Two minutes later I was striding rapidly towards the station, accompanied by another prisoner, a schoolmaster named E——, who had also been released on a "pass" and whom I have to thank for much assistance subsequently offered.
At last I was free from the torment and brutality of Sennelager Camp. But as I watched the incoming train on that morning of September 16th, 1914, I could not refrain from dwelling upon the lot of the many hapless friends I had left behind, the agonies, miseries, the hopelessness of their position, and their condemnation to unremitting brutal travail which would doubtless continue until the clash of arms had died away. As Sennelager vanished from sight my companion and I gave deep sighs of relief. We felt that we had left Hell behind.
PRISON THREE—KLINGELPUTZ
CHAPTER XVI
FREE ON "PASS" IN COLOGNE
It was two o'clock in the afternoon when I saw the last of Sennelager Camp as the train swung round a curve which blotted the Avernus over which Major Bach reigned supreme from sight if not from memory. The train in which we were travelling, of course, was wholly occupied by Germans. I found it impossible to secure a seat owing to the crowded character of the carriages, and as misfortune would have it I was compelled to stand until I reached my destination.
Naturally being thrown among so many of the enemy I was regarded with a strange interest by my fellow-travellers. They could see I was not a German, and although they did not resort to any provocative word or deed, it would have needed a blind man to have failed to detect their uncompromising hostility towards me. We travelled via Soest, and my position was rendered additionally unnerving because train after train labelled with the flaming Red Cross thundered by, bearing their heavy loads of the German battered and maimed from the battlefields. It was easy to see that the number of the train-loads of wounded was exercising a peculiar effect upon the passengers, for was not this heavy toll of war and the crushed and bleeding flower of the German army coming from the front where the British were so severely mauling the invincible military machine of Europe and disputing effectively their locust-like advance over the fair fields of Belgium and Northern France? Is it surprising under the circumstances that they glowered and frowned at me in a disconcerting and menacing manner?
