The men in the tents confessed that they had been moved by the sounds which penetrated to their ears from the field in which the civilian prisoners had been turned adrift. They immediately enquired after the condition of our boys. Unfortunately we could not yield much information upon this point, as we were still partially in ignorance of the plight of our compatriots. But there was no mistaking the depth of the feeling of pity which went out for "the poor devils of civvies," while the curses and oaths which were rained down upon the head of Major Bach with true British military emphasis and meaning revealed the innermost feelings of our soldiers very convincingly.
Seeing that we were exhausted and shivering from emptiness the R.A.M.C. made a diligent search for food, but the quest was in vain. Their larder like ours was empty. In fact the Tommies themselves were as hard-pushed for food as we were.
I witnessed one incident with an English Tommy which provoked tremendous feeling when related to his comrades. He was walking the field soaked to the skin, perishing from cold produced by lack of food, continuously hitching in his belt to keep his "mess-tin" quiet, and on the brink of collapse. He happened to kick something soft. He picked the object up and to his extreme delight found it to be a piece of black bread, soaked with water, and thickly covered with mud. He made his way to the field kitchen where there happened to be a small fire under the cauldron in which the rations were prepared. He slipped the soddened bread beneath the grate to dry it. While he was so doing, the cook, an insignificant little bully, came along. Learning what the soldier was doing, he stooped down, raked out the fire, and buried the bread among the ashes. Then laughing at his achievement he went on his way.
The soldier, without a murmur, recovered his treasure with difficulty. He moved out into the open, succeeded in finding a few dry sticks, lit a small fire, and placed his bread on top of it. Again he was caught. His warder bustled up, saw the little fire, which he scattered with his feet, and then crunched the small hunk of bread to pieces in the mud and water with his iron heel.
The look that came over the soldier's face at this unprovoked demonstration of heartless cruelty was fearful, but he kept his head. "Lor' blime!" he commented to me when I came up and sympathised with him over his loss, "I could have knocked the god-damned head off the swine and I wonder I didn't."
I may say that during the night the guard announced an order which had been issued for the occasion—no one was to light a fire upon the Field. Even the striking of a match was sternly forbidden. The penalty was to be a bullet, the guards having been instructed to shoot upon the detection of an infraction of the order. One man was declared to have been killed for defying the order intentionally or from ignorance, but of this I cannot say anything definitely. Rumour was just as rife and startling among us on the field as among the millions of a humming city. But we understood that two or three men went raving mad, several were picked up unconscious, one Belgian committed suicide by hanging himself with his belt, while another Belgian was found dead, to which I refer elsewhere.
At 5.30 we were lined up. We were going to get something to eat we were told. But when the hungry, half-drowned souls reached the field kitchen after waiting and shivering in their wet clothes for two and a half hours, it was to receive nothing more than a small basin of the eternal lukewarm acorn coffee. We were not even given the usual piece of black bread.
The breakfast, though nauseating, was swallowed greedily. But it did not satisfy "little Mary" by any means. During my sojourn among German prisons I often felt hungry, but this term is capable of considerable qualification. Yet I think on this occasion it must have been the superlative stage of hunger. The night upon the Field had come upon my illness from which I had never recovered completely. It was a feeling such as I have never experienced before nor since, and I do not think it can ever be approached again.
It is difficult to describe the sensation. I walked about with a wolfish startled glance, scanning the ground eagerly, as if expecting Mother Earth to relieve me of my torment. The pain within my stomach was excruciating. It was not so much a faint and empty feeling but as if a thousand devils were pulling at my "innards" in as many different ways, and then having stretched the organs to breaking point had suddenly released them to permit them to fly back again like pieces of elastic, to mix up in an inextricable tangle which the imps then proceeded to unravel with more force than method. My head throbbed and buzzed, precipitating a strange dizziness which seemed determined to force me to my knees. I chewed away viciously but although the movement of the jaws apparently gave a certain relief from illusion the reaction merely served to accentuate the agony down below.
As I reeled about like a drunken man, my eyes searching the ground diligently for anything in the eating line, no matter what it might be, I found a piece of bread. As I clutched it in my hands I regarded it with a strange maniacal look of childish delight. But it was a sorry prize. It was saturated until it could not hold another drop of water, and I think there was quite as much mud as bread. I wrung the water out with my hands and then between two of us we devoured it ravenously, swallowing the mud as contentedly as the bread, and not losing a single crumb. It was a sparse mouthful, but it was something, and it certainly stayed the awful feeling in the stomach to a certain degree for a little while.