good care of them! ", threw myself into my carriage. I felt like sobbing, and I knew I could not master myself….

The great Russian writer saw the Jewish cantonists on the road, but he knew nothing of what happened to them later on, in the recesses of the barracks into which they were driven. This terrible secret was revealed to the world at a later period by the few survivors among these martyred Jewish children.

Having arrived at their destination, the juvenile conscripts were put into the cantonist battalions. The "preparation for military service" began with their religious re-education at the hands of sergeants and corporals. No means was, neglected so long as it bade fair to bring the children to the baptismal font. The authorities refrained from giving formal instructions, leaving everything to the zeal of the officers who knew the wishes of their superiors. The children were first sent for spiritual admonition to the local Greek-Orthodox priests, whose efforts, however, proved fruitless in nearly every case. They were then taken in hand by the sergeants and corporals who adopted military methods of persuasion.

These brutal soldiers invented all kinds of tortures. A favorite procedure was to make the cantonists get down on their knees in the evening after all had gone to bed and to keep the sleepy children in that position for hours. Those who agreed to be baptized were sent to bed, those who refused were kept up the whole night till they dropped from exhaustion. The children who continued to hold their own were flogged and, under the guise of gymnastic exercises, subjected to all kinds of tortures. Those that refused to eat pork or the customary cabbage soup prepared with lard were beaten and left to starve. Others were fed on salted fish and then forbidden to drink, until the little ones, tormented by thirst, agreed to embrace Christianity.

The majority of these children, unable to endure the tortures inflicted on them, saved themselves by baptism. But many cantonists, particularly those of a maturer age (between fifteen and eighteen), bore their martyrdom with heroic patience. Beaten almost into senselessness, their bodies striped by lashes, tormented to the point of exhaustion by hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness, the lads declared again and again that they would not betray the faith of their fathers. Most of these obstinate youths were carried from the barracks into the military hospitals to be released by a kind death. Only a few remained alive.

Alongside of this passive heroism there were cases of demonstrative martyrdom. One such incident has survived in the popular memory. The story goes that during a military parade [1] in the city of Kazan the battalion chief drew up all the Jewish cantonists on the banks of the river, where the Greek-Orthodox priests were standing in their vestments, and all was ready for the baptismal ceremony. At the command to jump into the water, the boys answered in military fashion "Aye, aye!" Whereupon they dived under and disappeared. When they were dragged out, they were dead. In most cases, however, these little martyrs suffered and died noiselessly, in the gloom of the guard-houses, barracks, and military hospitals. They strewed with their tiny bodies the roads that led into the outlying regions of the Empire, and those that managed to get there were fading away slowly in the barracks which had been turned into inquisitorial dungeons. This martyrdom of children, set in a military environment, represents a singular phenomenon even in the extensive annals of Jewish martyrology.

[Footnote 1: A variant of the legend speaks of a review by the Tzar himself.]

Such was the lot of the juvenile cantonists. As for the adult recruits, who were drafted into the army at the normal age of conscription (18-25), their conversion to Christianity was not pursued by the same direct methods, but their fate was not a whit less tragic from the moment of their capture till the end of their grievous twenty-five years' service. Youths, who had no knowledge of the Russian language, were torn away from the heder or yeshibah, often from wife and children.

In consequence of the early marriages then in vogue, most youths at the age of eighteen were married. The impending separation for a quarter of a century, added to the danger of the soldier's apostasy or death in far-off regions, often disrupted the family ties. Many recruits, before entering upon their military career, gave their wives a divorce so as not to doom them to perpetual widowhood.

At the end of 1834 rumors began to spread among the Jewish masses concerning a law which was about to be issued forbidding early marriages but exempting from conscription those married prior to the promulgation of the law. A panic ensued. Everywhere feverish haste was displayed in marrying off boys from ten to fifteen years old to girls of an equally tender age. Within a few months there appeared in every city hundreds and thousands of such couples, whose marital relations were often confined to playing with nuts or bones. The misunderstanding which had caused this senseless matrimonial panic or beholoh,[1] as it was afterwards popularly called, was cleared up by the publication, on April 13, 1835, of the new "Statute on the Jews." To be sure, the new law contained a clause forbidding marriages before the age of eighteen, but it offered no privileges for those already married, so that the only result of the beholoh was to increase the number of families robbed by conscription of their heads and supporters.

[Footnote 1: A Hebrew word, also used in Yiddish, meaning fright, panic.]

The years of military service were spent by the grown-up Jewish soldiers amidst extraordinary hardships. They were beaten and ridiculed because of their inability to express themselves in Russian, their refusal to eat trefa, and their general lack of adaptation to the strange environment and to the military mode of life. And even when this process of adaptation was finally accomplished, the Jewish soldier was never promoted beyond the position of a non-commissioned under-officer, baptism being the inevitable stepping-stone to a higher rank. True, the Statute on Military Service promised those Jewish soldiers who had completed their term in the army with distinction admission to the civil service, but the promise remained on paper so long as the candidates were loyal to Judaism. On the contrary, the Jews who had completed their military service and had in most cases become invalids were not even allowed to spend the rest of their lives in the localities outside the Pale, in which they had been stationed as soldiers. Only at a later period, during the reign of Alexander II., was this right accorded to the "Nicholas soldiers" [1] and their descendants.

[Footnote 1: In Russian, Nikolayevskiye soldaty, i.e., those that had served in the army during the reign of Nicholas I.]

The full weight of conscription fell upon the poorest classes of the Jewish population, the so-called burgher estate, [1] consisting of petty artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to enrol in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on record where poor Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of money for a guild certificate in order to save their children from military service. The more or less well-to-do were exempted from conscription either by virtue of their mercantile status or because of their connections with the Kahal leaders who had the power of selecting the victims.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 23, n. 1.]

4. THE POLICY OF EXPULSIONS

In all lands of Western Europe the introduction of personal military service for the Jews was either accompanied or preceded by their emancipation. At all