one only
survived. Asked whether they had any guards, he said no; each sergeant
(he himself was one) was put in charge of fifty men, and was answerable
with his life in case any should escape." There were, however, some
compensations for the primitive barbarity of these arrangements. The
Serbian people did not attack their prisoners, they fed them. They might
have learned a less human attitude under more civilised conditions. "As
we motored through the town we were amused at the number of greetings
our prisoner received; he was evidently a well known and popular person.
As we passed he pointed out the houses of acquaintances and other
objects of interest. On one side lived a municipal official, who,
finding that he held the same sort of post in Bohemia, greeted him as a
colleague and used to ask him to his house. Further on was the fountain
where he had come to wash his clothes in the bitter winter weather, and
close by the house of the kind but match-making old lady who washed his
clothes for him, and having a daughter's hand to dispose of, wished to
keep him as a son-in-law."

RUSSIA.

Of what happened in Russian prison camps we have only rumours, and the
usual individual statements. The old Russian regime was scarcely likely
to be very efficient or very humane in its treatment of prisoners, but
any one who has examined war stories will be very cautious of believing
all that is told. What the "unofficial information and rumours" were may
be sufficiently gathered by referring to the _Cambridge Magazine_ of
August 26, 1916, Supplement "Prisoners." It may be well to add this: in
November, 1918, Erzberger, interviewed by Dr. Stollberg, of the
_Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_, asserted that out of 250 thousand
prisoners in Russia only 100 thousand remained alive.

AN IMPORTANT COMPARISON.

It will help to clarify our ideas of charges of ill-treatment to remind
ourselves of the following. A British officer, Lieut. Gilliland, was put
in charge of the British prisoners of war captured by the Bulgarians.
Mr. MacVeagh brought forward in the House of Commons various charges
made against this officer by repatriated prisoners. It was said that he
distributed unfairly food and clothing consigned to Irish prisoners,
and that he ordered the flogging of British prisoners by their Bulgarian
captors for the most trivial breaches of discipline. Mr. Macpherson, for
the War Office, said prisoners repatriated from Bulgaria had made
al