Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/421

Rh absence of medical care and attention, one is surprised, not that so many die, but that so many get through alive.

The exile parties that leave Tomsk in July and August are overtaken by the frosts and the cold rains of autumn long before they reach Irkútsk. They have not yet been supplied with winter clothing, and most of them have no better protection from rain, sleet, or cold wind than that afforded by a coarse linen shirt, a pair of linen drawers, and a gray frieze overcoat. Imagine such a party marching in a cold, northeast storm along the road over which we passed between Áchinsk and Krasnoyársk. Every individual is wet to the skin by the drenching rain, and the nursing women, the small children, and the sick lie quivering on water-soaked straw in small, rude telégas, without even a pretense of shelter from the storm. The mud, in places, is almost knee-deep, and the wagons wallow through it at the rate of about two miles an horn'. The bodies of the marching convicts, kept warm by the exertion of walking in heavy leg-fetters, steam a little in the raw, chilly air, but a large number of the men have lost or removed their shoes, and are wading through the freezing mud with bare feet. The Government, influenced, I presume, by considerations of economy, furnishes its exiles in summer and fall with low shoes or slippers called katí, instead of with boots. These katí are made by contract and by the thousand, of the cheapest materials, and by the Government itself are expected to last only six weeks. As a matter of fact they frequently do not last one week.

A high officer of the exile administration told me that it was a common thing to see exiles leave Tomsk or Krasnoyársk with new katí and come into the second étape barefooted—their shoes having gone to pieces in less than two days. Even when the katí hold out for their nominal period of service, they are not fitted to the feet of the wearers; they cannot be secured, because they have no