PART I
CHAPTER I[ToC]
CREFELD
I was taken prisoner at Gheluveld, 31st October, 1914, and arrived at Crefeld prison-camp on the evening of 2nd November with ten other officers brought in from various parts of the Ypres front.
It was the same old story every time that one heard, on asking what had happened in any particular sector of the battlefield.
The impression we got from the sum total of these descriptions led us to think that a German break-through to Ypres and beyond was a certainty during the evening of the 31st.
We had been taken through the German reserves while being transported to the rear, and had seen the thousands of fresh men they had got massed behind their fighting armies. Menin, Wervicq, and other places were packed with troops. Every farm and cottage held its full complement of armed Boches. On the railway, trains passed westwards every few minutes crammed with troops, destined for the Ypres battle.
It was not surprising that we prisoners, who knew the exact strength of the British army, and also the fact that all units were having hard fighting, and that nothing was left in reserve, should feel depressed and wonder if it was possible that the Germans would fail to use their great opportunity.
I have often been asked how our prisoners are treated in Germany. The only correct answer to this is that the treatment varies according to the time and place, and the type of German who comes into contact with them.
In 1914 it was generally the same throughout Germany. In those days the treatment was exceedingly bad. Every prisoner taken then has seen or experienced some brutality or insulting behaviour on the part of Germans.
For my part, I, on first becoming a prisoner, was spat at and called all the choice names their musical language can provide. I saw a British soldier, with a shrapnel wound in the back, made to carry a heavy German pack which bumped up and down on the open wound. This fact was remarked upon by a German private soldier, who, more humane than the rest, protested against this treatment. But the Unter-Offizier would not alter his order and the wounded man had to carry his burden for seven miles or more.
When asked for water at Aix-la-Chappelle railway station, by prisoners who had hardly had a drop to drink for two days, and scarcely a scrap of food to eat, I heard the Red Cross "Ladies"! reply—"For an "Engländer"? Nein!"
At Cologne station I saw the brute beasts of German officials haul three or four of the most miserable British private soldiers they could find, out of the cattle trucks and place them on the platform to be baited by the populace, comprised largely of women. There were German officers on the platform, so there was no excuse; it could have been stopped instantly by them.
There were many other incidents too numerous to mention, but similar and worse stories will be told by the thousand after the war. The treatment of prisoners has steadily improved since those days. No longer do the Germans openly insult and knock prisoners about to the same extent, except in out of the way places and when they have a particularly cowed and defenceless lot to deal with.
I have heard from officers taken prisoners in 1916, that they were reasonably treated when captured. It is much changed now according to general report.
While waiting at Cologne station for our train for Crefeld, we were locked in a cell under the stairs of the station. Although expecting to receive food here and being told that it was with that object that we had been put in this place, nothing of this kind materialised. However, we had the great honour of being visited by a German general and a young female of high rank, who could speak a little English.
This she aired, and asked us several silly questions. She was much taken with S——'s height, comparing him to some Karl or other. It was a kind of private show of the wild beasts at the Zoo in which we acted the parts of the animals.
On arrival at Crefeld station a hostile crowd was ready to receive us, and we were hurried as quickly as possible into the trains waiting there, in order to get us away from the attentions of the populace. As it was, two of the eleven officers in my party were hit with sticks, the wielders of which had pushed their way through the escort of German soldiers accompanying us.
We were not sorry to reach the barracks and get away from these demonstrations of the unpopularity of England in this town. Crefeld, a great centre of the silk industry, had suffered heavily by the entry of England into the war.
Once inside the camp we had time to spare for anything we wished to do, which naturally meant food first, sleep next, and after some time a wash and shave.
The barracks of the Crefeld Hussars, now wired in and used as a prison camp, are large and strongly built. The prisoners occupied three large buildings and a fourth smaller one provided mess rooms and canteen, etc.
There was a gravel parade square in the middle of the ground between the buildings; this we used as a place for exercise. This square was a hundred and forty yards long by about eighty yards wide. It made an excellent association football ground when cleared of big stones, and in the summer, by dint of hard labour, we turned it into a number of tennis courts.
Until he got command of Belgium, Von Bissing—the brute responsible for the death of Nurse Cavell—was the general in charge of the particular army command which included Crefeld in its jurisdiction.
On the walls of the prison camp an order signed by Bissing was posted, which informed all the prisoners that they were the inferiors of all Germans, whatever rank they might hold.
The order also warned us against trying to "evade our fate by escaping." It continued, "The guards are earnest men, knowing their duty." This caused the nickname "earnest men" to be given to them.
I wish Bissing could have known how we laughed at his special order. The Boche has no sense of humour or he could never have put a thing like that on the walls for Englishmen to laugh at and ridicule generally.
For the first year or so, only seven officers were allotted to the smaller rooms and fourteen to the larger ones. But these numbers were eventually increased, first to eight and sixteen respectively, and then to nine and eighteen.
At first we had a cupboard each, but later four had to do duty for seven officers. The beds were iron with wooden planks supporting a hard mattress, sometimes filled with straw or wood shavings, which was changed on one or two occasions.
During the first few months we had only small oil lamps for lighting purposes, at a scale of one per seven officers. It was impossible for everyone to read at the same time. We used to sit over the fire for warmth and the three nearest to the lamp could manage to see sufficiently in the evenings to read the few Tauchnitz editions we had been able to purchase through a tradesman, who was allowed into the barracks twice a week.
As nearly all great-coats and waterproofs had been taken away from prisoners at the time of their capture, we felt the effects of the cold pretty considerably. Roll-calls took place at 8 a.m. and 9.30 p.m., generally out of doors. We often went on these roll-calls in the early days with our blankets over our shoulders. A welcome supply of soldiers' great-coats was sent through the American Embassy about Christmas time. During the first winter there were about 250 Russians, 200 French, 120 English and a few Belgian officers in the camp.
That first winter was by far the worst of the three I spent there. We had not got to understand the true nature of the German official reports, and for some time they depressed us.
Parcels began coming in December, but the Germans made us pay duty on them for a time, and as we had very little money in those days, they were not so welcome as they became at a later date, when the duty was removed.
As time went by, conditions in the camp improved, but until the summer of 1915 we had great difficulty in getting permission to do anything to make ourselves more comfortable. In the early summer of 1915, thirty-five British officers were sent to Cologne to be imprisoned in cells as a reprisal against the alleged maltreatment of German submarine crews. The majority of this number went from Crefeld. After two months or more, the reprisal having ended, they came back, looking very white and ill.
Sometime in the month of June of this year a successful escape was made by three Russians, and three others who got out of the camp the following night were re-caught. Apparently they crossed the Dutch frontier but got tied up in swampy ground and had to return across the frontier into German territory again, in search of a way out of this bad stretch of country. It was while attempting this that they were seen by a German patrol and re-captured.
The whole affair was badly managed. The theory which many prisoners held and worked upon, consisted of allowing each small party twenty-four hours start, so that they might have a good chance of getting across the frontier, some eighteen miles away, before the next lot tried, who if caught at once would cause the Germans to discover the departure of others at the nominal roll-call always held after an attempt to escape. If anyone is missed at these roll-calls the frontier guards are warned by wire.
The frontier is guarded just the same, whether an escaped prisoner is reported "out" or not, so getting away unknown is not a necessity. Of this I am absolutely certain from after knowledge of the conditions, but of course nobody knew definitely what was the best course of action at that time.
