Wounded and a Prisoner of War, by an Exchanged Officer

by Malcolm V. Hay

Of the three soldiers, Anderson is the only one who has lived to tell the story of what befell after leaving the courtyard of the 106 on Dec. 7, 1914. Anderson survived, was eventually exchanged, and we met a year later in Millbank Hospital. The following is the story in his own words, taken down in shorthand. It is a story which bears the stamp of truth in every word, and is corroborated in every detail by a Government report published in all the daily papers on April 10, 1916:—

"When we left Cambrai Station, we were sent in a hospital train to Giessen; it took us three days. We had one basin of soup each day, and a piece of bread.

"When we got to Giessen we were taken to a waiting-room at the station and bad used. All the English were put on one side, called 'English swine' and that kind of thing. We were then taken in a motor ambulance to the Town Hall in Giessen. We were three weeks in that hospital and the food was all right there, but we, especially the English, were bad used all the time by the orderlies. There were four English altogether—M'Donald, Prime, and myself, and another chap in the Wilts. We went from there to Giessen camp, a great big French camp, and had to march two and a half miles with two sticks; I was nearly dead when I reached that camp; it was all uphill, and a crowd behind us shoving us on. We were there three days, then had orders to fall in and march to the station again. We started to march to the station, but I was not fit to do it, and some one stopped me in the town, put me on a car, and took me to the station in the car. We got to Wittenberg the next day, and as soon as we arrived in Wittenberg all the people were at the station, a big crowd, men and women. They all had big sticks, some had bars of iron, and we had to run the gauntlet of this,—of course I could not do so. I got one terrible kick, but anyhow I managed to get into camp, and as soon as we got into camp we got knocked about by the Germans, and everything was taken from us.

"Of course the food was horrible all the time. We had heard stories about typhus in the camp, and the French doctors inoculated us. I took ill about the beginning of February, and the Frenchman took my temperature, which was very high. He ordered me to the hospital, but there were no stretchers to be got. Six men carried me down to the bottom of the camp, about half a mile, and dragged me into an empty bungalow. It was in the same camp; there was no isolation. I was put on the floor amongst a lot of Russians; there were very few beds, and I was on the bare floor. In the camp there was one bed between three men, and I had left my bed in the camp. I lay on the bare floor all the afternoon; no orderlies were there; nobody came near me. The soup came up at night—just the same ordinary rations as we got in camp. The soup came up in a wooden tub without a cover, and they had to carry it about half a mile from the cook-house, and it arrived at the hospital full of dust and dirt—at the door of the hospital. The strongest that were able to get it got it, and the weakest lay without. That is a fact. I lay there about three or four days, when some Englishmen volunteered to come down and look after us.

"I took typhus first: when I was in hospital four or five days, Prime was carried there; he was put down on the floor, and died four or five days afterwards. Sergeant Spence of the Scots Guards was with him when he died. Just before the end they got him a ramshackle bed made up with boards, no mattress.

"The place was a long, narrow hut, whitewashed all over, and about one hundred men in it, absolutely packed, and not more than half a dozen beds at the first. We lay on the floor. There were stoves, but hardly any coal. No one brought in any food. You had to go outside to get it, and the orderly would give you some soup in your basin if you were there. Those not fit to rise from the floor got none unless a comrade brought it to them.

"The French doctors came round, but what could they do? They had nothing to give you, and could do absolutely nothing.

"The Germans had all left the camp as soon as typhus broke out. They built up wooden shoots to put the food down. When parcels from home came they went down the shoot.

"When the beds came in carts they were lifted over the barbed wire. No Germans came in.

"There were never enough beds, and men were lying on the floor all the time.