Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/428

406 Many times on the great Siberian road, when I had been jolted until my pulse had become imperceptible at the wrist from weakness, sleeplessness, and incessant shocks to the spinal cord and the brain, and when it seemed to me that I could endure no more, I maintained my grip by thinking of the hundreds of exiled men and women who, sick unto death, had been carried over this same road in open telégas; who had endured this same jolting while their heads ached and throbbed with the quick pulses of fever; who had lain for many hours at a time on water-soaked straw in a pitiless storm while suffering from pneumonia, and who had nothing to sustain them except the faint hope of reaching at last some fever-infected lazaret. If men can bear all this, I thought, we ought not to complain of our trivial hardships, nor break down under a little unusual fatigue.

The sick who live to reach an étape lazaret may hope to die under shelter and in peace; but, if the reports of the exile administration are to be trusted, they can hardly expect to be restored to health. Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy, the chief of the prison administration, in an official report to the Minister of the Interior, describes the condition of the lazarets between Áchinsk and Irkútsk as follows:

 Up to the year 1885 the lazarets necessary for the accommodation of exiles taken sick on the great exile road had not been built, nor had any provision been made for regular surgeons, or even for feldshers. According to paragraph 5 of section 363 of the "Laws relating to Exiles," it is the duty of civil and military surgeons, in places where étape officers are quartered, to examine the sick and give them necessary aid. Civil surgeons, however, do not live in étape villages, and army surgeons are found only at the étapes of Sheragúlskaya, Birusínskaya, and Tirétskaya. In these places there are army lazarets with six beds each, for the accommodation of sick soldiers belonging to the convoy commands. All prisoners taken sick on the road between Áchinsk and Irkútsk, up to the