The mentality of the Boche, on the subject of escape, is curious. In the early days, anyone who tried to escape and was caught was the subject of particular dislike among the Germans, besides suffering his usual term of punishment in cells.
I suppose becoming accustomed to these attempts altered their point of view, as latterly indifference towards evil-doers of this nature was displayed by them and the punishment term of cells was administered and given with the same lack of interest or emotion as the matron of a boys' preparatory school displays on dosing her charges all round with medicine.
During the first winter in prison we built up a library, which eventually became a large affair with a librarian and a room to itself.
Some prisoners managed to continue playing cards from their first days in prison until I left, and I suppose will continue to do so without ceasing until the day of their release. Personally, after the first year I spent in captivity I hated the sight of a card and played very seldom.
The orchestra, from modest beginnings, grew into a really excellent institution. Most of the instruments were hired from the town of Crefeld.
By dint of asking repeatedly, we persuaded the Germans to allow us to run a theatre, which also developed from an extremely crude state into what was really quite a respectable affair.
The main difficulty with which our theatrical manager had to contend, was the lack of material for "girls" in the caste. However, practise and hard training turned out some passable ones in time. The French were more fortunate in this respect than the English. They are all born actors it seems, and they found two or three really excellent male "actresses." The Russians also produced theatrical displays, but were not so persevering in that respect as the French and British.
Periodically the camp used to be visited by German officers on leave from the front. We used to stare at them and they at us, and beyond the necessary salute, took no particular notice of each other.
One thing about the uniform of German officers drew our attention. Although the top half of them appeared smart enough, they always looked sloppy about the legs. Often one would see a German officer with a reasonably well-cut coat, but his breeches would be perfectly impossible. His leggings were worse than his breeches and looked as if they must have been picked up at a second-hand clothes dealer's. They never fitted, and besides giving their wearers legs the same shape all the way down, generally ended off with their edges half an inch clear of the boots all the way round.
The leather of these leggings looked as if it was made of papier-maché. Being generally of a light yellowish-brown colour they at any rate matched the boots, for the latter were nearly always of that particularly aggressive tone of yellow often seen in the shop-windows in England. The German officer seems to like this colour and has it preserved by his servant, whereas we get rid of it at once.
I suppose these officers in their new uniforms criticised the generally unkempt appearance of the English officers in prison extremely unfavourably, not realising that anything is good enough for a prison, and the less new stuff we got from "home" the less unimportant work we gave to the hard-worked tailors endeavouring to cope with the millions of uniforms required by our growing armies.
In the Spring of 1916 we were allowed by the British Government to give our "paroles" for purposes of "walks" and other recreation.
This enabled us to go to the dentist in the town. This dentist, although extremely short-sighted, did not do such bad work, provided you found the hole for him. He did his best for us and his charges were extraordinarily reasonable. These visits to the dentist were naturally very popular, as they enabled us to see new sights and get away from the horrible prison for a few hours. The dentist scored heavily, as he always had a waiting-list and continuous work to do for the prisoners.
As a man he was about as unfit for war as anyone could imagine, and yet they called him up eventually. Being a weedy specimen, small and pasty-faced, with such short-sight that he had the greatest difficulty in seeing anything, he had been returned as totally exempt time after time by the army doctors. But during the winter of 1916-1917, the weeding-out committee of Germans arrived at Crefeld and once more he was examined. To everyone's surprise, and to his most of all, they passed him fit, and off he had to go. It cheered one up to see them need such a man in their armies.
FANCY PORTRAIT OF "THE CRAB" (page 28).[ToList]
The commandant, who, together with the vast majority of Germans, believed in a great German victory over the whole world in 1914, began his career as our chief gaoler as an autocrat of the Prussian type. Various objectionable things were done by his orders. Not the least objectionable of these was the stopping of smoking, when Major Vandeleur escaped in December 1914. After a fortnight we regained our tobacco and were allowed to smoke until a similar episode occurred, when the same penalty was imposed.
Sometime in the Spring of 1915, three French officers attempted to escape, but at the last minute, having already gained the outside of the camp, came back into the prison, and in so doing were fired upon by a German sentry who saw them. As the names of these officers were not known to the German authorities, they ordered a roll-call and demanded their names from the senior French officer. Naturally the request was not granted, so the commandant said that all smoking would be stopped for all officers of the camp, unless the names were forthcoming at once. Again he was disappointed, and the tobacco was once more collected. This time most of the parcels of tobacco were filled with lumps of coal and other unimportant trifles, while we smoked, like schoolboys, on the sly. Up the chimney was the favourite place for this.
During the summer of 1915 the commandant changed his tone a bit, and steadily improved from that time forward. Eventually there arrived a time when we could consider him a fair and just commandant, and although no friend of England or the English, he managed to get on very well with his English prisoners.
The French, however, were never able to satisfy their consciences on the subject sufficiently to look upon him as anything but one of the worst. This was too severe. The commandant complained that when he passed them, they would turn their backs on him, in order to avoid having to salute him.
Relations between the English and the allies were always of the best. About half the English preferred the Russians, while the other half preferred the French.
There were many amusing incidents constantly occurring, if one could raise sufficient sense of humour to enjoy them.
One typical example of the way in which we got some amusement out of our guards happened one morning when a German fatigue party was in the barracks loading up a wagon. One of the men had taken off his uniform cap and hung it up by the entrance to one of the buildings. Along came a certain English officer, interested in anything which might assist him to escape, saw the cap, snatched it up and hid it inside his coat, while passing into the building.
Ten minutes or so later, the work being finished, the German soldier looked round for his cap. Meanwhile, the story of the annexation of the cap had gone the round of the prison, so, when the wretched Boche passed along the front of the building with his bald pate shining in the sunlight, he had to run the gauntlet of a crowd of heads peering from all the windows and roaring with laughter at him.
For a long time, I, like the majority of Englishmen, was in a room half-English, half-French. We really got on very well together, but the usual rock upon which French and English split, cropped up in our case. We English wanted a fair proportion of the windows open; the French on the other hand wanted them shut, complaining of "les courants d'air mortels" (draughts).
A compromise was the only possible solution of this universal trouble. On one occasion our allied friends received a consignment of live snails from France, which they proceeded to cook with garlic on a small spirit stove in our room. The smell was appalling. I had to bolt from the room, although I am not over particular. The odour of snails hung about for days afterwards.
These same friends of ours took up fret-sawing as a hobby. Have you ever tried to live in a room in which five or six fret-saws are working for hours at a time? They used to commence work before breakfast sometimes. However, we stuck it without complaining for months.
We had a most extraordinary prison companion, in the person of a Russian, who received the nick-name of "Cuckoo." This Russian was not really an officer at all, but during the great Russian retreat from Poland was a transport driver. Finding, or otherwise coming by, an officer's great-coat, he was dressed in it, when taken prisoner with many thousands of others. The Germans, who were not able to prove whether all officers were genuine, naturally concluded that he was one, and took him to an officers' internment camp in Germany. During his wanderings from camp to camp, he one day came to Crefeld. The Cuckoo grew his hair long, abnormally long, so that it fell in a matted mass, reaching to his shoulders. It was said that he had vowed never to cut his hair until the Germans had been kicked out of his village. He was called the Cuckoo, because when one day he had climbed a tree he was asked what he was doing by some officer, and replied that he was a cuckoo. This extraordinary person was not allowed to feed with the Russian officers, as they objected to having him with them. So he had to have his meals between the two services, which were normally within an hour of each other. The English officers belonging to the first service were always late in leaving the table, and so were frequently in the large dining-room when the Cuckoo was fed. It was a sight never to be forgotten. His manner of eating was truly marvellous.
