A broad, level, methodically cultivated plain; a horizon of wooded slopes with, every few degrees or so, the suggestion of winding valleys and watercourses; to the northward, the river Weser, Nature’s barrier beyond the wire, flowing between us and freedom, and visible from our upper windows in an occasional gleam of silver against the shadows of the steep further bank; to the west the town, red-roofed and picturesque with adjoining allotments; on the edge of the allotments a large square walled enclosure containing two very recent architectural abominations, eyesores in the general prospect—to wit, Kaserne A and B of the Offizier Gefangenen Lager[[2]] Holzminden, that highly advertised Brunswickian retreat which, on a day in September 1917, flung open its hospitable gates to its first English guests, an advance instalment of about thirty from Karlsruhe. Such—in a paragraph—was Holzminden Camp and its environment.
[2]. Officer prisoners-of-war camp.
The new Camp had been freely boomed; the Lager “Poldhu” had got hold of it and done wonders with it—that mysterious Lager “Poldhu” of Germany in war time, which spoke not through wires or wireless and seemingly lacked all means of transmission, but which percolated, none the less, from Lager to Lager in some mysterious way, so that what should by rights have remained a close secret in the Kommandantur[[3]] at X in Baden was known all over the Camp at Y in Silesia within a week or so. Thus it was noised abroad in a dozen camps that four had got out from Freiburg and were still at large, that a tunnel scheme had been discovered at the last moment at Magdeburg, and that poor old C— had got “jug” again for hitting a sentry in the parcel office at Ströhen.
[3]. Kommandantur means in a prison camp that part set apart for the German personnel, and includes the Commandant’s office.
Holzminden—so ran the “Poldhu”—was to be the real thing, a prisoner’s Mecca—fine, brand-new buildings, spacious grounds, good scenery, good air. The report was discussed and swallowed or pooh-poohed according to temperament. The Schwarmstedt crowd took the news of their impending departure thither with a pronounced sniff. They were—had been for several months—in the Xth Army Corps Area. Holzminden also was in the Xth Army Corps. There could no good thing come out of the Xth Army Corps. Schwarmstedt was in fact sufficiently sceptical of the Xth Army Corps to have remained gladly in its flea-ridden huts, had it not been that the prospect of a winter on the bog-wastes in those flimsy buildings seemed almost intolerable. That fate was reserved in the actual event for Italians, with the usual leavening of neglected Russians.
Accordingly, an advance party of the ‘nineteen-fourteeners’ and ‘-fifteeners’ of Schwarmstedt packed up their household gods and suffered themselves to be transported to Holzminden. They were told authoritatively that this was going to be merely a stopping-place on the way to Holland and exchange; so they threw chests-full of tins at the starving Russians who were remaining behind, left their heavy luggage to follow after them, and arrived only with the clothes they stood up in and a suit-case of tins to last them till they reached the border. The border took most of them three months to reach; the suit-cases were empty in under a week. It was galling, after having been led to believe that they would be dining at the Hague in a few days, to find that they were to remain prisoners for an indefinite period in a camp in which the feeding arrangements were, to put it mildly, as yet incompletely organised. But they had acted unwisely. Three and a half years of doubt and uncertainty should have taught them better than to travel empty-handed so far from their refilling point, or to rely on exchange until they were actually at the border.