Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/353

Rh "Lying right across the threshold was the body of a boy. No coat, merely a thin shirt, in such tatters that his whole chest and arms were exposed; for trousers a piece of jute bag pinned around him, and no shoes or stockings. What agony that boy must have suffered in the Siberian cold before he died of filth, starvation, and exposure!

"And yet 'diplomacy' prevents us from taking charge and giving aid. But we are holding the train!

"We climbed into the car and found two other dead lying on the second tier of bunks amongst the living. Nearly every man was sunken-eyed, gaunt, and half clad. They were racked by terrible coughing. They had the stamp of death on them. If aid does not come quickly they will die. We looked into a few cars only, but at one window we saw a little girl perhaps eleven years old. Her father, she said, had been mobilized into the Red Guard. So now father, mother, and child are on that train and will die there. Dr. Rosett is one of the most beautiful characters that I have ever known. When I saw him in the car talking to these poor wretches and trying to comfort them, I could not help thinking of the Good Physician and how He, too, labored among the maimed, the halt and the blind.

" It is a strange thing that they all look at you with an expression sorrowful in the extreme, but never with a trace of bitterness. Suffering seems to have destroyed in them the power to express anger. I have visited the train at least ten times and I have never as yet seen any expression of any kind pass over the faces of these poor, tortured, dumb creatures.

"I went into the hospital last night. Fourteen were lying on the filthiest straw imaginable. Three of them turned their dull eyes on me, recognized the Red Cross uniform and got upon their poor worn knees. One of them, an old man of sixty, had a silver crucifix hanging around his neck. They sobbed soundless, body-racking sobs, and said in Russian, 'May God and Jesus Christ bless you and keep you for what you have done for us.' We felt absolutely repaid for all our work of these days, during which time I have not bathed or shaved, nor had my clothes off,