On some occasions dried smoked fish were part of the meals, and the Cuckoo would pounce on these like a vulture and gnaw one, holding it by the head and tail with both hands. This was not his only stunt. Another good one was the way in which he shovelled food down. His hands worked absolutely feverishly to supply his insatiable appetite; great gulps of tea were rapidly interspersed, for lubricating purposes, I suppose. For all that, I can say that I saw him at the bath, which is more than can be said for all the prisoners in the camp.
A really plucky, but at the same time comic attempt to escape was made one Spring by a certain officer, who went by the soubriquet of "Peeping-Tom."
The refuse heaps and dust-bins were cleared out daily by an old German man and a boy, who removed the rubbish in a heavy two-wheeled cart drawn by an old ox. This rubbish-cart in these days used to leave the camp without being carefully searched and was emptied some distance from it. This fact was naturally well known to the prisoners, but the question, which most people took to be unanswerable, was how to remain hidden in the rubbish and yet be alive at the end of the unpleasant journey. It remained for "Peeping-Tom" to think of a gas-mask in connection with this scheme. Borrowing one from an officer, who had been lately brought in from the front, and had retained possession of this article of equipment, he dressed himself in it, and choosing a moment when the German boy was looking the other way, and the old man had departed on some other business, he rushed to the cart and got inside. A well-trained batch of English soldier-servants then arrived, each armed with a bucketful of rubbish which they threw over the top of him, successfully hiding him from view. All would now have been well, had not fate cruelly intervened, in the shape of an old German who worked the bath-house furnace, and who occasionally came out for a breath of fresh air.
Seeing this extraordinary looking object disappear into the cart, the old Boche fetched his cap and went off to the commandant's office to report the strange event. Remarking this, another officer who had been assisting the attempt, walked past the cart and warned "Peeping-Tom" that he had been seen and must get out. Suddenly a horrible looking object rose from the middle of the cart sending a shower of empty tins and other rubbish in all directions. For a moment his peaky masked face peered round, and then leaping from the cart, he went like the wind for the room of a friend in the nearest building. The German boy nearly fell flat on his back from fright when he saw this apparition, and could do nothing to hinder its escape from the cart. The Germans arrived in force shortly afterwards, but their bird had flown. From that day onwards, the rubbish was pierced with spikes every time it passed through the main gate, so that this scheme never had another chance.
During the earlier days of our captivity, impromptu sing-songs sometimes used to take place. On one particular occasion this led to trouble with our prison authorities. Empire-day was a day which could be made something of by the English, as a set-off to the numerous Saints-days and fêtes of the French and Russians.
This particular Empire-day, which we had decided to celebrate as a "jour-de-fête," happened to be the day of the declaration of war between Italy and Austria.
The noise made by the Empire-day celebrators was quite appreciable, and sufficiently loud to reach the ears of the many town-people promenading up and down outside the camp. As these Germans had just heard that their so-called ally and friend, Italy, had declared war on Austria, thus upsetting German calculations, they were very angry and depressed. On hearing these sounds of cheerful voices and other manifestations of joy they naturally concluded that our Empire-day celebrations had been especially arranged in order to celebrate the entry of Italy into the war, which fact, combined with their feeling of depression and indignation at what they termed Italian treachery, made them wild with rage, and complaints were sent in to the commandant, who believed also that the noise had been due to a celebration in honour of Italy. It was only after most persistent declarations on the part of the British senior officers, that it was at last satisfactorily explained to the commandant.
On the whole we were exceedingly fortunate in our German officers at Crefeld. One of them, however, was a most ludicrous person. He was nick-named the Crab, on account of his gait. He wore cuffs, which always asserted their independence from his shirt, when he raised his hand to the salute.
This Crab was a fool in his dealings with the prisoners, and various little incidents occurred between him and his charges. On one occasion the order against smoking on parade was re-read to the prisoners, and then the German officers kept their eyes open for smoke for a time after this.
The Crab one day saw an English officer smoking and took his name, with the result that the victim got three days cells. In the course of his campaign against smoking, he next came up against the French.
One of these was observed to be smoking and accused of it. However, he declared his absolute innocence and the Crab was non-plussed. On looking round he found that the whole crowd of Frenchmen were smoking, and roaring with laughter at him. This was too much for him to tackle and he gave it up.
Occasionally our allies received him with a chorus of coughs or suppressed cheers if he came on parade late.
A very fine attempt to escape was made by a naval officer, who used the Crab as his model. One evening, knowing that the Crab was busy in the camp and would not be passing out of the Commandantur gate for a few minutes, the Naval officer, dressed à la Crab to the last button, presented himself at the first barrier and got easily through without causing any suspicion. At the next gate, however, the sentry, as a matter of form, asked him for his pass, but unfortunately, not being conversant with the language, he was unable to understand what was required of him, otherwise a word in answer and the production of anything at all resembling the pass might easily have sufficed to allay the man's suspicions. Instead of which the sentry had to repeat his question several times, each time becoming more suspicious of this strangely silent German officer.
It wasn't very long before they discovered the trick which was being played on them and arrest quickly followed. The commandant, it was said, was extremely amused over the whole affair, and made the naval officer show him how he had copied the Crab walk.
He then sent for the Crab, who came to his office to find his double staring at him. The commandant roared with laughter, but the Crab only vouchsafed "very clever" in English as his remarks on the subject, looking very fed-up the while.
All the German employees in the prison used to laugh at the Crab, so this little masquerade caused a good deal of amusement among them.
We were always hearing rumours from someone who claimed to be in the know, about the mobilisation of the Dutch army and a rapid attack on Germany.
This interested us very much of course, as we had visions of being released by Dutch cavalry. However—cheering as these rumours were at first—they became decidedly unpopular when nothing ever happened according to the programme of the rumour.
Sometimes we heard of misgivings in the town when our offensives were stretching the German armies to cracking point. The people didn't believe their official reports without applying a grain of salt to them first, on many occasions. The Times was largely read in the town, and I have heard it actually said by a German that he read it so as to get news of the war,—the German papers containing nothing but stuff entirely favourable to the Fatherland.
There was an official report issued by the Great Headquarters every afternoon and this appeared in the Extra Blatt, a yellow sheet of paper specially printed. This Extra Blatt used to be carried past the prison by an old Boche, who always shouted the same thing—"heavy losses of the English, French and Russians." At last, after hearing him daily for two years or more, the prisoners began to assert themselves, and he was received with cheers, which daily grew louder, until the commandant ordered that the old man should not come past any more and give opportunities for the prisoners to practise their sarcasm at the expense of the communiqués of the Great Headquarters.
The reports about the Jutland battle sent the Germans into a great state of excitement. At first they were very happy, while we said very little to those Boches we met about the camp. A day or two later their joy was rather more assumed than real, until nearly a week afterwards, the sudden marvellous discovery by the German authorities that they had lost some more ships, and the consequent admission of this unfortunate little fact, finally wiped out altogether the dreams of a German domination of the seas, which many deluded people seemed to consider a "fait accompli" after that battle. It was then our turn to smile and drop insinuations and hints that probably their authorities could tell them more if they liked.
