Wounded and a Prisoner of War, by an Exchanged Officer

by Malcolm V. Hay

"We had nearly 100 deaths a day at one time. The total population of the camp was about 16-17,000, with only about six doctors, French and Russian. Then we had six British R.A.M.C. doctors—Captain Sutcliffe, Major Fry, Captain Fielding, Captain Vidal, and Mr Lugard. Major Fry, Captain Fielding, and Captain Sutcliffe took the typhus and died. I never got a wash all the time I was there until I was able to go to the tap. There was one fellow, a private in the Gordons, who never had his wound dressed; it was running all the time. He died of pure neglect and typhus. A man died next me with his clothes on, never had them off, even his greatcoat on. Our clothes were running with vermin—millions!

"You could not get dressings or bandages. I have seen men with open wounds who have had to wash their bandages, and hang them up to dry before they could put them on again.

"M'Donald volunteered as an orderly in the Typhus Ward, and when he came along he was only one day on duty when he took typhus. He got better, but declined because of the starvation diet. I had him out walking for a little bit up and down, but he was very weak, a living skeleton. He would fall down, and I told him to try and get up and walk a little bit. 'Oh, Jock,' he says, 'I'm no' fit.' 'Come on,' I said, 'try.' He got a parcel from home—one from his mother—just before he died. It was just from hunger and neglect.

"Things were getting that bad about the month of April that the Germans began to get a little afraid, and started a new hospital—about half a dozen of huts. It was isolated from the camp, and we moved there about the beginning of May.

"Things gradually got a little better after that, but January, February, and March were three awful months.

"The Germans did not come back into the camp till the month of August.

"After I was better of the typhus I was back in the same camp. All food was thrown over the barbed wire. Even packets were sent down the shoot. The Germans never came near; you would see them outside the wire. Just before the American Ambassador came there was a new thing for carrying down the food—something like a dustbin with a lid on. The shoot is still there, but is not used. After the Ambassador came we put in a claim, saying we had been passed as unfit for military service, and men who ought to have gone home last August had had it cancelled at the last moment; but we heard no more. The American Ambassador said that must be the Government's fault; he would see about it. He sent us a lot of games. We were only allowed to play games between the huts.

"The camp was run by the Russians, and nobody to look after us. The Germans never came in; you could do what you liked as long as you did not go too near the wire, when they used to sound the alarm. When the alarm sounded at night we had to run into the park, and if you did not get into the park soon enough they fired at you. They fired one night and killed six Frenchmen. One of the Royal Irish who came up with me had a bullet right past his ear,—I suppose it made him pretty nippy.

"We got no clean clothing or a change. The English were all in rags: you would not know they were soldiers at all to look at them. Just three days before the American Ambassador came, when they heard he was coming, they paraded us all up and looked at our underclothing. We got a shirt and a pair of socks to smarten us up. You could never get hot water; but the day that the American Ambassador came the Germans came round in the morning and told us that if any of us wanted hot water, to send two men out of each room to the cook-house and get as much boiling water as we wanted. We wondered what was up: we were saying there was something up that day. The Ambassador asked us what clothing we had. He made a great improvement: we got shirts and overcoats, but they took all our overcoats away.

"He asked a lot of men if they had had typhus; he seemed to know all about it. Just previous to that, a Mr Jackson from the American Embassy came. It is wonderful how things got about the camp. This was shortly after the typhus was cleared out, but he did not come into the camp. There were about thirty yards of space between the wires, and he could not speak to any of us; he just went round. There was a crowd of Germans; but when Mr Gerard came himself he came into the barrack-room and asked one man a question, then another.