"The damned English swine can wait!" This was the dictum of those in authority and the underlings were only too eager to fulfil it to the letter. If there were the slightest opportunity to deprive us of our food, on the flimsy pretext that we had not answered the summons with sufficient alacrity, it was eagerly grasped. Under these conditions we had to go supperless to bed, unless we could procure something at the canteen or our more fortunate comrades came to our assistance by sharing with us the comestibles they had purchased.
Some ten days after the appearance of Major Bach a new target for his savagery and venom appeared. This was a party of Belgian priests. I shall never forget their entrance to the camp. We were performing necessary daily duties outside our barracks when our attention was drawn to an approaching party surrounded by an abnormally imposing force of soldiers. Such a military display was decidedly unusual and we naturally concluded that a prisoner of extreme significance, and possibly rank, had been secured and was to be interned at Sennelager.
When the procession drew nearer and we saw that the prisoners were priests our curiosity gave way to feelings of intense disgust. They were twenty-two in number and were garbed just as they had been torn from prayer by the ruthless soldiers. Some were venerable men bordering on seventy. Subsequently I discovered that the youngest among them was fifty-four years of age, but the average was between sixty and seventy.
The reverend fathers with clasped hands moved precisely as if they were conducting some religious ceremonial among their flocks in their beloved churches. But the pace was too funereal for the advocates of the goose-step. They hustled the priests into quicker movement, not in the rough manner usually practised with us, but by clubbing the unfortunate religionists across the shoulders with the stocks of their rifles, lowering their bayonets to them and giving vent to blood-freezing curses, fierce oaths, coarse jeers, and rewarding the desperate endeavours of the priests to fulfil the desires of their captors with mocking laughter and ribaldry.
The brutal manner in which they were driven into the camp as if they were sheep going to the slaughter, made our blood boil. More than one of us clenched our fists and made a half-movement forward as if to interfere. But we could do nothing and so had to control our furious indignation.
However, the moment the priests entered Sennelager we received a respite. Officers and guards turned their savagery and spite from us to visit it upon these unhappy victims by night and by day and at every trick and turn. Clubbing with the rifle was the most popular means of compelling them to obey this, or to do that. More than once I have seen one of the aged religionists fall to the ground beneath a rifle blow which struck him across the back. No indignity conceivable, besides a great many indescribable, was spared those venerable men, and they bowed to their revolting treatment with a meekness which seemed strangely out of place.
After one more than usually ferocious manifestation of attack I questioned our guard to ascertain the reason for this unprecedented treatment and why the priests had been especially singled out for such infamous ferocity.
"Ach!" he hissed with a violent expectoration, "They fired upon our brave comrades in Belgium. They rang the bells of their churches to summon the women to the windows to fire upon our brothers as they passed. The dogs! We'll show them! We'll break them before we have finished. They won't want to murder our brave troops again!"
The words were jerked out with such fearful fury that I refrained from pursuing the subject. Later I had a chat with one of the oldest priests. It was only with difficulty we could understand one another, but it was easy to discover that the charges were absolutely unfounded, and were merely the imagination of the distorted and savage Prussian mind when slipped from the leash to loot, assault and kill for the first time in his life.
A night or two later a few of us were purchasing food at the canteen. Suddenly four soldiers came tumbling in, dragging with them one of the most aged of the Fathers. He must have been on the verge of three-score and ten, and with his long white beard he presented an impressive, proud, and stately figure. But the inflamed Prussian has no respect for age. The old man was bludgeoned against the counter and at his abortive attempts to protect himself the soldiers jeered and laughed boisterously.