Of course we were told what would happen to England when the submarine campaign began. The Unter-Offizier in charge of the parcel room informed us with great glee that the English would be unable to receive any more parcels. Although pooh-poohing his suggestions many prisoners had secret fears on the subject.
There was great excitement in Boche circles when the first batch of parcels bearing postmarks of a later date to that of the first day of the unlimited submarine campaign arrived in the camp. This did not look a all like a complete blockade of England!
After careful thought a satisfactory explanation was forthcoming from the "under officer." "Of course the English postal authorities must have faked the postmarks in order to cause these very misgivings to arise in the minds of true Germans"! Again he and his satellites were able to look on the bright side of things. But not for long did their joy last. The steady stream of incoming parcels continued and joy gave way to sulkiness and then disillusionment in the minds of those Germans who saw with their own eyes. Depend upon it these men told others what they had seen and so it spread. All the same they still imagined, in May, 1917, that we had far less food in England than was really the case.
Talking about food reminds me of the behaviour of the Crefeld children when we prisoners went out for walks on parole. Although undoubtedly brought up upon ideas of hate against England, and presumably thoroughly informed of the odious natures of all Englishmen, these children very soon forgot their lessons and rapidly became great friends with the prisoners—English, Russians, French, Belgians and Arabs alike. Of course to a certain extent their behaviour was due to their hopes of getting odd bits of chocolate or a biscuit or two from their enemy friends. It was not unusual to see the "Walk," generally consisting of about forty prisoners, returning with a crowd of kids of all kinds and description hanging on to its edges. Their usual practice was to get hold of a prisoner's hand and trot beside him, asking sometimes for chocolate and occasionally for old tennis balls.
These children's disregard of the attitude, which the war lord has decided must be displayed against the English, was not allowed to continue unchecked. I expect the children were the subject of a special army order, as they suddenly ceased to join us in our walks, and the usual crowd of urchins who stood for hours in the road outside the barracks in the hopes of having something thrown out to them, were chased from their points of vantage and silence once more reigned in the one time noisy road.
On special occasions the schools were given holidays by orders from headquarters. A victory or the occupation of a town was always commemorated in this way. On these occasions, the headmaster or mistress would march the school past our prison and order the kids to sing patriotic songs. We always laughed at them, and the girls would sometimes forget to sing and would wave their handkerchiefs to us instead, causing their bear-leaders to get wild with rage. Eventually when the Germans got tired of victories and wanted food instead, their holidays ceased and we no longer had to listen to shrill voices shrieking "Die Wacht am Rhein" or "Deutschland über Alles," time after time ad nauseam.
It was extraordinary how the feelings of the German people changed towards us while at Crefeld. At first nothing was too bad to say or do to the captives of the Kultur nation, but it is marvellous what a good blood-letting and perpetual food shortage has done for them. So tame did they get that our windows, at first only open at the very top and all covered with white paint, were eventually made so that one could sit and look out quite easily. No fist shaking or gestures of hate were made by the time the windows were allowed open, so prisoners and Boche civilians simply stared at each other quite peaceably.
There was one thing that specially worried us in the camp. By some means or other all attempts to escape by digging tunnels were discovered. Although the foundations of the prison buildings were literally honey-combed with tunnels and attempts were made without number, never once did one succeed.
Most ingenious efforts were made, but despite the most rigid secrecy and the utmost caution, sooner or later in would come a search party and go straight to the scene of the excavation and often catch the diggers red-handed. It was believed that there were spies among the prisoners; at any rate everything that went on was known in the commandant's office sooner or later. The members of one party on being caught were actually complimented on their fine work by the Boches, who were full of joy naturally at having found the tunnel.
For many months before we left Crefeld the Germans used to search the ground floor rooms and cellars daily. Not infrequently they would pay two or three visits to the cellars in one night. Their searching included tapping the walls, ceilings and floors for hollow places. Periodically a search for the earth excavated from these holes and hidden away, would lead to the Boches discovering many hundredweights of sand and rubble stowed away safely.
Searches were sometimes made in our rooms for articles of contraband. Civilian clothes, and maps, compasses and various tools were the chief objects of interest to them. These searches on some occasions were extended to the persons of the prisoners, especially after an order forbidding the possession of real German money had been issued. Of course none of us liked being searched and we showed our searchers pretty clearly what we thought of the whole affair. I must say that the commandant did not order many searches and probably those that did occur were due to the orders of a superior.
These searches were usually carried out by the under-officers and men of a different unit from that which guarded the camp, in order to prevent those who were quite friendly to us among the prison guards letting us off too lightly.
During 1915 we were all inoculated and vaccinated against a number of diseases. In all we were each punctured seven times. Many prisoners objected to these measures and did their utmost to avoid being done. The German authorities caught the majority and treated them to these unpleasant attentions however.
The inoculation was a comic sight. One after the other the prisoners filed past the doctors, who worked automatically at their pricking job. It often was a case of almost leather punching when the tough skins of some of the rougher types of prisoners had to be pierced. The needles were far from sharp, and I believe had to be constantly changed.
Small parties of prisoners were constantly leaving and arriving at the camp. This was done, so it was generally thought, to let the people see prisoners being taken about and make them imagine that the German armies were always taking new batches.
New arrivals from the front were sometimes brought in, and we would generally worry the lives out of them for their first few days, asking for news of all kinds. Hardly ever were they able to tell us anything we did not know from the newspapers, but it often happened that all sorts of wild rumours arose from the remarks of fellows who were simply badgered into saying things they did not really mean or had not thought over thoroughly.
Early in the Spring of 1917 the Germans brought a hundred odd mercantile marine officers and men from Karlsruhe to our camp at Crefeld, with what object nobody rightly knew. These men had been through a very bad time and were very pleased to get to a camp where there were English army officers. The majority of them had been captured by the Moewe, and some of them had been in her for weeks while she cruised about sinking other ships. They had been half-starved and had very little clothing with them. In several cases the Germans had sunk their ships so quickly that the wretched crews had had no time to put on any of their clothing and had had to take to the boats in whatever garments they were wearing at the moment.
When they arrived at Crefeld they were received by the military officers and had a breakfast given them at once. They were extraordinarily pleased to get some decent food, and we so arranged it that they never lacked English food with which to augment their camp rations while at Crefeld.
In connection with this, the Germans were very amusing. They expressed their astonishment that officers of our army should take so much interest in British mercantile marine common seamen as to provide them with food and actually wait on them at the first decent meal they had seen for months.
A collection of clothes of all descriptions was made, and most extraordinary sights were to be seen as the result of this. Stokers promenading in the uniforms of Guards officers, and ship's boys in huge "British Warms."
I think the Germans had hoped to annoy us army officers by this introduction of merchant seamen. If this was so they failed utterly to achieve their object. The greatest good feeling existed between the two lots in the camp, and after three or four weeks the merchant sailors were removed to another camp where I am afraid they were less comfortable. The Germans were not the only surprised people over this affair. The French, although Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity is their national motto, were very astonished at the way in which good fellowship and camaraderie was fostered between army officers and merchant seamen.
