They welcomed me to the table. It is surprising what a degree of intimacy can spring up between seven men, all with histories behind, and all with the same hope of getting to England. They were only beginning to find themselves, they were indeed still groping to pick up the threads of reality of a world from which they had been snatched two years before.
The Englishman at my right, a corporal, had been taken prisoner with a bullet in his foot at the retreat from Mons. In the summer of 1916 he had been sent to a punishment work camp near Windau in Courland. I had already heard unsavoury rumours of this camp while I was in Germany, of men forced to toil until they dropped in their tracks, of an Englishman shot simply because his guard was in bad temper. But the most damning arraignment of Windau came from a young Saxon medical student, who told me that after he had qualified, for a commission as second lieutenant he declined to accept it. This was such an unusual occurrence in a country where the army officer is a semi-deity that I was naturally curious to know why.
"I am loyal to the Fatherland," the young Saxon said to me, "and I am not afraid to die. I was filled with enthusiasm to receive a commission, but all that enthusiasm died when I saw the way Russian prisoners were treated in East Prussia and at Windau. I saw them stripped to the waist under orders from the camp officers, tied to trees and lashed until the blood flowed. When I saw one prisoner, weak from underfeeding, cut with switches until he died in the presence of a Berlin captain, my mind was made up. My country has gone too far in making the army officer supreme. I now could see the full significance of Zabern, a significance which I could not realise at the time. During the first part of the war I became angry when outsiders called us barbarians; now I feel sad. I do not blame them. But it is our system that is at fault, and we must correct it. Therefore, although I am an insignificant individual and do not count, I shall, as I love my country, obey the dictates of my conscience. I will not be an officer in the German system."
I thought of that sincere young student while the boat staggered under the onslaughts of heavy seas, and the corporal told of how twelve hours' daily toil on the railway in Courland with rations entirely inadequate for such work, finally put him on the sick list, and he was sent back to Munster in western Germany.
He was then sent into the fields with two companions—the two who were in the group about the table—and with them he seized a favourable opportunity to escape. His companions had tried on previous occasions, each separately, but had been caught, sent back and put into dark cells and given only one meal a day for a long and weakening period. That did not daunt them. The Germans thought that men who had gone through that kind of punishment would not try to escape again. Yet as soon as their strength was restored through their food parcels from home they were off, but in an entirely different direction.
I asked one of them, a little Welshman, where be got the waterproof rubber bag on the floor at his feet, in which were all his earthly belongings. "That used to be the old German farmer's tablecloth," he said.
To-day in Europe there are millions of civilians dressed in military uniform, which fails to hide the fact that their main work of life is not that of the soldier. But the three British soldiers sitting under the smoky brass lamp were of a different sort. Twelve years of service had so indelibly stamped them as soldiers of the King that the make-shift clothing given them in Holland, could not conceal their calling. Their faces were an unnatural white from the terrible experiences which they had undergone, but, like the rest of the Old Army, they were always soldiers, every inch of them.
The two men whom, I had heard talking French on the deck were Belgians. The one had been a soldier at Liege, and had managed to scramble across a ditch after his three days' tramp to Holland, although the sentry's bullet whistled uncomfortably close. He said that his strongest wish was to rejoin the Belgian army so that he might do his part to avenge the death of seven civilian hostages who had been shot before his eyes.
The other Belgian was just over military age, but he wanted to reach England to volunteer. His nerve and resource are certainly all right. He knew of the electrified wire along the Belgian-Dutch frontier, so he brought two pieces of glass with him, and thus held the current of death away from his body while he wriggled through to freedom.
We talked until after midnight. The French captain, formerly an instructor of artillery at Saint Cyr—the West Point and the Sandhurst of France—taken prisoner in the first autumn of the war, was the last to tell his story.