Wounded and a Prisoner of War, by an Exchanged Officer

by Malcolm V. Hay

I.

I had been four months in hospital when my name was put down on the list of "transportables," and a place was reserved for me in the "Zug Lazaret."

These trains were made up according to the output from the different hospitals along the front, chiefly from Lille, Douai, Cambrai, and St Quentin.

After the pressure of traffic consequent on the rush back from the Marne had subsided, a regular hospital-train service was inaugurated, and trains direct to Munich were run once a week.

When I expressed some fears to Dr Schmidt as to how I would be treated on my journey, he laughed, saying something about German culture, and that one must not believe all the tales one hears about the Germans. At any rate, he assured me I had nothing to fear, for instructions had been given to pay every attention that the nature of my wound required, and I was to travel by a special Lazaret with a comfortable bed and plenty of good food from a restaurant car.

In the light of subsequent experiences I am sometimes rather suspicious of my friend's kindly intentions. The German idea of humour is so different from any other. I often wonder if Dr Schmidt had been "pulling my leg" in his clumsy German way.

However, when the motor ambulance came to fetch me at 10 A.M. on the 6th of January, I started off on my journey quite free in my mind from painful anticipations. I pictured to myself a comfortable hospital train, with perhaps a German Schwester to look after the worst cases, and if not a made-up bed, at least a stretcher on which I could rest my paralysed limbs.

On arriving at Cambrai station I found that the "special hospital train" consisted of ordinary 3rd-class corridor coaches, which were packed with French and English wounded. I was helped along the train by two kindly German soldiers, and lifted up into a 2nd-class carriage, where I was warmly greeted by a French Army doctor, like myself en route for a German prison.

One side of the carriage had been made up as a bed, and the nice white sheets looked most inviting. However, my satisfaction with what I supposed to be the arrangements for my comfort was short-lived. I had scarcely time for more than a few words with the French doctor when a German officer, a lieutenant, appeared at the door. His message was brief and easy to understand. I was to get out.

In spite of my protests, this officer attempted to make me climb down on to the platform, but as this was quite beyond my powers, he allowed me to crawl along the corridor. At the far end of the train was a 3rd-class corridor coach of the usual Continental type, with hard wooden seats, the partitions running only half-way to the roof. This coach was full of wounded French and English soldiers, among whom I recognised several who had been in hospital with me, but I was not allowed to speak to them. At the end of the coach was a compartment, one side of which had been transformed into a bed by nailing up a board against the seat, which was covered with straw.

I was assisted on to my bed of straw by a German N.C.O., who, along with three other soldiers, all with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets, took up all the remaining room in the carriage. It was evident that I was to be efficiently guarded.

I took no notice of my escort, but kept an eye on the platform, as I wished to get a hold of some German officer of high rank, in order to protest against my removal from the 2nd-class carriage. Presently an inspecting officer, a captain, I think, came along the train.

I explained to this officer that the wound in my head was only newly healed, that I was still quite paralysed on one side, and that Dr Schmidt had arranged (as I thought) for my proper accommodation on the journey.

I requested permission to be allowed to travel along with the French officer from whose company I had been somewhat rudely shifted.

The German officer, standing on the platform, listened to what I had to say, and when I had finished he got on to the footboard, looked through my carriage window at the wooden bed, the straw, and the three sentries, and then I got my answer: "Das ist schön für einen Engländer."

This was my first lesson in German Kultur. I thanked the contemptuous German most heartily, and I fancy that my exaggerated politeness somewhat annoyed him.

Although I did not appear to be taking any notice of my sentries, I could not avoid catching the eye of the man opposite, who kept on glaring at me with a most objectionable persistency.

I looked at him in my most benevolent manner, but made no attempt at conversation.

When presently the others got up and went out into the corridor, this man's conduct became most alarming. He was evidently under stress of some strong emotion. Suddenly his whole manner changed. Laying a finger on his lips with a warning gesture, he bent towards me and said in a low tense voice, "Moi aussi je hais les Allemands."

In spite of the hatred in his voice and the bitter look which accompanied the words, I did not show much eagerness to follow up this somewhat startling opening for conversation. I was rather afraid of some trap. One had heard stories of prisoners on the way to Germany being taken out of the train and shot on the accusation of having spoken of the Fatherland in an unbecoming manner or on some similar trumped-up charge. All attempt at further conversation was, however, put a stop to by the return of the other sentries.

The soldier opposite, whether friend or foe I knew not, remained silent and motionless in his corner, although from time to time he favoured me with a malevolent stare, while his companions took hardly any notice of me at all. It was some time before another opportunity occurred for private conversation. However, at some country station the three soldiers got out to get a drink of coffee, leaving me alone with the mysterious sentry. Again his manner changed, and again bending forward, he hissed with a hatred in his voice that seemed very genuine, "Moi aussi je hais les Allemands."

