Connecticut western news., 1918-10-24
CHAPTER xxx.
kuItur-the Real Stuff.

NeustrelitZ was mainly for Russian prisoners, and there were neither Brit ish nor French soldiers interned there only sailors of the merchant marine such as the men I was with. The Russians were given far worse treat ment than any other prisoners. This was for two reasons, as near as could make out. One was that the Russian would stand most anything, whereas the British and French could only be goaded to a certain point, and beyond that lay trouble. The other reason was that the Russians sent German prisoners to Siberia, or at least, so the Huns thought, and Fritz hates the cold. So, hating the Russians, and realizing that they were used to be- ing under-dogs, Fritz picked on them and bullied them in a way that the rest of us would not have stood. We would have rushed them and gone west with bayonets first.
 The barracks were made of spruce, and were about ninety feet long and twenty-five feet wide, and you can take 1t from me that as carpenters, whoever made them were fine farm CTS. There were cracks in them that you could drive an automobile through. When we were there, each barracks had stove in the center, a good stove and a big one, but at first 1t was of no use to us, because the Germans would not give us coal or wood for 1t. But after shivering for while, we be- gan ripping the boards out of the bar racks, and taking the dividing boards from the benches that we used for beds.
 Later, they gave each of us a mat tress filled. with wood shavings, and a blanket that was about as warm as a pane of glass. The mattresses were placed on the ground in the barracks, which were very damp, and after three or four days, the shavings would be- gin to rot and the mattresses to smell. In order to keep warm we slept as close together as we could, which caused our various diseases to spread rapidly.
 When we were receiving our ratiOnS, the sentries would offer us an extra ration if we would take a lash from their belts. We were so hungry that many and many a man would go up and take a swat in any part of his body from the heavy leather belts with brass tongue and buckle, just to get a little more shadow" soup or barley coffee or mud bread.
 One morning the sentries picked out ten men from our barracks, of which I was one, and drilled us over a field near the kuche. There was a large tank in the field and we had to pump water into 1t. It was very cold, ond we were weak and sick, so we would fall one after another, not caring whether we ever got up or not. Fritz would smash those who fell with his rifle butt. We asked for gloves, be- cause our hands were freezing, but all we got was "Nichts."
 After we had been there for about an hour and half, one of our men became very sick, so that I thought he was going to die, and when he fell over, reported it to a sentry. The OChlLJ SdLhC OfCAB 0o" AJAll6 the snow, yelled, "Schwein, nicht krank p grabbed him by the shoulder, and pulled him all the way across the field to the office of the camp com mander. Then he was placed in the guard house, where he remained for two days. The next thing we knew, the Russians had been ordered to make a box, and were being marched to the guard house to put him in 1t and bury him.
 Another thing at Neustreiitz, that was pretty hard to stand, was the pret- ty habit the Huns had of coming up to the barbed wire and teasing us as , though we were wild animals in a cage. Sometimes there would be crowds of people lined along the wire