Next morning a decrepit omnibus driven by a German soldier came to take me from the Hôpital 106 to M. Brunot's Hôpital Annexe, from where, after three days, I was sent off to Germany.
CHAPTER VI.
CAMBRAI TO WÜRZBURG.
I.
I had been four months in hospital when my name was put down on the list of "transportables," and a place was reserved for me in the "Zug Lazaret."
These trains were made up according to the output from the different hospitals along the front, chiefly from Lille, Douai, Cambrai, and St Quentin.
After the pressure of traffic consequent on the rush back from the Marne had subsided, a regular hospital-train service was inaugurated, and trains direct to Munich were run once a week.
When I expressed some fears to Dr Schmidt as to how I would be treated on my journey, he laughed, saying something about German culture, and that one must not believe all the tales one hears about the Germans. At any rate, he assured me I had nothing to fear, for instructions had been given to pay every attention that the nature of my wound required, and I was to travel by a special Lazaret with a comfortable bed and plenty of good food from a restaurant car.
In the light of subsequent experiences I am sometimes rather suspicious of my friend's kindly intentions. The German idea of humour is so different from any other. I often wonder if Dr Schmidt had been "pulling my leg" in his clumsy German way.
However, when the motor ambulance came to fetch me at 10 A.M. on the 6th of January, I started off on my journey quite free in my mind from painful anticipations. I pictured to myself a comfortable hospital train, with perhaps a German Schwester to look after the worst cases, and if not a made-up bed, at least a stretcher on which I could rest my paralysed limbs.
On arriving at Cambrai station I found that the "special hospital train" consisted of ordinary 3rd-class corridor coaches, which were packed with French and English wounded. I was helped along the train by two kindly German soldiers, and lifted up into a 2nd-class carriage, where I was warmly greeted by a French Army doctor, like myself en route for a German prison.