Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/351

Rh following Allied Intervention in Siberia, and shows the atrocities of White Terrorists against Bolsheviks and even innocent people. It is abbreviated from the American Red Cross Magazine of April 1919 which says: "Propriety has demanded the exclusion of much that is unprintable." "It is the eighteenth day of November, 1918. I am at Nikolsk-Ussurisk in Siberia. In the past two days I have seen enough misery to fill a life-time. I will try to set down in my own manner what I have seen.

"I have seen, through the windows of box-cars forty animals who once were human men, women and children; faces glared at me which I could not recognize as human beings. They were like beasts' faces, of a species unknown to man. Stark madness and terror stared from their eyes, and over all the unmistakable signs of death.

"I have seen the dead lying along the roadside, and fifty or sixty men fighting like dogs for pieces of bread thrown to them by the sympathetic poor people of Nikolsk

"This  'train of death,'  for by that name all Eastern Siberia now knows it, left Samara about six weeks ago in charge of Russian officers. It had on board at that time 2,100 prisoners of all sorts.

"Since that day 800 of these wretches have died from starvation, filth, and disease. There were, as near as we could count, 1,325 men, women, and children penned up in these awful cars yesterday.

"It seems a wicked thing to say, but the thought has surely come to me that to kill these people painlessly would require perhaps three dollars' worth of poison or ten dollars' worth of ammunition; and yet for weeks this train of fifty cars has been wandering, driven on from station to station, every day a few more corpses being dragged out. Many of these people have been in box-cars for five weeks in their original clothing. There are from 35 to 40 in a box-car, measuring say 25 by 11 feet, and the doors have seldom been open save to drag out the bodies of