THE TYPHUS INFERNO AT WITTENBERG
Reading edition
They were received in apathetic silence (Dec., 1914). The rooms were unlighted, the men were aimlessly marching up and down, some were lying on the floor, probably sickening for typhus. When they got into the open air again Major Fry broke down. The horror of it all was for the moment more than he could bear.
Major Priestly saw delirious men waving arms brown to the elbow with fæcal matter. The patients were alive with vermin; in the half light he attempted to brush what he took to be an accumulation of dust from the folds of a patient’s clothes, and he discovered it to be a moving mass of lice. In one room in Compound No. 8 the patients lay so close to one another on the floor that he had to stand straddle-legged across them to examine them.
What the prisoners found hardest to bear in this matter were the jeers with which the coffins were frequently greeted by the inhabitants of Wittenberg who stood outside and were permitted to insult their dead.
Report of the British Committee.
