Boche and Bolshevik Experiences of an Englishman in the German Army and in Russian Prisons — Background and Themes

The Gardener's Wife and the Crowd's Delirium

The opening chapter, “Manufacturing Public Opinion,” contrasts two responses to the outbreak of war. The gardener's wife, a peasant woman who remembered 1870, reacts with stoic dread: her face goes “pinched and white,” and she turns silently back to work. Price then immediately juxtaposes this with the “delirious joy” of Bonn's crowds, who were “absolutely certain of victory” and treated foreigners with “withering contempt.” This pairing is not merely anecdotal; it structures Price's method throughout. He repeatedly sets a single, quiet observation against a larger, more volatile public mood, using the specific to test the general. The gardener's wife becomes a touchstone for the human cost that official narratives erase.

Typhus as a Measured Horror

Price's account of typhus in the prison camp at Stretensk is clinical in its accumulation of detail. He lists the conditions that bred the disease: “hunger, bad air, and dirt.” He describes the barracks' atmosphere as “heavy with the smell of unwashed men, of damp, unswept floors, of clothes hung out to dry, of oily soups, and with the acrid reek of coarse tobacco.” The prose refuses to sensationalize. Instead, it builds horror through inventory and process: men watched the disease “creeping nearer day by day,” noting which comrade fell next. Price even explains why washing was nearly impossible—the bathhouse attendant demanded a tip, and washing indoors was forbidden for dirtying the floor. He himself cleaned with tea for a week. The effect is not of a survivor's melodrama but of a witness's precise, almost bureaucratic, testimony.

A Hospital of Fifteen Beds

Price's description of the medical response to the typhus outbreak is devastating in its understatement. The hospital, he writes, was “a room capable of holding fifteen beds,” staffed by two Austrian doctors with only iodine and castor oil. He recounts walking in by mistake and seeing men “lolling fully dressed” on beds, others leaning against walls, others on the floor. An orderly told him the men on the beds were dying, and the rest were waiting for a bed to die in. Price does not editorialize; he lets the discrepancy between need and resource speak. This restraint is characteristic of the memoir's tone. The catalog subjects list “Prisoners and prisons, Russian,” but the excerpts show that Price's focus is less on the fact of imprisonment than on the specific, mundane failures of care that defined it.

The Errata as a Window

The book's front matter includes a page of errata, corrections to the original 1919 edition. Among them: “Page 54, line 1, read ‘insolent expression of mocking pity,’ not ‘piety.’” This small correction hints at the care Price (or his publisher) took with precise wording. The substitution of “pity” for “piety” changes the emotional register of a scene we cannot read—from religious hypocrisy to a more direct cruelty. The errata also fix a name (“Herrman” for “Harman”) and a missing preposition. These are not merely typographical; they suggest a writer attentive to the exact texture of an encounter, even in retrospect. The reader is reminded that this memoir, though based on articles written soon after the events, was revised with an eye to accuracy.

Price's narrative moves from Germany to Russia, from conscript to prisoner, but its most consistent thread is the gap between official categories—soldier, enemy, prisoner—and the lived reality of hunger, disease, and bureaucratic indifference. Readers should attend to the small details: the cherry-picking, the tea used for washing, the errata. These are not digressions but the evidence from which Price builds his case. The book is not a comprehensive history of either the German army or Russian prisons; it is a series of sharply observed scenes, each one a test of the slogans that surrounded the war.

That odd feeling of being an outsider in one’s own uniform—I recall it from my grandfather’s letters, and again when reading this account. There’s a strange quiet in being trapped between two allegiances. Something of that same isolation surfaces in My Escape from Germany — Key Ideas to Explore, where the fear isn’t of capture, but of not being believed. The loneliness of the escapee feels almost familiar.