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