Leaving them, we came to a gate in the barbed wire fences, and passed on foot through a double line of sentries into the main street of the prison camp. One saw on either side rows of long, newly erected, unpainted sheds, separated by side streets of muddy ground and fenced off from the main camp street by more barbed wire. One's first impression was that prisoners of war are among the piteous objects on the face of the earth. You see swarms of shuffling men who before the fortunes of war went against them must have looked smart and soldierly. Now in their uniforms they seemed self-conscious and absurd, sheepish almost because they had to wear regimentals in the presence of the enemy. What must have been a trim-looking British marine caught my eye. His olive drab was tattered and stained; he must have lost his cap or sold it to buy tobacco. What he wore was a battered derby, picked up Heaven knows where! It was characteristic, I afterwards learned, of the entire camp.
As we walked up the main street, groups of prisoners ran down the side streets and gathering by the barbed wire fences, stared curiously. We saw a whole battalion of English jackies, more marines, and then swarms of Russians, heavy and stupid looking. Only one enclosure, the Colonel explained, was filled with Frenchmen.
The first place that Lieutenant Colonel Alberti put at our disposal was the camp kitchen. We entered one of the long sheds and came into a steaming room, where instantly the chief cook and his assistants stood at attention. The chief cook, following the fashion of his kind, was dressed in white from head to foot, but his assistants wore the field uniforms of Russia, smeared with grease. The eye took in a cement floor that supported three enormous caldrons, each one big enough for three men to hide in and brimming with a white-looking mixture.
"They are getting supper ready," explained the Lieutenant Colonel, and he went on to say how the prisoners were fed. "That is a stew made of cabbage and meat; you can see the pieces of meat in it. At four o'clock in the afternoon, and at six-thirty in the morning, the prisoners are given a soup similar to this. Then in the middle of the day they get sausage and bread. Of course we change the diet; very often they have coffee in the morning, also."
It did not sound very promising; nor did the stuff in the caldrons look inviting. I asked the Lieutenant Colonel if I might taste some of the stew. To my surprise he was perfectly willing; and to my further surprise I found it to be excellent. Far from being tasteless, it was evidently prepared by a good chef, and there were sufficient pieces of meat to provide ample nourishment for a man partaking of that dish twice a day; certainly he would not be underfed, and in a prison camp one does not expect delicacies.
As we left the cookroom, the Lieutenant Colonel told us that the eight thousand five hundred men in this particular section of the camp were fed in fifty minutes, a statistic suggestive of German efficiency. From the kitchen we visited one of the sheds where the prisoners sleep. Leading the way, the officer threw open a wooden door. Instantly some one shouted a command in Russian; there was a scuffling of feet and the prisoners jumped up from their mattresses, struck attention and saluted. At the thought of being compelled to sleep in that room, cold chills ran up one's spine. In justice to the Germans it must be said that they build the place clean; they furnished it with new clean bedding; they do everything humanly possible to keep it clean.
Given that same number of Russians, two hundred and fifty, put them in that same sized room, their mattresses in four rows, each mattress flush against the other, transport that shed into Russia and leave those men there without German supervision to make them keep reasonably clean, and you would get one result—cholera. As it is, every prisoner at the Doeberitz camp and every other prison camp in Germany—and I later visited many of them—can thank fortune that he was taken prisoner by a nation that knows how to keep things clean.
Passing through the long room with the Russians standing on either side, bewildered at the sight of foreigners, noting the many windows for ventilation, one was glad to get out into the open air. There the Lieutenant Colonel confirmed something you had been thinking.
"It's best not to get too near those fellows," he said. "We do our best to make them keep clean, but they've all got lice." Then the officer had his little joke. "For a few days before we had these quarters ready we had to keep all nationalities together, so the Englishmen caught it from the Russians. They've been scrubbing ever since, but then they should share everything. Are they not allies?"
Walking up and down the side streets of the Russian section one saw faces pressed against the window panes, others peering from behind the doors, while others boldly came out to view the Lieutenant Colonel's guest. Here one noticed the difference in the Russian soldier. Two distinct types, one with the predominance of Tatar blood, heavy faced and tiny eyed, as devoid of expression as a pudgy Japanese; but there was the other Russian, the man from the North, more alert looking, who grinned at you as you went by, and seemed to see something funny in it.