And then in atrociously bad French my "friendly" enemy threw light on his mysterious behaviour by explaining that he was a Pole, and was under orders to join at Valenciennes some reinforcements that were being hurried up to Arras. "I have to go on," he said; "I cannot help myself, but I will never aim straight at the French or English."

I suggested that he might perhaps manage to get taken prisoner, but he answered that it would be most difficult, as all Poles were kept separate from their fellow-countrymen and closely watched.

Any shirking in the firing line would mean instant death at the hand of some Bavarian comrade.

He begged me not to betray by any word or sign that we had conversed together, because he was looked upon with suspicion by the other soldiers, and for that reason had feigned intense hatred of the English. This was the explanation of the malevolent stare at me. At this point the other sentries returned, and no further opportunity for conversation occurred.

My newly-found friend was evidently worrying over his miserable lot. He took out a well-thumbed Feldpostkarte, and as he read one could see that his thoughts were far away with the wife and children from whose side he had been dragged to fight for the hereditary enemies of his country. I shall not easily forget the sadness of the man's face,—a young face with very dark, dog-like eyes. There was nothing smart about him; he was indeed rather more dirty than even a travel-stained soldier from Poland had any right to be. As I looked at him I thought of the countless numbers of German soldiers whose lives had been sacrificed in vain efforts to capture the French position at Arras. And this man was to be one more. His fate was perhaps the hardest of all. For him there would not even be the soldier's last consolation of duty done. As the train drew up at Valenciennes the soldiers in my carriage began to put on their equipment, and when the train had stopped they all got out. My Polish friend went out last, and as he left the carriage he turned round and bade me with his eyes a silent and almost appealing farewell.

Valenciennes is an important junction, forming a central point from which the railway line branches off to both the French and the English front. Moreover, the principal base hospital had been transferred here from Cambrai early in October, so I was not surprised to find the platform crowded with Red Cross attendants, stretcher-bearers, doctors, railway transport officers, and soldiers representing all parts of the German Empire. Now that my Polish friend and his two comrades had gone I was left alone with the fat unterofficier, who took the first opportunity that was offered of exercising his authority over me.

It was a very mild evening for January, and as I soon got tired of watching the crowd of German soldiery, whose presence in France is an outrage that cannot be fully realised by merely reading about it in the papers, I leant out of the window on the opposite side of the train. The contrast was striking. Not a soldier was in sight, and the little French town, as far as one could see from my carriage window, seemed abnormally quiet. To make complete the illusions of peace, a grey-headed French railway employee in his blue blouse came sauntering down the line.

When he reached my carriage and saw the British uniform, he cordially wished me good-evening, and asked where I had been wounded. I did not get further in the conversation than to return the "bonsoir" when my sentry rushed across the carriage, threw up the window, and in a voice meant to be most terrifying thundered out that "to speak out of the window was 'verboten.'"

I said I was sorry, but did not know it to be "verboten." This inoffensive remark produced a regular parade scolding, accompanied by an interesting exhibition of eye-rolling, which forms an important part of German military discipline.

The lecture ended up with a dramatic pointing of the finger to an enormous high-up stomach and "Ich verbiete." I said "All right."

This seemed about to cause another storm, so I hurriedly translated it into "Ist gut."

My guardian, still rumbling, went out into the corridor; I opened the window again, and the train moved slowly out of the station.

The train did not stop again till we were well over the Belgian frontier.

I did not see any frontier marks, nor did we stop at any frontier stations. A rough calculation, however, of the distance we had gone from Valenciennes showed that we must have reached Belgium about 6 A.M. As the train was now going very slowly, I was able to observe the countryside with more attention, and I was eagerly looking out for some landmark that might enable me to recognise the road along which we had marched on our way up to Mons nearly five months before.

Our first stop in Belgium was at a small country station, the name of which I have forgotten. This place must have been just on the fringe of the fighting during the last week of August. It was here that began the trail of the Hun.

The station was a complete wreck, and in the adjoining village only one house seemed to have escaped destruction. Temporary shelters had been rigged up with corrugated iron all along the platform, at the end of which was a wooden Red Cross dressing-station.

These dressing-stations have been set up at every station, however small, all along the line between the German frontier and the front, and form a striking example of German organisation and efficiency. They consist of two small rooms, one of which can be used as an operating-room, and is stocked with first-aid appliances and a small pharmacy. The whole building can be taken down and set up elsewhere in a very short time.

The country now presented a melancholy sight, and as the railway line itself had been much damaged, the speed of the train was reduced to a crawl over the numerous temporary wooden railway bridges.

