On being dismissed, we went off to our rooms and very soon found out all about our new prison.
Imagine dirty sand, covering a layer of peat with water two feet underneath it, enclosed with a barbed wire fence. In this area put four long low wooden huts with tarred felt roofs, three much smaller ones, three pumps, a long latrine, a hospital hut and some cells, and you have the sum total of the buildings in the camp.
The three long low huts held 390 officers, each hut divided roughly into eight to ten rooms. Many of the rooms held sixteen officers, and so crowded were the beds in them that three pairs had to touch in many instances, despite repeated and varied ways of re-arrangement being tried.
The latrines were very close and handy, so much so in fact, that their ends came to within ten paces of the living-rooms at the end of two of the huts. As the latrines were never cleared out, the atmosphere in these near huts was something too appalling for words, especially if a west wind was blowing.
The drinking-water had been passed as fit for human beings by the German sanitary authorities. For all that, the majority of us only drank tea and coffee, etc., requiring boiling water. The water was brownish and smelt abominably.
We became expert laundry hands, as we had to wash our own clothes, and so learnt the art from experience.
Many of the prisoners were able to see the comic side of life in this place fortunately, and so made the best of a bad job.
As the bath-house was outside of the wire fence, we could only get to it by going on parole, or by being marched out in groups. This naturally meant that the turn for baths did not come round too often. If one refused to give parole for this purpose, a bath could be got twice a week with luck.
The natural outcome of this was that everyone used to bath under the pumps which were situated between the living-huts. It was a common sight to see between twenty and thirty naked figures throwing water over each other round the pumps.
It was absolutely impossible to play tennis or football in this camp, as there was no space in which to do such things. The little ground lying between the living huts had been planted with vegetables by the Germans before our arrival. It was against all orders to walk across this ground. A Belgian private soldier, acting as officer's servant in the camp, did so once, and was banged into cells for his offence. No officer was put in cells for this, but that was not due to the lack of opportunity. I think the Germans did not want to cause trouble with their English officer prisoners, so refrained from rash acts of this nature.