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.