Although the guards in our railway carriage had become quite friendly by now, they did not relax their vigilance, and it was quite evident that they would not sleep all at the same time during the night which was approaching.
I watched very carefully that night, but never once did I catch them all unconscious at the same moment.
There can be no doubt whatever that they had had very stringent orders on the subject, owing probably to the escape of nine British officers from trains in the last three months.
The same watchfulness was displayed by the Germans throughout the train, as we found out on comparing notes afterwards.
The journey continued throughout the next day and we passed through Minden in the late afternoon.
We had now made up our minds that Stralsund, one of the rumoured destinations, was to be our new "home." Great was our surprise when we found that our train had stopped at a small town called Schwarmstedt, in Hanover, and that our new camp was some eight miles from there. The guards got out and formed a close cordon completely round the train and we were told that we were not to be marched off till daybreak. The German soldiers from our carriage not employed on this cordon duty fetched us water at our request and we settled down to sleep for a few hours until the time for moving came. We were turned out of the train at 3 a.m. and after being formed up in fours we waited for an hour or so.
We had a grand opportunity of studying the Prussian method of enforcing obedience and smartness in the men during this wait. A captain and a sergeant-major kind of man, fairly screamed at the privates. On several occasions, livid with rage, one or other of them rushed at some hapless wretch and roared at him in sentences containing very choice German words—hardly of the endearment variety.
Our carriage guards had previously told us that the major, captain and sergeant-major were "Schweine" of the worst type, but that the lieutenant was liked well enough. We could now judge for ourselves.
At last we got the order to move off, our hand baggage being left behind to be brought up by a miniature railway train especially constructed for the purpose of supplying the prison camps.
The camp with several others, as we found out afterwards, was situated on the Lüneburg Heide, some eight miles east-north-east of the town of Schwarmstedt and five or six miles on the Berlin side of the river Aller.