Nov. 25. "The Turks controll [sic] the Suez Canal at Kantara."
The total number of prisoners claimed to have been captured in the month of November works out at 268,508, and on one single day, the 14th Nov., 10,000 guns and a quantity of ammunition were taken as booty.
Mrs von Puttkamer must have taken considerable trouble with this singular document, and I cannot understand with what object it was distributed broadcast among the prisoners. The only result of reading such an obviously biassed account of the war was that, as we had no means of discriminating between what was true and what was false, we did not pay the least attention to any of it.
The three wounded men who had been over four months in bed, and whose wounds were not yet healed, were now suffering a great deal of pain from the cramped position, the jolting of the train, and from want of nourishing food. They had tried to get some relief by lying on the floor of the carriage, where they finally settled together in a heap.
The sentry, with whom I was by this time on the best of terms, began to grow sentimental at the thought of meeting his wife and children, with whom he was to spend a week's leave in the neighbourhood of Coblenz. I tried to find out if he had heard of any talk about a proposed exchange of prisoners, but he could not or would not give me any information.
Light was failing as we reached the Rhine valley. The train crawled slowly under the shadow of the vine-covered cliffs, far to the west the rain-clouds were drifting away as if driven by the last rays of the setting sun, which they had hidden during the day. We had no light in the carriage, and the blackness of the interior darkness was relieved only by the twinkling lights on the distant banks of the Rhine. By the time the train reached Coblenz the wounded men, though not asleep, were in a condition of dormant torpor, while the sentries slept heavily, dreaming, no doubt, of their soon-once-more-to-be-met buxom fraus.
At Coblenz most of the German wounded who had started with us from Cambrai came to their journey's end, and the station was crowded with Red Cross people who had come to meet them. There were no serious cases, nearly all arms and a few superficial head wounds. Here also we saw the last of our two fat sentries, and their place was taken by two men who belonged to some very antiquated sort of Bavarian Landsturm, harmless, inoffensive creatures both of them. They actually put their rifles up on the rack, whereas the other sentries had clung tight to theirs on the whole journey from Cambrai. We immediately got permission to smoke, which had been refused us before, and I again made inquiries about food and drink with the usual result. No arrangements had been made for feeding prisoners, and as our own stock of food was getting low an effort had to be made to get something done.
It was not long before the doctor in charge of the Coblenz ambulance, tall and thin, with a black beard, came along inspecting the wounded. He asked if there were any men who required to have their wounds dressed, explaining that we would get to our destination the next day, and he would not dress any one except if absolutely necessary.
The men said they preferred to wait, and I then pointed out to the doctor that the accommodation for five badly wounded men was insufficient, so that they had to lie on top of each other on the floor, and that we had been given practically no food since we left Cambrai.