Fortunately, almost all the politicals or prisoners of war obtained extra sustenance in some way or another, although the majority of the Poles and Russians did so only occasionally and in small quantities.
As far as the British were concerned, we got enough food from England in our parcels to do entirely without the prison diet. Those amongst us who found themselves temporarily short of eatables simply drew from others who were better supplied.
I had had a foretaste of prison in Cologne in November, 1914, which had not been encouraging. Consequently I felt apprehensive enough, while mounting the stairs behind the N.C.O. on the morning of my arrival.
The prison being very full, only a convict cell ten feet long and five wide was available for me, into which I was thrust without ceremony. A small window, barred, and high up in the narrow wall, faced the door. The bed on the left was hinged to the brick work and folded flat against it. A stool in the corner by the door was balanced on the other side by the hot-water pipes for heating. Farther along, toward the window, a small double shelf, with three pegs underneath, took the place of wardrobe, cupboard, and bookcase. It held a Prayer Book, a New Testament, an earthenware plate, bowl and mug, a wooden salt-cellar, a tumbler, and a knife, fork, and spoon. Against one side of it hung a small printed volume of prison rules and a piece of cardboard, showing a dissected drawing of the shelves, with the contents in regulation order, and an inventory underneath. In the center of the wall a small table was hinged and fastened like the bed. A Bible text above decorated the cell.
When in the course of the morning bed-linen and a towel were issued to me, I was vastly pleased. I had not expected such luxuries. The former consisted of a coarse gray bedcloth, an enormous bag of the same material, but checkered in blue, and another small one of the same kind. The big bag was to serve as a cover for the two blankets, which were to be folded inside; the small one was a pillow-slip.
Dinner meant another welcome interruption in the difficult task of settling down, and, since it was Saturday, turned out to be bean soup. Although the quantity was far short of what I required, particularly in my famished state, it appeared so tasty, so far beyond anything I had been accustomed to in camp as far as German rations were concerned, that I was beginning to think myself in clover.
Still, I was in solitary confinement. How long was this state of affairs to last? I had asked the man in charge of the canteen, a British prisoner who paid me a visit in his official capacity. He did not know. He had had four and a half months after his escape of the previous summer. The N.C.O.’s refused to commit themselves, if they answered my questions at all. So I tried to face the prospect of being shut up in a small cell, with no company but my own, for five months. On this basis I worked out the final date, made a very rough calendar, and thereafter at 11 A.M., the hour of my arrival in the Stadtvogtei, marked with great ceremony the termination of every twenty-four hours in “solitary.”
I was not examined again, contrary to my expectations, and my clever plans, framed in Vreden prison, of “diddling the Boche” into a forgiving frame of mind could not be tested. My hopes of a glimpse of Ruhleben camp and my friends were not realized. The term of my solitary confinement evidently was regarded as a state secret, not to be communicated even to the person whom it most concerned. This was a policy always pursued by the Kommandantur in Berlin—whether out of sheer malice or callous indifference I don’t know. Since I was the first escaper to be punished under a new regulation, there was no precedent to form an opinion from; but I did not know that, and consequently expected the same term of “solitary” as other men before me. Those who came after me were not permitted to have much doubt about the subject. We saw to that.
On the morning of the second day I was told that, in addition to solitary confinement, punishment diet had been ordered by the powers that were. One day out of every three (for four weeks) I was to receive bread and water only. It sounded unpleasant. The canteen man, who came to see me every day for a few minutes, assured me that this was something new, quite outside his experience, and, being pressed, cheered me vastly by consenting to my expressed opinion that it might, perhaps, indicate a correspondingly short term of “solitary.”