e dry; Hegedues may have thought it was
most sanitary to have dogs to eat the corpses' entrails and sometimes
the whole corpse. Dr. Stephen Pop, a Roumanian lawyer in Arad
(afterwards a Minister at Bucharest), displayed his humanity by
drawing up a terrible indictment of the conditions. "You should be
glad," said Tisza, the reactionary Premier, to him, "very glad that
you can breathe the free air of Hungary." The casemates were provided
with less than three centimetres of straw, which was not removed for
months. Spotted fever, pneumonia and enteritis were the chief
epidemics: those who were guilty of some offence, such as receiving a
newspaper, would be put among the spotted fever cases. Sometimes the
dead were left for two or three days with the living. Such was the
state of the bastions and their underground passages that the Magyar
soldiers came as rarely as they could manage. It was, said Hegedues, a
provisional arrangement to have about a thousand people in one of
these passages or lunettes, with no lavatory. But it was not only the
nonagenarians--several of whom were at Arad--that found their life was
a very provisional affair. You could be killed in different ways: the
dying were occasionally wrapped in a sheet and rocked against a wall.
When they groaned the soldiers laughed, and said that this was
"Cheering King Peter." In fact the Magyars behaved with rare
generosity to their prisoners, we are told in the _Oxford Hungarian
Review_ (June 1922), by Mr. Aubrey Herbert, M.P., a gentleman who
persists in writing of that which he does not know. A woman called
Lenka (or Helen) Mihailovi['c], who had kept the canteen in the
fortress during fifteen years, was expelled in January 1916 for having
helped to clothe some naked children. People used to give Rosner, the
sergeant, a tip in order to be allowed to visit the canteen. Their
ordinary food was the reverse of appetizing. Constantine, the son of
Ilja Jovanovi['c], a boy who used to be employed at the fortress (and
who had not been permitted by the Magyars to learn his own language),
saw the children being fed, very often, on salt fish--no matter
whether they were ill or not--and sometimes on the intestines of
horses. The Serbian grave-diggers used to cook themselves a dish of
grass, salt and water. They were too weak to work, and they had work
enough: on February 1, 1915, for instance, twenty-nine people were
buried. A certain captain (afterwards Major) Lachmann, an Au