When the Russian revolution broke out, we all wondered how the Russians in the prison camp would take it. The majority of them seemed to have very little decided opinion on the subject, but were generally inclined to think it a good thing for their country. It was then that we were told that the Russians were all to be sent to another camp, which made the whole camp think furiously as to the reason for this move of the German authorities. Was it peace in sight and the prisoners were to be concentrated in camps by nationalities near the frontiers of neutrals bordering their own countries preparatory to the general exodus at the end of the war? Did it mean a separate peace with Russia?
These and other theories were discussed backwards and forwards. Eventually the Russians went and many of us were very sorry to lose them, as it meant a loss of all means of continuing to learn the language from their Russian friends. Two hundred English arrived from Gütersloh in their place, and then the departure of the French began.
The leave-taking between the French and English was very cordial and annoyed the Germans very much, as while the former went from us we all sang the "Marseillaise." The English continued to sing it until the French were out of sight along the road to the station. Then we became an all English prison-camp. There seemed to be no room to move, as everyone was out of doors, and a great percentage of the Russians and many of the French had kept to their rooms a great deal.
We were only about six weeks in this state, as in May once again the Germans turned the camp upside down, this time ordering its complete evacuation by all the English.
CHAPTER II[ToC]
THE MOVE TO SCHWARMSTEDT
Many and varied were the aims ascribed to the Boches when the news of the move from Crefeld, ordered in May, 1917, reached the ears of the prisoners.
We were divided into parties of varying sizes. My party was the strongest, consisting of four hundred officers and about seventy soldier-servants.
The greatest secrecy was displayed as to our destination by the Germans, and all sorts of places were mooted as possible by the prisoners themselves.
Shortly before we had heard the news of our impending departure, a strange thing happened. A battalion of young German soldiers marched into the German half of the camp, and very soon after their arrival we were astonished to see another line of sentries posted round the camp outside the barbed-wire fence.
These sentries were only twenty yards apart and were dressed in active service uniforms. In addition to these, machine guns were posted at each corner of the camp so as to command the roads running past it. These precautions were taken a day or so before May 1st, the day when the Social Democrats were to have labour demonstrations throughout Germany.
We were naturally extremely interested and wondered what was to happen.
These German soldiers were far from being on the best of terms with our old Landsturm men, who continued to carry out the usual guard duties as they had done previously.
Nothing else happened beyond the arrest of five civilian Germans who were hanging about the entrance to the prison. Why they were suddenly seized and flung into cells no one rightly knew, but we concluded that it had to do with these same May 1st demonstrations.
The preparations for the great exodus from the camp were full of comic and sometimes almost tragic incidents.
Some prisoners, who had taken the trouble to try to make their rooms comfortable when the camp became all English, were particularly savage over the move, and took care that nothing which they were unable to take away should be left to be sold again to another batch of prisoners at a later date. There was a considerable quantity of live stock of various kinds in the camp, and measures for the transportation of these furred and feathered belongings had to be undertaken. The rabbits had to have special boxes made for them so that they could be carried by hand.
These rabbits had been in existence some six months at Crefeld and were very prolific breeders. They provided many an excellent meal for their owners and were objects of great interest, being watched by a small crowd of the prison inhabitants every day.
Quite a number of canaries, a dog or two and a cat, were also in the camp, and would have to be taken away by their owners.
We were told that our heavy baggage might in due course follow us to the new prison camps and that we could take one box each, which was to accompany us. Of course we all had accumulated much more stuff than would go into one box, and much grousing and desperate thinking was the result of this order.
The commandant promised to have our special boxes of tinned food sent on to us as soon as possible after our departure. Although many of us never expected to see the things again, he kept his promise, greatly to the delight of everyone. These food boxes arrived some three weeks after we had got to the new camp.
On the last evening at Crefeld, definite "move" orders were issued and our names were called by parties. I was detailed for No. 2 camp, which was to have over half the 750 officers at that time at Crefeld. Another party consisted approximately of three hundred officers, and the remaining fifty or so were distributed among two or three other new camps.
Owing to finding out that five or six officers were missing at the final roll-call, another nominal roll-call was ordered that evening in order to ascertain the names of those who were missing. The Crab was in charge of this roll-call, and he stood at the opening of a wire netting fence dividing two tennis courts, while the English officers answered their names and filed past him. Muddles very soon occurred, and what with officers who had already answered their names wandering back among the uncounted ones, so as to answer to the names of those missing, and the mistakes which naturally occur in calling over the names of 750 officers of another nationality, the Germans were bamboozled, and had no idea what they were doing. This roll-call was a fearfully slow one, and it became dark before two thirds of the officers had passed through the opening.
Now, of course, no certainty of keeping those counted from those uncounted could possibly be assured, unless a large number of soldiers were employed to prevent persons slipping from the counted crowd to the uncounted crowd. Accordingly a strong force of German soldiers was sent for, and for some reason or other they made matters worse instead of better.
This state of affairs continued for some time, until someone applied a match to an old broom found on a tennis court. It made an excellent torch and others quickly emulated his example. This was followed by a wild throwing about of these flaming missiles, and it not infrequently happened that one of them pitched extremely near a German soldier forming one of the cordon round us. This sport gave place to bonfires. In a moment some old benches were torn up and three or four fires started. This roused the Boches and they cleared the bonfire stokers away and proceeded to trample out the flames, amid the laughter of all the prisoners. The alarm was sounded on a bugle, and yet another small army of soldiers arrived on the scene, but they did not tackle the largest bonfire which burnt merrily on undisturbed.
It was a weird sight. The red flames lit up a wide area, in which the greater part of the prisoners were strolling about surrounded on all sides by German soldiers in field gray uniforms and carrying rifles. However, the whole affair was only due to over-boisterous spirits, and there was no bad feeling displayed towards the Germans, who very wisely did not interfere to any great extent. When the order to disperse to our rooms was given the prisoners went off quietly enough and the whole affair died out without any trouble occurring. However, at times it had been touch and go, whether the Boches would fire at us.
The hour for parade next morning was extremely early, and we had to wait for hours before we eventually moved off. Prior to leaving the camp our personal baggage, which we were to carry by hand, had to be searched. A large number of young German officers and Feldwebels were brought into the camp to carry out this task. They were quite civil and polite and got through their job fairly quickly.
My party was the first to move out of the camp. We then found we had to walk to the station, a mile or so away. It was now that many discovered what a quantity of baggage they had got with them. Everyone had been under the impression that we should go by trams to the station, and consequently had much more to carry than they would have had if a walk to the station had been expected.
It was an awful procession. Every fifty to a hundred yards the column had to halt while bags were changed to the other hand or bundles re-adjusted. We walked four abreast and on both sides of each four was a German soldier.
It was an absolute nightmare. Some prisoners threw some of their belongings away, and a few sat down unable to move a yard further without a rest. At last, after an absolutely agonising time, we reached the station. We were put in the carriages four at a time, with three to four German soldiers in each carriage with us. In my carriage there were four Germans, one of them an Unter-Offizier. The Germans appropriated the corner seats, to prevent us being near the doors. This of course allowed the four of us to play bridge in the middle of the carriage.
