I ventured to protest. I reminded the major of the assurances he had previously given me. I repeated to him that in my quality as a physician I ought not to be deprived of my liberty. I asked him why was it that the competent authorities at Berlin had not been informed of the medical services I had been rendering at the hospital and to the civil population since the beginning of the war? Altogether I made a very strong plea in protest against the execution of the latest order.
Perturbed and embarrassed the major mumbled some sort of an explanation. The instructions had “come from someone higher in authority than himself”; he had “tried to explain my case to them,” but they “would not hear him”; “all the British subjects in Germany and occupied territory were to be interned without delay.” The major assumed an air of haughtiness I had not noticed hitherto.
“At two o’clock this afternoon you will have to depart,” he said. “A non-commissioned officer will accompany you to Berlin and thence to Ruhleben.”
Ruhleben is the internment camp for civilians of British nationality. The shadow of a very real sorrow pervaded that room. I did not know what to say. Two hours only remained in which my wife and I might be together. She persisted in her entreaties that she might bear me company to Germany, only to meet with an absolute refusal every time.
The Major had the delicacy (?) to inform her that her company, even to the station merely, was not desirable!
Punctually at two o’clock on June 6 a non-commissioned officer stood in the room to which during the past three days we had become reconciled, as to a new little home where the children, living only a few miles away, might visit us once or twice a week.
All was declared ready for my departure. It was a solemn moment, and profoundly sad. My wife and I were separated. I did not know then–and it was perhaps better–that I should never see her again in this world.
At three o’clock the train arrived at Brussels, where we had to wait for an hour to connect with the express which ran from Lille to Libau in Russia.
By four o’clock we were steaming at a good speed in the direction of Berlin, passing through the country sights of Belgium. We crossed through Louvain, which had been burned, and through a large number of towns and villages which showed the effects of bombardment and other horrors of war; thence through Liege, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Cologne, where we arrived at about nine o’clock.