In Belgium the railway line was always strongly guarded, while in France I hardly noticed any troops except at the railway stations. From the moment we entered Belgium it was evident that a great number of soldiers were billeted in the villages and towns, or rather in the huts that had been constructed amidst the ruins. In fact, the German soldiers seemed in this district to have taken the place of the Belgian population, as between the frontier and Mons I do not remember seeing a single Belgian. Of course, at this time I did not know that thousands of Belgians had fled to England, nor had I heard anything more than vague rumours of German atrocities, such as the burning of Louvain and the indiscriminate murder of the civilian population in many parts of Belgium. I was therefore somewhat at a loss to understand why the railway line was so very much more carefully guarded in Belgium than it was in France, and why the civilian population seemed to have almost disappeared.

As we began to enter the mining district in which the town of Mons is situated, I looked out of my prison window with renewed interest at the more dominant features of the landscape, which I could now recognise quite distinctly.

At one place the line followed for a short time the very road along which we had marched on the 22nd August, the day before the battle of Mons, happy in our ignorance of all that was to come.

It was along this same straight road lined with tall poplar trees that the grey-clad German soldiers had been rushed on in motor-cars, that the hundreds of machine-guns and light artillery had hurried with the hope, that was so nearly realised at Le Cateau, of destroying what was left of the little British army. Further on the line skirts the now famous Canal de Condé.

The effect of the German shell fire was very noticeable along the banks of the canal. Most of the houses within a hundred yards of the water had been totally destroyed, so that the ground between the railway line and the canal was now fairly open. On the right side of the line the damage had not been so considerable; still, even on that side fully fifty per cent of the houses were roofless. As far as a limited view from the railway would allow me to judge, I do not think the upper part of the town was much knocked about. Most of the German shelling on the 23rd had been directed on the British positions along the canal, and any damage that was done in the town itself was probably caused by the British guns' attempt to check the German advance through the town later in the afternoon.

The lower part of the town of Mons reminded me of the streets of Pompeii. The silent ruins had been abandoned even by the German soldiers. Here and there some rough attempt had been made to provide shelter, and we passed a few miserable women and children who were standing grouped in the doorways of their shattered homes. We entered the station of Mons at about 7 P.M. Here, as far as could be seen, everything seemed quite normal, and no traces were visible of the storm that must have raged all around during that eventful August day when British troops had paid their flying visit to the town.

The platform side of the train was quite deserted, so I turned my attention to the other window, and was presently accosted by a German railway soldier. I at once surmised from his opening remark and evil-looking face that he was intent on "prisoner baiting." I naturally pretended not to understand, and he thereupon became most annoyed. The expression of his humorous thought was that "the English were all going to Berlin, and the verdammte English would verdammt well stay there for ever." I shook my head and said "nicht verstehe."

Then followed a sort of pantomime repetition of the same idea slowly spoken in simple words. Again I shook my head. Then a brilliant idea struck him: "Parlez vous Français?" "Oui," said I. But all the French he could muster consisted of "A Berlin." This was yelled out in a loud voice with great enthusiasm.

I then constructed a sentence in very bad German to the effect that our train was not going to Berlin but to Munich. This got rid of him, as he evidently thought it was hopeless to make the thick-headed Engländer understand his subtle German humour, and off he went shouting "A Berlin, A Berlin!"

The fat N.C.O. who had been standing in the corridor during this interview now came into the carriage, and I asked him if there was any dinner going, and was told that it would be brought along presently. It was not long before a party of soldiers appeared carrying two dixies of soup, a plateful of which was handed up.

It was thin vegetable soup, tasteless and stone cold. This was the "dinner from a restaurant car" that Dr Schmidt had told me about! My appetite would not rise to more than a spoonful of it, and I do not think even Oliver Twist would have asked for more. Fortunately my kind French friend at Cambrai had provided me with a parcel of food, and I thought the time had come to take stock of its contents. I asked my corpulent attendant to reach me down the parcel, in which I found several "petit pains," some ham, and a large lengthy German sausage, upon which, as it rolled out of the paper, my guardian cast a swift but appreciative eye. I thought it might be a good idea to try and bribe him into a good temper, and ventured to ask for the loan of a knife! My request having been complied with, I sheared off a large piece of the sausage and stuck it on the end of the knife as I handed it back to its owner.

A grateful grunt showed that my offering to the stomach had found a weak spot in the enemy's armour, and from that moment we were comparatively friendly. After I had eaten some bread and ham I asked for something to drink, and was told that nothing was to be had except the thin cold soup. I had saved one or two cheap cigars from the hospital, and I settled down as best I could to smoke one of them.

I have forgotten to mention that there was a Red Cross attendant on the train, whose occupation consisted in slouching in the corridor and staring out of the window. He was a short, thick-set man, one of the dirtiest-looking I have ever seen in uniform. He wore a once white linen overall and a Red Cross badge on his arm. I do not know if he was qualified for Red Cross work, as he made no attempt or offer to help me or any of the other wounded men. Shortly after leaving Mons I began to feel symptoms of a bad headache coming on, and so I asked my guardian if there was a doctor on the train and if he could give me some aspirin. My request was passed on to the Red Cross attendant, who said he would go and ask the doctor.

