Towards the afternoon of the third day we reached Munden, Hanover, where we were detrained, taken to a waiting-room, and supplied by the Red Cross with a much-needed ration of hot soup and bread. After this we were paraded, divided from the men, and marched to the camp of Munden, which is situated on the banks of the river Weser, at a distance of about a mile and a half from the station. Here I again pointed out my condition to the officer in charge of our party, but gained nothing, not even a conveyance to the camp. The officer said that a conveyance was coming for the wounded. I replied, “So is Christmas,” but evidently he did not see it. Anyhow, the outcome of it was we had to walk. We arrived at the camp some time during the evening, and were immediately segregated in a room by ourselves, where we found some palliasses thrown on the ground, filled with straw. Some coarse sheets and blankets were also provided, also a washing-stand and a bootjack. I mention the latter because the German orderly told off to look after us kept on picking up this beastly bootjack, gesticulating that everything was provided, even a bootjack. The following day we were again interrogated, and personal effects, such as letters, notebooks, and money, some of which my brother officers still had in their possession, were temporarily confiscated. The equivalent of the money, however, was returned in German coinage. After this we were allotted rooms, and found, to our disgust, that we were to be separated. The Germans, having found out that the British were very much happier when by themselves, arranged that one British officer always occupied a room filled with officers of any other nationality but his own. It was in little ways such as this that the Boche showed a marked hostility to British officers in comparison with that shown to the Russian or French. In the room to which I was personally sent there were already fifteen Russians.
Shortly after being allotted rooms I was conducted to hospital, where on the ground floor of the building the wound in my ankle was satisfactorily dressed; but they did not seem to know what to do with the body wound. Finding that three of the ribs were broken on the right side, they made some sort of an attempt to set and bind them. The doctor in attendance was a bumptious little beast of about nineteen or twenty years of age, and did not seem to know very much about his job. After this I returned to my room full of Russians and took to my bed.
The camp at Munden was an old oil factory, and had been hastily turned into a camp for prisoners of war. There were about eight hundred prisoners there at the time of our arrival, but more came after we had been there a month or two. The sleeping-room had practically no furniture of any kind. A shelf, on which tin basins were placed, served as a wash-stand, and there were a couple of pails for water. Two small tables and about a dozen chairs, with a small shelf about five inches wide passing over the head of each bed, completed the furnishing of the rooms. Besides the sleeping-rooms, part of the ground floor of the factory was utilised as an eating-hall. The accommodation here consisted of a few dirty tables and chairs. To add to the discomfort the oily ceilings and walls had been whitewashed, to create the appearance of cleanliness. Naturally it cracked off in drying, with the result that one’s hair, eyes, and clothes became covered with fine powdered lime, mixed with the dust which filtered through the boards of the floor of the sleeping-rooms above. Canteen, hospital, and bath-room were also portioned off the ground floor. The canteen cooked and supplied the daily rations. Here we could buy bread, cheese, jam, and coffee, and occasionally tinned fruit, also sundry toilet articles.
The daily ration was not appetising nor particularly varied. Black bread and coffee every day for breakfast. The midday meal consisted, almost without exception, of either fish and potatoes or pork and potatoes. The fish was very seldom eatable, but the pork often quite fresh. Even on the day when it was not, so long as one had not too keen an eye for colour, it tasted quite good. I refer to the rainbow hues that could often be seen reflected from its surface.
Certainly this method of serving the rations did not help to make them appetising. The orderlies had to wait in long queues in front of the canteen for four or five hours before the mid-day meal till their turn came to be served. They would then order and pay for the ration allowed to the number of officers they happened to be appointed to. Their rations were then thrown into ordinary slop-pails, and in these served to the officers. Potatoes were the principal mainstay, though the cheese and butter were quite good. The black bread was horrible, and caused violent indigestion, owing to its damp and doughy condition.
The best part of the camp were the baths, which were quite good, hot and cold water being obtainable up to midday, Sunday excepted. The space set apart for an exercise-ground was a muddy stretch of about ninety yards square, surrounded by two lines of wire. Into this yard, protruding from the ground floor of the factory, ran a long wooden latrine, which was the most dreadful place imaginable, merely a series of holes cut in the ground, with no form of drainage. The only attempt at draining them was made by our own orderlies, who pumped them out, and disposed of the contents in another large hole just outside the wire. On a warmish day, with the wind blowing towards the camp, it became impossible to take exercise outside at all; and towards February 1915, in order to visit these same latrines, it became absolutely necessary to cover over one’s mouth and nose. In this same yard the general rubbish-heap of the camp was piled with every kind of rotting refuse, on which flies swarmed. Indoors the camp was infested with lice, especially the hospital-room. The Russian officers had been suffering from this pestilence for a long time before the arrival of the British, and no attempt had been made on the part of the Germans to rid the camp of this vermin, either by fumigating or in any other manner.
Towards the end of March, when I had been removed from my room to a bed in the hospital situated on the ground floor, I asked one of our officers, who, owing to a great family name, seemed to have more influence with the Boches, to complain to the commandant of the appalling state of filth reigning in the hospital, some of the beds being literally alive with many thousands of lice. The outcome of this complaint resulted in the importation of incinerators to the camp, after which things became distinctly better.
CHAPTER III
THE DREARINESS OF CAMP LIFE
During the period of our captivity at Munden the time passed more heavily, I think, than at any later period, owing to the fact that we had practically no reading matter. Parcels and letters from home were very scarce. No daily papers nor periodicals of any sort were allowed, not even German, only a rag called The Continental Times: A Journal for Americans in Germany—probably the most scandalous paper ever produced, copies of which should certainly be printed after the declaration of peace, and would be worth a guinea a copy, I can assure you. There were only about a dozen English novels in the camp, and no means of obtaining more; consequently, to keep one’s mind occupied, one had to read them over and over again; also, to make things worse, smoking was prohibited as a general strafe, because some Russian officers sang their national hymn in the yard one Sunday—confinement to cells, along with the common felons in the civilian jail, situated in the town, being the penalty if caught smoking. Personally I bribed certain guards to procure cigarettes for me. It can well be imagined that one had to pay heavily for them, about fourpence apiece, for a very low-class cigarette made of German tobacco, being an average price. Even then one could only manage to buy a limited number. Often enough a cigarette would be divided in half and shared with one’s pal, so that one seldom got more than a few whiffs. Cigarettes arriving in parcels from home were, of course, not delivered to us.
My parcels from home began to come fairly regularly towards the end of February 1915, having been a very long time on the way. Occasionally books were included, which the Huns would take months to censor; and one was not always certain of receiving these, even though written years before the outbreak of war, lest they should contain information on any subject which might prove useful to prisoners.