Wounded and a Prisoner of War, by an Exchanged Officer

by Malcolm V. Hay

In a much-thumbed copy of the 'Figaro,' dated October 25th—a copy which, it was said, had been dropped from an aeroplane, and which we secretly circulated from ward to ward—we read the story of Ypres, vague reports of which we had heard from German soldiers, who were told by their chiefs, and firmly believed, that the objective now before them was first Calais and then London. We heard that, once Calais had fallen—and who could doubt that it would fall?—the famous big guns that had done such deeds at Liége and Antwerp would batter down the defences of Dover and sweep a passage across the Channel for the German troop-ships. It was Bismarck, I think, who, looking over London from the top of St Paul's, exclaimed regretfully, "Was für Plünder!" On this "Plünder" the mind of the German was now fixed; and soldiers billeted in the town talked grandly of the punishment to be inflicted on England for having treacherously hatched a cowardly plot for the destruction of the German Empire.

The bulletin of war news, posted up each morning outside the Kommandantur, boasted each day of the capture of countless Russian and French prisoners. One day in November the Cathedral bells were rung to celebrate the victory of German arms in the East. All such official displays of cheerfulness could not hide from our observant notice that all was not well with the German armies. The glorious victories always took place at the other end of Europe.

But nothing was published officially about the military situation on the Western front. German soldiers back from the trenches of Arras spoke bitterly of their failure to capture the French positions. Rumour said that the German casualties between Arras and Ypres amounted to over 100,000 killed. Arras was known to us as "Le Tombeau des Allemands." Reports from Valenciennes told of crowded hospitals, train-loads of wounded, and train-loads of dead. Somewhere behind the line of battle, not very far from Cambrai, there are large brick-fields. Here it was that a crematorium was built. A tale was told of trains that passed in the night, of open trucks in which men, limp and with nodding heads, stood upright, packed in close array. By the light of some dim country station lamp the corpses in their blue-grey uniform had been seen and recognised, though hidden by blood and earth, fresh from the field on which they had fallen. Even for the Boches this was too horrible an end, to travel in such manner to the grave, strung together like bundles of asparagus.

At times it would seem as if Martin Luther was right when he wrote in 1527 that the Germans are "a heathenish, nay utterly bestial, nation." But I do not hold with the judgment of this first apostle of frightfulness. The German nation consists of the High Command, with its hordes of obedient slave-drivers, and the rest of the nation, which in the inner chambers of the High Command is referred to as the mob—die Menge. The High Command is certainly heathenish, and may be looked upon as utterly bestial, in view of the fact that they have replaced the elementary principles of honour by some sort of jungle law of their own making.

Germany at Home! A Member of the Medical Staff at Cambrai.

But there are still symptoms of humanity left in the mob, something of human sympathy and of the brotherhood of man, which even at Cambrai made itself felt on rare occasions. Such an occasion was a visit to the Salle cinq of Herr Arntz. It was at the time when I was confined to bed, as much by the fear of Germany as by the paralysis, and on one of the darkest days of November. Mme. Buquet sat by my bedside, as she often used to do of an afternoon when the day's work was over, and spoke of a German who had called at the hospital a few days before, asking for her by name. He had stood out in the corridor waiting for her to come, bare headed, closely cropped, in the uniform of a private soldier, and not until he spoke did she recognise a friend. They had not met for three years, and the place of their parting—the Black Forest in the spring-time. Herr Arntz, then a young student in chemistry on his holiday tour, had now passed his degree as Doctor der Chemie. In spite of weak eyesight and the wearing of blue spectacles, he had been called up shortly after the outbreak of war, and was doing railway duty at Cambrai. So much and more had Mme. Buquet told me of her friend on that afternoon when he came again to see her.

It was cold, dark, and inhospitable in the corridor, and she brought him into the Salle cinq, where the gas lamps, which had just been lit, gave the room a touch of homely comfort. Perhaps it was the Numéro 6 who had called for morphia, or some other wounded man who required attention, so that Mme. Buquet left her friend sitting alone not very far from my bedside. I cherish no friendly feeling towards any Boche, yet there was something about this one which commanded my attention. This was not the manner of our usual German visitors—to sit there quietly and as if ashamed.

I started conversation with a hybrid sentence in French and German, which encouraged Herr Arntz to draw up his chair closer to my bed. There was nothing remarkable in the subject of our conversation. His attitude towards the war was that of a fatalist towards an earthquake; he showed a real sympathy for my state of health and the effect of my wound, choosing strange and almost unintelligible phrases in his efforts to speak the French tongue.

"Ah, mais 'le cerf' il n'est pas touché," then you will get well. That was good. And to me when I would speak of der Krieg, "let us forget it for a moment." How could this quiet gentleman and I, lying sick, be at war? Was it indeed wrong, as many said at the 106, thus to converse with a Boche? Should I have refused my hand at parting? My friend, so I must call him for his kindness, lies in an honourable grave somewhere along the long battle line. A year later, promoted from guarding railway stations, blue spectacles and all, he "fell at the head of his company." One of the mob—die Menge.