The doctor answered that no other accommodation was available, and he expressed some indignation at our not having had any food, promising to send some along at once. We got some nice hot coffee, a large piece of German black bread, with a roll and sausage each, and made our first meal at German expense.
After the train started on again the big sentry, who looked rather like a Scotch Highlander, and came no doubt from the mountain forests of Bavaria, produced a couple of night-lights, with whose slender flickering the carriage was dimly lit up.
Our new sentries had no idea of discipline or duty whatever. They seemed to look upon themselves as showmen travelling with a collection of curious beasts, for at every station where we stopped people took it in turns to come right into the carriage, and we met with considerable annoyance and impertinence from many of them. One German, who said he was shortly going to the front to kill some Engländer, tried to drag my greatcoat from me, but this was too much for the sentry, who ordered him to desist.
Owing to the constant entry of these unwelcome visitors it now became impossible to think of sleep, for whenever I tried or pretended to doze I was pulled up and asked to answer some impertinent questions.
The type of German soldier that now began to predominate was of a far different class to what we had met with before. It is probable that the men we had conversed with between Cambrai and Coblenz had been to a certain extent tamed by experience at the front, whereas the older and more ignorant class of Landsturm, who at every station forced their attentions upon us, spoke to us and about us as if we were dangerous criminals, and on several occasions if it had not been for the sentries we would have been roughly handled.
It was at Aschaffenburg, on the Bavarian frontier, that we had occasion to be really alarmed at the hostile attitude of the crowd on the station platform.
We reached Aschaffenburg at three in the morning, and were informed that we were to stop there for five hours. There was nothing for it but to try and get some sleep; this, however, was not to be allowed. A curious-looking mob of men dressed in bits of all uniforms collected outside our carriage and proceeded to go through a pantomimic exhibition of hate. The leader of this mob was a nasty-looking ruffian, more than half drunk, who kept calling on us to come outside and fight; also threatening to come inside and cut our throats, and brandishing a big pocket-knife, he looked quite up to doing it. However, the mob, which was getting more and more excited, was eventually dispersed by an officer, who rebuked them for insulting men who were defenceless and disabled.
After the dispersal of this collection of ruffians, who looked as if they had stepped off the stage of a comic opera, we still continued to be plagued by a constant stream of visitors. One group of these soldiers came in about five in the morning and behaved with great rudeness and brutality. The wounded men had by this time settled on to the floor of the carriage, all in a heap, and had fallen off to sleep.
The sentry was telling our visitors that one of the Engländer had been shot in the face and was badly disfigured; whereupon a German soldier pulled the poor fellow out of the sleeping mass on the floor and sat him upon the seat, the others standing round pointing with their fingers at the poor mutilated face with coarse jeering laughter. The young Irish soldier sat patiently through it all—his blind eye was a running sore, the torn cheek in healing had left a hideously scarred hollow, and the mouth and nose were twisted to one side. His condition would have stirred pity in the heart of a savage, and yet these Germans laughed and jeered.
This scene comes back to me with a fresh bitterness when I see the able-bodied young civilians in this country—they must number several millions—who should be ashamed to be seen alive until the perpetration of deeds such as these have been brought to account.