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.