LIFE IN MOSCOW

ENEMY PRISONERS

From Our Special Correspondent. Moscow, Feb 5 (Delayed).

The Moscow train was two hours late in starting. Strolling round the station, I came across several groups of prisoners of war, Austrian and German. This was no novel sight, for Petrograd is full of prisoners, who go wandering aimlessly in all directions. What they are doing here and whither they are bound, no one seems quite to know.

My attention was attracted by a short, thickset German soldier, who was excitedly gesticulating and talking loudly in the accent of a Prussian workman. He spoke of the war, of the capitalists who were killing off the masses in their own interests, of revolution in Germany, and of the spread of Russian revolutionary principles to all countries. “Why,” he cried, “they are afraid of us now; they won’t let us prisoners back through the front.” “Yes,” said an Austrian on the edge of the crowd, “they wouldn’t let me through when I tried to go.”

I engaged this Austrian in conversation. He was a fair-bearded sergeant of 40, pale and haggard, as from long privation. He had come from an internment camp in Turkestan to Moscow. From Moscow he had gone to Minsk, and thence to the front, where, with sixty other prisoners, German and Austrian, he had made an attempt to get through the lines.

“Russian soldiers,” he said, “are now very good to us. Russian sentries helped us on. ‘Go, comrades,’ they said, ‘go home and God be with you.’ But when we came to the German lines, sentries stopped us. ‘Who are you?’ they said, and when we told them we were prisoners of war they shouted, ‘Go back, go back, it is strictly forbidden to let you pass.’ I was angry, and said, ‘Until now I have always wanted to defend my country at all costs. I have been wounded seven times and proved my loyalty.’

“The sentry said, ‘No, no, if I let you pass, you will be arrested and it will be the worse for me. Go back and take this money.’ He offered me forty marks, but I said, ‘I will not take your money, I want to go home.’ So we turned back, all very angry, and one German lieutenant, who was lame, we had to carry back through the snow.

“Then I came back to Moscow, where a big party of invalids was formed, and we were told we would be sent home through Finland and Denmark. But now there is fighting in Finland, we cannot get through, and we are stranded in Petrograd. We can find no one to care for us. We have nothing to eat or drink, and nowhere to sleep. Fourteen hundred of us are living in trucks here at this station.”

BOLSHEVIK AGITATORS

The sergeant was a hotel-keeper from Vienna. He did not believe in revolution in Austria. “Why, if there were disorders like those in Russia, they would be suppressed immediately,” he said. “It would be different, of course, if the Emperor were dethroned. In Moscow, the Bolsheviks had meetings of prisoners and talked of world-revolution. They pay agitators 40 roubles a day.”

Here the little German soldier angrily intervened. “What proof have you of that?” he asked. “Why do you slander the Bolsheviks? I am a member of the prisoners’ committee, I speak at all meetings and get only my regular 40 copecks a day.” “Oh, God forbid!” said the sergeant; “I have nothing to do with politics.” “I am a workman and a Social Democrat,” said the little German. “Who are you?”

“I am a hotel-keeper,” said the Austrian sergeant. “Then you’re middle class,” said the German, “and you’ve no right to pass judgment on a proper party,” and he contemptuously turned away.

I went up to a group of Hungarian prisoners and addressed them in their own language, whereupon their faces lightened and they became exceedingly voluble, and discoursed for half an hour on politics and war. Their view was that revolution was possibly a good thing, but only after the war.

“Revolution destroys discipline and makes war impossible,” they said. “After the war, let Czechs and Ruthenians and Roumanians have all the reforms they want; let there be revolution in France, England, and Germany, but the war must be fairly finished first.”