Eventually the train moved out of the station and we saw our last of Crefeld. Extraordinary as it may seem, we were positively annoyed at leaving; far from being keen on seeing new places and settling down in new environments, the majority would have preferred to remain in the same old groove for the whole term of their imprisonment. Time seems to go by much more quickly when nothing happens to mark its flight. The two and a half years spent in that prison had slipped by without milestones and it was extremely hard to realise what the two and a half years really meant. One sometimes felt that life previous to the war was really the invention of a dream. It often seemed to one that "prison" was the natural state of existence and anything outside of it unnatural. Perhaps the animals at the Zoo have the same impression of the outside world.
On settling down for our journey to that unknown destination, we had an opportunity of studying our guards. They were men of about thirty years of age and had all been to the front for long spells. For several hours they were very sulky and only answered our remarks and questions in monosyllables.
When we reached Essen they expanded a little in order to point out to us what a wonderful place it was. It certainly was wonderful. Miles of workshops and factories, and in many of them one could see guns, new, old, and damaged, lying about. The Germans in our carriage were evidently proud of this place and talked quite a lot about it, using many adjectives of the "kolossal," "wunderschön" type. We, of course, told them that we had hundreds of places in England of a similar nature and that they would one day see their wonderful Essen burnt to the ground. We thought naturally of air raids on Essen, and in view of the bombing of this place early in the war, we carefully examined it, and came to the conclusion that a bomb would be bound to hit something of importance there, so close together are the various workshops jammed.
At Gütersloh station we slowly passed a train conveying a German battalion towards the West front. We were able to examine the men well. This particular battalion consisted of very fine looking men, but there was no "Joy in the War" expression, as the German papers call it, on their faces, and they were not singing or shouting the incessant repertoire of the front-going German soldier. In fact they looked resigned to their fate, and took very little notice of us. Of course we talked to each other about "Kanonen Futter" for the benefit of the guards in our carriage.
On clearing out of Gütersloh we decided to have a meal. As we had prepared for two or three days in the train if necessary, we had plenty of food with us. It was with great curiosity that we covertly watched our German guards when we produced white bread and tinned beef sent from England. It was evidently a great surprise for them, and they could not help showing their astonishment in their faces. It did not look to them as if England was starving if white bread could still be made, and as for the meat, they had not seen so much during a whole week as we each proposed to eat at one meal.
They had had a meal themselves just before we began ours, so we had been able to estimate what had been given them as their rations. It was very scanty and the small quantity of bread was exceedingly poor looking. In the hopes of getting them to talk a bit, we offered them some beef and a little bread. They accepted with alacrity and became friendly from that moment, telling us all sorts of things that interested us exceedingly.
Apparently, they in common with the majority of Germans, had mistrusted and even feared their English prisoners up till then. Very probably they had all been warned to be suspicious of us, and given to understand that we might overpower them at any moment and escape from the train. There must have been some such fear in the minds of the senior German officers, as there were machine guns on the train in addition to four hundred armed soldiers.
The under-officer told me that he had been wounded twice and been on the Russian front for a very long spell. He had also been on the West front in 1914, and I discovered that he had been in an attack on the very trenches occupied by my brigade near the Chemin des Dames on the Aisne. He had no hesitation in saying which was the nastiest front. He was absolutely fed up with the war, as were the others in the carriage. They asked us when we thought the war would end, and out of principle we said in a year to two years' time. I was often asked the same question while at Crefeld and always answered—"a year or more." This seemed to depress them and they used to blame England for being the cause of the war going on so long. Nearly every day I went to the canteen, and, according to my usual custom, talked to the German soldiers doing duty as salesmen there.
The war was always the subject of conversation and I generally asked them, laughingly, when the great promised defeat of England was going to come off. One day, one of them became quite serious and leant across the counter to me and said in a low tone so that only I could hear—"Germany will never defeat England." As an afterthought he added, "but England can never defeat Germany." I laughed and told him to wait.
It was extremely interesting to observe the gradual taming of the Boche.
In 1914 he was intoxicated with victories actual and prospective; 1915, confident but a little more calm; the big talk of capturing London, etc., had died down by then; 1916, general depression, and towards the end of the year actual and open fear for the future and hate of the war was to be observed among the soldiers and civilians of the lower orders.
By the Spring of 1917, real anxiety about the coming summer's fighting began to be evident, which was partially relieved by the events in Russia and the great promises and hopes held out to them by the submarine warfare.
Their behaviour towards us followed the same gradual scale. At first, bullying, truculent and brutal, they became more docile as time went on, until when we left Crefeld in May 1917, their behaviour was not so far removed from what one had a right to expect from prison guards and officials towards their officer prisoners.
Although the guards in our railway carriage had become quite friendly by now, they did not relax their vigilance, and it was quite evident that they would not sleep all at the same time during the night which was approaching.
I watched very carefully that night, but never once did I catch them all unconscious at the same moment.
There can be no doubt whatever that they had had very stringent orders on the subject, owing probably to the escape of nine British officers from trains in the last three months.
The same watchfulness was displayed by the Germans throughout the train, as we found out on comparing notes afterwards.
The journey continued throughout the next day and we passed through Minden in the late afternoon.
We had now made up our minds that Stralsund, one of the rumoured destinations, was to be our new "home." Great was our surprise when we found that our train had stopped at a small town called Schwarmstedt, in Hanover, and that our new camp was some eight miles from there. The guards got out and formed a close cordon completely round the train and we were told that we were not to be marched off till daybreak. The German soldiers from our carriage not employed on this cordon duty fetched us water at our request and we settled down to sleep for a few hours until the time for moving came. We were turned out of the train at 3 a.m. and after being formed up in fours we waited for an hour or so.
We had a grand opportunity of studying the Prussian method of enforcing obedience and smartness in the men during this wait. A captain and a sergeant-major kind of man, fairly screamed at the privates. On several occasions, livid with rage, one or other of them rushed at some hapless wretch and roared at him in sentences containing very choice German words—hardly of the endearment variety.
Our carriage guards had previously told us that the major, captain and sergeant-major were "Schweine" of the worst type, but that the lieutenant was liked well enough. We could now judge for ourselves.
At last we got the order to move off, our hand baggage being left behind to be brought up by a miniature railway train especially constructed for the purpose of supplying the prison camps.
The camp with several others, as we found out afterwards, was situated on the Lüneburg Heide, some eight miles east-north-east of the town of Schwarmstedt and five or six miles on the Berlin side of the river Aller.
Crossing the river and leaving the valley through which it flowed, we quickly entered a wild tract of country, through which the only road was a rough cart track. The soil was peaty with a deep layer of sand and black dust on the top of it. For the first two or three miles we passed through several very fine pine forests interspersed with young plantations and rough scrub.
This type of country gave way to a flat marshy-looking area covered with rank vegetation and stunted fir-trees. Streams and ditches cut up the land, and it struck one as being a very wet place even in the summer, in winter it would probably be a swamp.
At last we reached the camp and found ourselves looking at a collection of wooden huts with tarred felt roofs, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, seemingly planted at random in the midst of the wildness.
CHAPTER III[ToC]
SCHWARMSTEDT CAMP
Our first sight of this camp hardly encouraged us to think that we were going to a better place than Crefeld. An ominous silence fell upon the incoming prisoners! And it was a particularly sulky lot who faced the new commandant when he had them formed up in front of him.
He admitted the bad state of the camp in his very first speech, and hoped that we would put up with it as he himself was powerless to alter matters.
On being dismissed, we went off to our rooms and very soon found out all about our new prison.
