off and needed nothing. The Red Cross delegates went away, and, in fact, distributed nothing at Ishim. “The Czechs.“ said the colonel, “are traitors,“ and he would not allow them to get anything. We were not allowed to keep the records of the barracks. This was “Frau Colonel’s“ business, and Petrograd knew nothing. The soldiers told us they were left without anything to eat, for complaining about the little bread, which was very hard, and got severe punishment for the most triflings things. They were often put under arrest and shut up for two days without anything to eat for complaining about the food. They were given no soap for washing. They were huddled together in wooden