The interpreter turned to the rest of us and said: “Now then, if your John Bull could get hold of a photograph of that, he’d print huge headlines, ‘Ill-treatment of British Officers. Made to chop up wood for German soldiers.’”
It was at Douai that we discovered for the first time the German habit of putting dictaphones in prisoners’ rooms. Ours was attached to the electric light appliances and masqueraded as a switch wire. But if any one listened to our conversation, they can have heard very little to interest them, save perhaps sundry strings of unsavoury epithets preceding the word “Boche.”
From Douai we moved to Marchiennes; half of the way by tram. Every time we stopped, French women crowded round us bringing cigarettes and tobacco.
“It is not allowed,” said the German sergeant-major, “but I shall be blind.”
Material comforts were even fewer at our new resting-place. There were eight of us and we were put in a large, draughty barn, with bed-boards covered with bracken that was unspeakably lousy. There were no rugs or blankets of any description, and the nights were miserably cold. The eight days we spent there were the worst of our whole captivity. The food, consisting mainly of a stew of bad fish and sauerkraut, was at times uneatable. Indeed, things would have gone very badly with us, had we not managed to make friends with one of our guard. He was very small and very grubby, and introduced himself to us one morning when the commandant was not about.
“Me Alsacian,” he said. “English, French, kamarades. Prussians, ugh! nix.”
From this basis of common sympathies negotiations proceeded as smoothly as linguistic difficulties permitted. He told us that, if we wanted food, the only way was to apply to the Maire. He himself would carry the letter.
Two hours later he returned with a loaf of bread and a packet of lard. It seemed a banquet, and for the rest of our stay he brought us, if not a living, at any rate an existing ration, and on the day that we moved he even came on to the station carrying a sack of provisions.
Our train journey provided an admirable example of official negligences. For officialdom is the same all the world over. In England it was like a game of “Old Maid”; and so it was here. To the commandant at Marchiennes eight prisoners were only so many cards to be got rid of as quickly as possible. As soon as they had been put in a train, and the requisite number of buff sheets dispatched, his job was at an end. What happened in the course of transmission mattered not at all.
And so the eight of us, with two German sentries, were put in a train at Marchiennes at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. We had rations for one day, and we reached Karlsruhe, our destination, at 7 p.m. on the Thursday. In this respect our experience is that of every other prisoner that I have met; only we, by being a small party, fared better than most.