THE PRISONER'S JOURNEY TO SIBERIA.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2522, 8 September 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE PRISONER'S JOURNEY TO SIBERIA.

A Dreary March. You sea u marshy plain, where the icy winds blow freely, driving before it the snow that begin* to cover tho frozen soil. Morasses, with small shrubs or crumpled trees, bent down by wind and Know, as far as the eye can reach. The next village is 20 miles distant. Low mountains, covered with thick pino fores.s, mingling with the grey snowcloud*, rise in tho dust on the horizon. A track, marked all along by poles to distinguish it from the surrounding plain. The party slowly moved along this road. In front, a row of soldiers opens the march. Behind them heavily advance tho hard-labor convicts, with half-shaved heads, wearing grey clothes, with a yellow diamond oil the back, and open shoes worn out by the long journey, and exhibiting the tatters in which the wounded feet aro wrapped. Each convict wears a chain, rivetted to his ankles, its rings being twisted into rags-if the convict has collected enough of alms during his journey to pay the blacksmith for rivitting it looser on his feet. The chain goes up each leg and i 8 suspended to a girdle. Another chain closely ties both hands, and a third chain binds together six or eight convicts. Evory false movement of any of the pack is felt by all his chain companions; the feebler is dragged forward by the stronger, and he must not stop; the way—the ctapc—is long, and the autumn day is short. Behind the hard-labour convicts march the poselcntsy (condemned to settle in Siberia), wearing' the same grey cloth and the same kind of shoes. Soldiers accompany the party on both sides, meditating perhaps tho order given at the departure: "If one of them runs away, shoot them down. If ho is killed, five roubles reward for you, and a dog's death to the dog !" In the rear you discover a few oars that are drawn by the small, attenuated, oat-like, peasants' horses. Teey are loaded with the bags of food for sick convicts, with the sick or dying who are fastened by ropes on tho top of the load. Behind the cars hasten the wives of the convicts; a few have found a free corner on a loaded car, and crouch there when unable to move further ; whilst the greater number march behind the cars, loading their children by the hands, or bearing them on their arms. Dressed in rags, freezing under the gusts of the oold wind, cutting their almost naked feet on the frozen ru's, how many of them repeat the words of Ayvakutn's wife : " These tortures, how long will they last ?" In the rear comes a second detachment of soldiers, who drive with the butt-ends of thoir rifles those women who stop exhausted in the freezing mud of the road. The procession is closed by the car of the commauder of the party. As the party enters some great village it begins to sing the" Miloserdynaya " —the "charity song." They call it a song, but it is hardly that. It is a succession of woes escaping from hundrods of beasts at once, a recital in very plain words expressing with a childish simplicity the sad fate of the convict—a horrible lamentation by which the Russian exile appeals to the mercy of other rniserables like himself. Centuries of suffering, of pains and misery, of prosecutions which crush down the most vital forces of the nation, are beards in these recitals and shrieks. These tones of deep sorrow recalls the torture and whips of our own time, the darkness of the cellars, the wilderness of the woods, the terrors of the starving wife. The peasants of the villages on the Siberian highway understand these tones ; they know their true meaning from their own experience, and the appeal of the Neschastnyie of the " sufferers," as our people call prisoners —is answered by the poor. The most destitute widow, signing herself with the cross, bring her coppers, or her piece of bread, and deeply bows before the " chained " sufferer, grateful to him for not disdaining her small offering.