It was now dark, and the train stopped at many small stations, at each of which numbers of soldiers were billeted. Some of them always came up to my carriage to show off their knowledge of English. One or two of them were very rude, but the majority were merely interested and addressed me quite politely, sometimes in fluent English. One man I remember, who spoke just like an Englishman, said that he had been twelve years in England with a German band and knew all the coast towns. This fellow said he was very sorry "that England had made this War," as no Germans would like to go back there any more.

At several stations other German bandsmen spoke to me out of the darkness, and sometimes they climbed up on to the footboard and attempted to enter into discussions as to who started the War. England, of course, was declared to be the aggressor and originator of all the trouble, and some surprise mingled with hatred was expressed at her action in thus attacking, for no apparent reason, a pacific industrial country like Germany. Of course I was not in a position to argue the point, and generally contented myself with asking whether they thought we had prepared an Expeditionary Force of 70,000 men to attack 7,000,000 Germans.

These men belonged for the most part to the Landsturm, and one of them told me they had been in billets for over two months. They seemed quite cheerful at the prospect of going nearer the firing line.

Conscription is, from the Germans' point of view, simply organised patriotism, although ignorant opponents of National Service are fond of sneering at the German conscript and assert that he will only fight when forced on with revolvers. I wish that some of our stay-at-home sneerers could have seen these crowds of German conscripts and heard the singing and laughter. If cheerfulness be one of the first qualities of a soldier, these people possessed it to a very high degree.

At one station a soldier who was, I think, rather full of beer, hung on to the footboard outside my window and attempted to be offensive in a mixture of German and English. His peroration was coming to an end as the train began to move, but he clung on and delivered his final shaft: "England is the enemy and will be punished." However, his own punishment was near at hand, for when he attempted to jump off the train, which was running fairly fast, he made a false step and fell heavily on the back of his head, and, as it seemed to me, right under the wheels of the train.

My sentry, who under the influence of sausage had become quite communicative, remarked that the man was drunk and deserved all he got.

Symptoms were now developing of a serious headache such as I had experienced once before in hospital. On asking the Red Cross attendant if he had taken my message to the doctor, I was told that it would have to wait till the next stop, and by the time we got to Charleroi I was in the fast grip of an acute neuralgic attack.

Entrance to the platform at Charleroi had evidently been verboten, for there was no one on the platform, although a great crowd of soldiers could be seen at the far end of the station, which was brilliantly lighted with electric arc lamps.

I again asked my sentry to get me some relief. He was quite sympathetic, and I think began to realise that I was getting rather bad. He told me that the Red Cross attendant had gone to the doctor and would be back before long. The very great pain was made worse by the knowledge that the two or three tablets of aspirin, for which I had waited so long, would afford instant relief. At last the Red Cross attendant came along the corridor and made some sign to the sentry, who went out to speak to him. They talked for a long time, and seemed to be arguing about something. Every minute was more painful than the last, and then, to my relief, the sentry came back. I stretched out my hand for the aspirin. "Nichts," he said, "the doctor sends a message—'tell the Englishman not to smoke cigars and he will not have a headache.'"

Looking back now on this incident I am inclined to acquit the German doctor of all blame, although at the time I was full of wrath at what I supposed to be callous indifference and cruelty, surprising even in a German member of the medical profession. The most likely explanation is that the dirty Red Cross attendant had never taken my message to the doctor at all.

The only thing now was to get some sleep while the train was at rest, as I knew that when the jolting began again sleep would be quite impossible.

My desire for rest was not, however, to be satisfied, for the sentry leant out of the window on my side of the carriage and started a conversation with somebody on the platform. I was surprised to hear that he was talking to a woman, and on looking up to see who it was, a pleasant voice bade me "Good-evening" in perfect English.

A pretty, young Red Cross nurse stood there at the window. The sight of her, the kindness with which she spoke, the sympathetic look, were for a moment as unreal to me as the memory of a dream. "Is there anything I can do for you?" she said; "I hope you are not very badly wounded." As soon as she knew of my headache she went running along the train, and was back almost at once with three large tablets of aspirin. "I am so glad to be able to help you," she said; "I promised my friends in England that I would do all in my power to help the poor English wounded."

I could not find words to thank her then, and I cannot find them now. Never did I need kindness more, and never was a kind deed more kindly done.

Before the train started off again the good sister came back to ask how I was feeling, and wished me well on my journey.

The relief to the pain was almost immediate, and in spite of the renewed joltings, and the hard bed which afforded small comfort to a semi-paralysed man, I slept soundly for the rest of the night.