HOW OUR MEN WERE TREATED

From G. Ward Price. Sofia. Oct. 12 (Viâ Salonika, Oct. 16). The first party of ten officers and 190 men out of the forty-eight officers and 1,000 men who were British prisoners of war in Bulgaria passed through Sofia this afternoon on their way towards Salonika. I went to the station to see them, and talked with both officers and men. As to the former, one may say that they have been on the whole well treated. Everything depended on the personal disposition of the commandant of the camp in which they were interned. The civilian population was always kindly disposed. What harshness they endured came from the regular officers of the Bulgarian army. Many of the officers lived practically free on a monthly parole in provincial towns, drawing 70f to 100f a month from the Bulgarian Government, and cashing cheques on Cox’s when they needed money. Twenty-five attempts to escape were made by officers. Not one succeeded, and one officer, a Lieutenant of the R.N.A.S., died last month of a bullet-wound received from a Bulgarian at the time he was recaptured. But though there does not seem to be much to reproach the Bulgarians with in their treatment of our officer prisoners, it is certain that the men have suffered considerably, not through any vindictiveness on the part of the Bulgars, but from the sheer ignorance and callousness of their captors. “For the first six months of our war with them, these people did not understand what an Englishman was,” was the way a sergeant who had been captured from the 10th Irish Division at the end of 1915 summed up the matter. Our people probably got no worse handling than the Bulgarian soldier gets from his superiors, but what is tolerable for a thick-skinned Bulgar peasant was acute hardship for a civilised Britisher. About 200 in all from various causes died. Our rank and file were constantly stinted of food and lived in very great part on their parcels from home. When they went sick, as many did, from malaria, and lately from influenza, they were neglected and half-starved in hospital through lack of food, drugs, and medical staff on the part of the Bulgarian army. The result is sad to see. Some of our men in to-day’s party were pale and thin to a pitiable degree yet. “There’s far worse than us to come,” they said. Both officers and men speak with great gratitude of the work which Mr. D. I. Murphy, the American Consul-general, did in looking after their interests. M. Moncieff, who, before the war, was Bulgarian Minister in Paris and London, never hesitated to defend their interests, and incurred unpopularity with his own countrymen on their behalf. He was at the station to see this party off to-day. Colonel Nicoloff, the supply officer at Philippopolis, the chief prisoners’ camp, has been most generous, too. “The whitest man in the Bulgarian army,” said a British officer. But although the British and French prisoners had not to endure much deliberate ill-treatment from the Bulgars, it was far different with the Serbs. The soldiers of our gallant Balkan Allies who fell into the hands of their relentless enemy, the Bulgar, have been constantly and viciously illused. Out of about 50,000 of them, only 20,000 have survived their brutal handling during these three years. British officers, with their own eyes, have seen Serbs regularly beaten and often shot without excuse. “The poor devils were thrashed, worked to death, or killed out of hand, in a way that no civilised country would allow a dog to be treated,” said one of our released prisoners this afternoon.