Tom Slade on a Transport

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

“Unless Fritzie offered ’im a carriage. Hi, Fritzie, w’en do we have tea?”

They made no secret of this dangerous topic—perhaps because they knew the idea of escape from the clutches of Germany was so preposterous. In any event, “Fritzie” did not seem greatly interested.

They were grouped at the station, a woebegone looking lot, despite their blithe demeanor. There were a dozen or more of them, in every variety of military and naval rags and tatters. Tom was coatless and the rest of his clothing was very much the worse for salt water. The sailor suits of his two companions were faded and torn, and Freddie suffered the handicap of a lost shoe. The rest were all young. Tom thought they might be drummer boys or despatch riders, or something like that. Several of them were slightly wounded, but none seriously, for Germany does not bother with prisoners who require much care. They were the residue of many who had come and gone in that long monotonous trip. Some had been taken off for the big camps at Wittenberg and Göttingen. As well as he could judge, he had to thank his non-combatant character as well as his youth for the advantages of “Slopsgotten.”

When the hapless prisoners had been examined and searched and relieved of their few possessions, they were marched to the neighboring camp—a civilian camp it was called, although it was hardly limited to that. They made a sad little procession as they passed through the street of the quaint old town. Some jeered at them, but for the most part the people watched silently as they went by. Either they had not the spirit for ridicule, or they were too accustomed to such sights to be moved to comment.

Tom thought he had never in his life seen so many cripples; and instead of feeling sorry for himself his pity was aroused for these maimed young fellows, hanging on crutches and with armless coat sleeves, hollow-eyed and sallow, who braved the law to see the little cavalcade go by. For later he learned that a heavy fine was imposed on these poor wretches if they showed themselves before enemy prisoners, and he wondered where they got the money to pay the fines.

The prison camp was in the form of a great oval and looked as if it might formerly have been a “rice track,” as the all-knowing Tennert had said. It was entirely surrounded by a high barbed wire fence, the vicious wire interwoven this way and that into a mesh, the very sight of which must have been forbidding to the ambitious fugitive. It was not, however, electrified as in the strictly military prisons and on the frontiers. Tom was told that this was because it was chiefly a civilian camp, but he later learned that it was because of a shortage of coal.

The buildings which had formerly been stables and open stalls had been converted into living quarters, and odds and ends of lumber gathered from the neighboring town had been used to throw up rough shacks for additional quarters.

Straw was the only bedding and such food as the authorities supplied was dumped onto rusty tin dishes held out by the hungry prisoners. Some of these dishes had big holes in them and when such a plate became unusable it behooved its possessor to make friends with someone whose dish was not so far gone and share it with him. Some of the men carved wooden dishes, for there was nothing much to do with one’s time, until their knives were taken from them. The life was one of grinding monotony and utter squalor, and the time which Tom spent there was the nightmare of his life.

Occasionally someone from the Spanish Embassy in Berlin would visit the camp in the interest of the Americans, the effect of these visits usually being to greatly anger the retired old German officer who was commandant. He had a face like the sun at noon-day, a voice like a cannon, and the mere asking of a question set him into a rage.

Many of the prisoners, of whom not a few were young Americans, received packages from home, through neutral sources—food, games, tobacco—which were always shared with their comrades. But Tom was slow in getting acquainted and before he had reached the stage of intimacy with anyone, something happened. He still retained his companionable status with Tennert and Freddie, but they fell in with their own set from good old “Blighty” and Tom saw little of them.