Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/427

Rh ten or fifteen cents a pair. Colonel Zagárin was protesting against the acceptance of such shoes, and was asking for an investigation. The fraud was so manifest and so glaring, and the results of it would be so calamitous to thousands of poor wretches who would wear these katí for a day or two and then be forced to walk barefooted over icy ground or through freezing mud, that I thought something would certainly be done about it. Upon my return from the mines of the Trans-Baikál five months later, I asked Colonel Zagárin what had been the result of the protest that he had made to the governor in my presence. He replied, "It had no result."

"And were those shoes issued to marching exile parties?"

"They were."

I asked no more questions.

I could furnish innumerable illustrations of the way in which the life of convicts on the road is made almost intolerable by official indifference or fraud; but it is perhaps unnecessary to do so. The results of that life are shown by the records of the hospitals and lazarets, and by the extraordinarily high rate of mortality in exile parties. Hundreds of prisoners, of both sexes and all ages, fall sick on the road, and after being carried for a week, or perhaps two weeks, in jolting telégas, are finally left to recover or to die in one of the étape lazarets between Áchinsk and Irkútsk. It seems barbarous, and of course it is barbarous, to carry forward in a springless teléga, regardless of weather, an unfortunate man or woman who has been taken sick with pneumonia or typhus fever on the road; but, under existing circumstances, there is nothing else for a convoy officer to do. He and his soldiers must go on with the exile party, and he cannot leave the sick for five days in a deserted étape wholly without attendance. He is forced, therefore, to carry them along until they either die or reach one of the widely separated lazarets, where they can be left and cared for.