A “VERBOTEN” SKETCH.
VIII
Beeskow Lager
The journey from Carlsruhe, in Baden, to Beeskow in der Mark presented a marked contrast to the nightmare, the shivering and sleepless progression between Le Cateau and Carlsruhe in mid-winter. We occupied second-class carriages, well and warmly upholstered, and these we held without change throughout the journey of thirty odd hours.
The people encountered en route were entirely civil, and not over-curious. Every second woman seemed to bear upon her back—besides the apparent burden of the war—a basket; every third man a rucksack. Everywhere were visible evidences of intensive agriculture; the making the most of a possibly not too opulent soil. Tillage right up the hillslopes; potato patches almost up to the six-foot way. Continually we alternated field and wood; brown boles of fir and pine, with, hidden in their duskiness, the white stems of the silver birch, like flashes of summer lightning.
We had just a glimpse of Heidelberg, with its castle on the hill, and arrived at Frankfurt towards six o’clock in the evening. We marched through the crowded station—which in one of its wings bore evidence of a recent air raid—to a hall where we had a meal of macaroni and rissoles served by a pert and self-possessed boy of eleven clothed in a precocious suit of evening dress.
Next morning Weimar, with its quiet memories of Goethe and Schiller; Merseburg, with its vast and unquiet Krupp works, springing up here in precaution against possible air raids on Essen. And so, about nine of the clock on Saturday evening, after a divergence from the main line, the train pulled up at Beeskow, where it became at once apparent that practically all the youngsters, and a large number of the grown-ups of the town, had turned out to witness our arrival.
It was the nearest thing to taking part on the wrong side at a spectacle or victory that I had yet experienced—of being “butcher’d to make a Roman holiday”—and yet it was soon evident that there was not a sufficiency of “hate” in the whole crowd to cover a 50-pfennig piece. To most of the children this was the first sight of the Engländer, and they had obviously expected much more of monstrosity and oddity than was forthcoming, and were disposed to be mirthful on very easy provocation.
A Lieutenant of the Cameron Highlanders, dressed in an arrangement of the garb of old Gaul, which permitted of carpet slippers, puttees, and an orderly’s peaked cap, consequently received most of the attention.