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 r