ELEVENTH CHAPTER
A month has passed, yet the camp looks much the same as before. Mona had expected that the prisoners would be liberated by this time, but they are here still. The Commandant is said to be waiting for orders.
Meantime regulations have been relaxed. The men are no longer restricted to the various compounds. There is no limit to their liberty of moving about, except the big gates, guarded by soldiers, and the three lines of barbed wire by which the camp is surrounded. Why not? Nobody is likely to attempt to escape. Within a few weeks everybody will be free.
Mona has all the help she can do with now. The prisoners are constantly about the farm-house, doing anything they can for her. They show her photographs of their wives and children and get her to count up the savings that are coming to them.
At length comes word that the Peace Congress has begun and that the Commandant has received his orders. Two hundred and fifty of the prisoners are to be sent over the water every day until the camp is empty.
But there is a condition attaching to the liberation. Mona hears of it first from three prisoners belonging to distant compounds, who are talking outside the house. To her surprise they are speaking not only in English, but in British dialects.
“They ca’ me a Jarmin,” says one, “but what am I? I were browt to Owdham when I were five year owd and now ’am fifty, so ’am five year Jarmin and forty-five English. Yet they’re sending me back to Jarmany.”