Imagine dirty sand, covering a layer of peat with water two feet underneath it, enclosed with a barbed wire fence. In this area put four long low wooden huts with tarred felt roofs, three much smaller ones, three pumps, a long latrine, a hospital hut and some cells, and you have the sum total of the buildings in the camp.
The three long low huts held 390 officers, each hut divided roughly into eight to ten rooms. Many of the rooms held sixteen officers, and so crowded were the beds in them that three pairs had to touch in many instances, despite repeated and varied ways of re-arrangement being tried.
The latrines were very close and handy, so much so in fact, that their ends came to within ten paces of the living-rooms at the end of two of the huts. As the latrines were never cleared out, the atmosphere in these near huts was something too appalling for words, especially if a west wind was blowing.
The drinking-water had been passed as fit for human beings by the German sanitary authorities. For all that, the majority of us only drank tea and coffee, etc., requiring boiling water. The water was brownish and smelt abominably.
We became expert laundry hands, as we had to wash our own clothes, and so learnt the art from experience.
Many of the prisoners were able to see the comic side of life in this place fortunately, and so made the best of a bad job.
As the bath-house was outside of the wire fence, we could only get to it by going on parole, or by being marched out in groups. This naturally meant that the turn for baths did not come round too often. If one refused to give parole for this purpose, a bath could be got twice a week with luck.
The natural outcome of this was that everyone used to bath under the pumps which were situated between the living-huts. It was a common sight to see between twenty and thirty naked figures throwing water over each other round the pumps.
It was absolutely impossible to play tennis or football in this camp, as there was no space in which to do such things. The little ground lying between the living huts had been planted with vegetables by the Germans before our arrival. It was against all orders to walk across this ground. A Belgian private soldier, acting as officer's servant in the camp, did so once, and was banged into cells for his offence. No officer was put in cells for this, but that was not due to the lack of opportunity. I think the Germans did not want to cause trouble with their English officer prisoners, so refrained from rash acts of this nature.
As we had been allowed to take only one box with us from Crefeld, some officers had purchased huge baskets in the canteen into which they had crammed great quantities of luggage.
When these baskets were unpacked, the German authorities decided that they were too big to remain in the rooms and so ordered that they should be removed from the camp to a store shed outside the wire fence.
Three officers availed themselves of this fact and hid themselves inside the baskets, arranging that strong English soldiers should carry them out, pretending that they were empty and put them with the other large boxes in the shed. Thus the officers would get outside the camp and eventually get away from the shed by night.
All went well at first. The baskets were outside the gate, and merrily moving off towards the shed, when the Boche officer called upon the soldiers to halt, and decided that as the soldiers were needed for other work the baskets were not to be put in the store room till after five o'clock. Down went the baskets on to the ground and were then massed near the German sentry on gate duty. As it was only two o'clock and fearfully hot, the wretched inhabitants of the baskets had a very poor time of it waiting till five.
One of the three did not keep still and we could see the wicker-work straining from his movements. Awful squeakings and scratchings came from this basket, and although we tried to drown the noise by talking and shouting near the gate, the German sentry must have heard something and became suspicious, as he stood by them and looked carefully at each in turn.
At last they were taken to the store. What really caused their recapture I don't know, but it appeared to be due to one of them showing himself at the window of the store-room some three hours later. They had to be careful to arrange it so that one of the baskets could be cut open from the inside, and the others could then be opened with the keys that the occupant of this basket had on him.
At about eight o'clock the German officer arrived, followed by a guard, went straight to the store-room and captured all three, who by this time had been out of their baskets for hours. We next saw them marched off to cells, where they were to do five months in solitary confinement.
We had not been thirty-six hours in this camp before three officers did get away. Crashing along a ditch, they cut the wire and got through the hole which was in the fence opposite the nearest clump of undergrowth to the camp.
How the Germans did not hear them crashing into these bushes I cannot conceive, as I myself heard them seventy or eighty yards away. These three were away about ten days before being caught. Not very long after their exit the German sentry noticed the hole in the wire and so that chance was spoilt for anyone else. The clump of bushes, which had been so useful to the three escapers, was cut down by order of the commandant, and after that a hundred yards of open clearing surrounded the wire fence, making a good field of fire for the sentries.
Owing to the sandy nature of the soil, which had all the dirt-causing propensities of coal dust and none of the advantages of clean sand, we had to be constantly washing our feet if they were to be kept clean at all. Many prisoners, realising what a lot of laundry work wearing socks in this dusty place meant, discarded their use altogether and simply wore football shorts and shoes, with an old shirt as top-wear.
Our rooms were perpetually in a filthy state. As soon as they were brushed, in came more of this sandy dust. A wind made life unbearable.
These conditions are those of summer, winter will mean a different tale. The open ditches, dry on account of the drought when I left, are hardly there as ornaments, but in all probability are filled to over-flowing with the surface water from the camp, when the rainy months come along.
At the end of the camp was a space wired off from the rest of the ground for the use of the soldier servants. There was a wooden hut similar to those occupied by the officers, which did duty for the housing of the men. In this wooden hut about 200 soldiers, of all kinds and descriptions, were packed—Russians, French, Belgians, and English, and not a few half-German half-Russian Jews.
These latter men were allowed great freedom by the Germans. There was no fear of them escaping, so they walked in and out of the camp whenever they wished to do so, as far as we could see. They were hardly trusted by the rest of the prisoners, who had good reason to know what useful sources of information these persons are to the German camp authorities.
I went to these quarters of our soldiers several times, although officers were not supposed to do so. But if no coat was worn, it was impossible for a German sentry to tell who was an officer or a private, so we used to adopt that plan if we wished to get into the enclosure.
The crowded state of that soldiers' hut was beyond belief. The beds were arranged as closely as possible, and then another layer fixed on to the tops of the ground floor ones.
For the first three weeks of our life in this camp, we had to live mainly on the rations provided by the German authorities, since many of us had not been able to bring much in the way of tinned food along with us when we left Crefeld. The parcels from England were also delayed in their arrival, as the organization arranged for Crefeld had to be altered for Schwarmstedt. The food provided by the Germans at a daily cost to each officer of 1 mark 50 pfenning, comprised the following: Breakfast, coffee, of the war variety, probably made with acorns. Dinner, soup, always containing lumps of mangel-wurzel, cabbage, black peas, and occasional pieces of potato. Twice or three times a week, tiny shreds of real meat could be discovered in the soup. There was often a liberal ration of grit in this soup, but no extra charge was made on account of that. The Evening Meal, soup of the sago or meal variety, generally exceedingly thin.
In addition to these daily rations, we were each allowed to purchase two pounds of war bread per week at 60 pfs. This war bread was exceedingly nasty and doughy. If pressed with the finger the indentation remained, as it does in other putty-like substances.
Its color was a dark grey brown, and its smell and taste were sour. I understood that it was mainly made of potato. It is amusing to hear the talk about the English war bread in this country, to anyone who has experienced the same commodity in Germany.
The German war bread most certainly has violent effects on the interior economies of those who eat it for the first time, without becoming gradually trained to stand the strain of such an ordeal by eating the different grades of bread which have been given to the Fatherland during the last two years.
Personally I cannot justly complain, as I was one of the few who did not suffer from eating it.
