Officers shout orders on the platform. The German soldiers take their seats. En route for Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, etc.... We are prisoners in earnest!
CHAPTER III
IT was right at the beginning of hostilities. The prisoners had been sent to an instruction camp, the buildings of which were still occupied by German recruits.
The men, guarded by sentinels, were at that time herded together on some waste land surrounded by barbed wire; shelter there was none. We dug ourselves holes in the sand as best we could. Some green branches formed a roof; and there, exposed to the rain, we remained night and day, even without straw to lie on or coverings to protect us from the severity of the nights, which were already very cold. The wounded were visited from time to time by a German army doctor; there being no hospital, they suffered still more from the exposure than their comrades did.
Twice a day, at a fixed hour, officers and men filed before the doors of the kitchens. For some time even a French General was to be seen, joining this long line of starving people. He had come to receive with his own hands the bowl that the German cooks refused to give to any but himself. However, a room had been prepared for him in some neighbouring barracks.
The men slept in the open. The tents were not put up till much later; but at the end of a fortnight or three weeks, after an American official had visited the camp, they consented to house the prisoners in stables, considered too unhealthy for horses! Our soldiers were frequently twelve in a box. The Germans, who seem able to foresee everything, did not attach sufficient importance to the question of prisoners, or perhaps imagined these arrangements would do well enough for the two months the war was to last.