It is the next day, some time after morning appel, which the General has attended and which has passed without incident. The senior British officer, the better to forward his many just claims, has ordered a punctiliously correct parade.
From Room 69 on the second floor of Kaserne A we may get a good view of the interview which, one way or the other, is destined to fashion our existence for the immediate future. The General having made a tour of the Camp is about to pass through the gate into the precincts of the Kommandantur. Our senior officer will apply for an interview. The General will doubtless unbend so far as to go through the form of one.
He is surrounded by his staff, as well as by the old Camp Commandant, with his insufferable Camp Officer, the Paymaster, and the other officers attached to the camp. They are grouped respectfully behind their Chief, very splendid in their best uniforms, and stiff as pokers. Every now and again he turns and addresses a question to one of them, and then the poker back grows even stiffer, and the gloved hand goes up to the peaked cap in salute and stays there till the General is pleased to turn away again. How we used to loathe this German habit. One conceived a frantic longing to tear their hands forcibly away and fasten them down. It seemed so thoroughly Prussian, this habit of talking to their superiors as if they were shading their eyes from the sun! How infinitely better our own brisk method seemed than this long-drawn apotheosis!
The interview is graciously accorded and takes place on the bleak patch of grass graced by the euphemistic title of Spielplatz and already worn bare by the trampling to and fro of 500 pairs of feet. Here, against the back wall of the squalid cook-house, across one of the dining room tables (symbol of conference!), ringed in by smug supercilious Huns, and with the eyes of his own countrymen riveted on him from the adjoining barrack, our senior officer joins the issue. It exemplifies the scant attention which has been paid to the spokesman of the British community that the interview should be held in the open air, almost as an afterthought, instead of, as it should properly have been held, in the Kommandantur itself.
The senior British officer has no enviable task, but he has at least the armour of experience and knows how far he may go and to what he is entitled. Years of this sort of thing—ever since First Ypres—have taught him that only too well. There is nothing novel to him in this interview; only that the nature of the Hun opposite to him partakes of the attributes of the fox rather than of the pig, and that he has if possible a stiffer job in prospect than ever heretofore, and one which he would gladly delegate.
It is no sinecure being senior officer in a bad German prison camp. “The stiffest job I ever took on in my life,” a veteran of both the Boer and the European war was heard to say once. “I have never known a position where one weak link in one’s own argument, one single individual who is beyond control, will so completely crack one’s line of defence.”
But of that anon. For the present we will follow Major Wyndham at his uphill task, as the interview begins. He trusts to his own moderate German rather than to an interpreter and speaks direct to the Fox, who listens with eyes askance and a sneer on his face.
The first complaint is the building accommodation. It is at present quite inadequate. There are no public rooms, no library, one solitary cook-house, and no bathroom. When are these going to be allowed, please?
The General confers. The extra cook-house and the bathroom will be put up as soon as possible. As to the public rooms and the library, there is nothing in the Regulations which prescribes for these. They have been permitted in other camps, but that was a luxury.
“But every German officers’ camp in England has at least one public room. It is well known.”