It was a great day when the first consignment of re-directed parcels arrived. By standing in a queue for two hours the parcel could be obtained from the German censors. One of the first prisoners to draw his parcel came back with it under his arm, and a disgusted expression on his face. Nobody dared ask what he had got in his parcel, he looked too savage for the risk to be taken. However, it soon got about that he had got a dozen tennis balls! It was not surprising that he had looked like murder, when one realised that no tennis was possible in this camp, and that food was what he most wanted.
Fortunately our trials in this latter respect soon ended, as the parcels began to come in as regularly as they did at Crefeld. In addition the Crefeld commandant's promise, that the food boxes would be sent on, was fulfilled, and once more we had plenty of provisions. The soldiers also received their parcels now, and from what some of them said, they generally do wherever they are, thanks to the untiring energy of those who see to this for them in England.
One day we caught a specimen of the beasts which attacked us at night, and took it to the German officer pinned on a board. He made excuses and blamed the wooden huts, saying how impossible it was to deal with vermin. However, our room was to be fumigated. We were ordered to clear everything out of our room, and then the Germans arrived with a blow-flame with which to run over the bedsteads and clear out the cracks in the walls. Another German splashed creosote on to the floor, and places too high up to be reached by the blow flame.
We realized that this was all "eyewash," as the gaps between the partition walls separating the rooms were in some cases wide enough to allow the passage of one's hand. Therefore the many footed beasts of prey lurking in such places would easily avoid the strafing by going a few inches next door via these cracks. Of course the other rooms were not fumigated at the same time, so their preserves must have been entered by the game driven out of ours. We all wrote home for Keating's, but the letters never fetched up.
The censoring of our letters was done at a headquarter censor's office at Osnabrück, after our removal from Crefeld. This meant endless delay and often non-arrival of incoming letters, and practically a complete suspension of the outgoing mail.
The reason for this latter fact is not difficult to explain. Of course the prisoners described the new camp in these letters, and as the place was bad from every point of view, the contents of these epistles were not liked by the censors at Osnabrück. Consequently the letters were either burnt or kept. Of course the non-arrival of letters in England would do more to cause inquiries to be made at this end than anything else, but the Germans don't see things in that light.
This camp, Schwarmstedt, was known as No. 2, but why a number should be assigned and no name given to it, only a Boche could say; possibly it was because the Germans did not want it visited by any interfering inquisitive neutral country representative, since it was such a bad camp. I was pleased to hear that it was visited shortly after, and a full report made. I believe some of the grievances were attended to.
When we were at Crefeld some of us had taken up fencing as a form of exercise and amusement. The sabres and épées were sent out from England, but the Germans were very careful to take charge of them on their arrival, and used to let us have them at specific times, locking them up carefully at six o'clock every evening.
This care was continued for over a year, and then I suppose realising at last that as weapons with which to attack the camp-guards they were absolutely useless and that bed legs would be much more likely weapons if anyone wished to do such an absurd thing, they suddenly ignored the old fencing weapon and we were able each to have his own. When we moved from Crefeld, I took mine with me, tied quite openly on to a kit bag.
I hung it up in my room without thinking anything about it, until one day we were told that we were to be visited by a Boche General, and that everything had to be extremely tidy and in its correct place. As the authorities here were much more fussy persons than those at Crefeld, and the arriving general was rumoured a particularly aggressive England-hater, I thought that I had better hide my sabre, which I did almost entirely, only about three inches of it showing. Naturally I was a trifle worried about this compromising thing, as I had never realised before that it might get me into trouble in this new camp.
Whenever there was a search I had to hide it; in fact I got to dislike that sabre. I never got rid of it finally because I got rid of myself instead and left it behind as a legacy to my room companions. I hope they haven't claimed it and taken over its troublesome propensities.
At one end of the camp were three small huts known as machine-gun houses, constructed originally so as to command the three streets of the enclosure. In two of these the senior British officers lived, nine in a room.
The other one was the orderly room. In addition to these three houses, there were several machine-gun towers dotted at intervals outside but close up to the main wire fence of the camp.
These also must have been designed originally as points from which turbulent prisoners could be overawed. After a week or so of English occupation of this camp, one of them was cunningly used to give cover to an escaping party.
The exit from the camp was successful, but the actors in this drama were caught and brought back after several days away. The offending tower was promptly pulled down by the Germans and an extra sentry posted in its place.
Near the soldiers' quarters was the building assigned to "cells." I never saw the inside of them, but they were extremely small and hot in the summer. Officers in cells were marched out to the "bath" twice a week, and we could see them quite close, and sometimes even speak with them, while this was going on. They looked very white after a fortnight in these places, but that was due probably to the lack of sunlight. Each cell had a barred window about eight feet from the ground and occasionally we could see the faces of the occupants staring through the bars.
Another wooden hut did service as a hospital. This building was the best in the camp, being painted white on the inside and having quite a clean appearance. There were not many officer prisoners sick in this hospital when I left. Three or four bed cases was the total, on the average day.
Owing to the great heat, the rough grass and bog myrtle became extremely dry, and when a fire did break out it burnt merrily for a long time in the surrounding country.
On several occasions the flames swept down on the camp, and the German guards not on duty were turned out to prevent their too close approach to the wooden buildings.
Once a fire was only stopped ten yards short of the nearest hut.
The smoke was very thick and drove across the camp, obliterating it. Needless to say, some of us were watching the sentries very closely during this, but nobody got an opportunity of attacking the barbed wire perimeter by which we were enclosed. Rumour had it that a German village a few miles away had been wiped out by one of these fires. The German civilians of course blamed the prisoners, saying that they had caused these fires when smoking on parole-walks. The commandant then ordered no smoking except on roads, while we were out walking.
The German commandant of this camp full well realised what an extremely unpleasant place it was and how unsuited for the accommodation of officers or for private soldiers for that matter. Evidently ordered to make the best of a bad job, and told to try and smooth over the bad particulars of the camp by the skillful giving of small privileges, he attempted to get the prisoners interested in the building of a theatre and the making of playing-fields outside the camp.
A strong section of the prisoners fortunately hung together and declared themselves solidly against taking advantage of these privileges until such time as the really important questions, which had already been the subject of numerous complaints by the prisoners, should be attended to, and action for the general welfare of the camp population taken by the German authorities.
This camp was a miserable one if judged only from the details of existence there, but fortunately, as so often happens, there was a brighter side to it.
The uncomfortable and trying conditions made for unity and co-operation among the prisoners themselves. The humorous side of life seemed to come to the fore more easily than at the comparatively comfortable camp of Crefeld.
Cliques and factions existing during the previous two years at Crefeld were inclined to disappear, and a more general feeling of a common cause in the face of an unpleasant period steadily grew, closing the gaps in the ranks of the prisoners and tending to bring together people who would hardly bear to see each other under previous conditions.
It is surprising what a difference the effect of a long term of imprisonment has on various people. To anyone gifted with the smallest powers of observation, the constant changes and rapid transformation of ideas and standpoints in the small world of prison necessarily came with interest. It is a strange fact, but nevertheless true, that some prisoners, forgetting that a prison-existence is only temporary and entirely unnatural, seem to think that things matter in such a place, and that the happenings and views of the outside world do not directly concern them.
A long spell of such an existence changes a man more in character than the same period spent in the ordinary course of life. Some are tempered in the fires of such a test, while there are others....