The demeanour of our captives, on reaching the cages, varied widely, according to the stress which they had undergone. Some wore an air of abject misery, and were thoroughly cowed and subservient. Others were defiant, sulky and even arrogant.
Our treatment of them was firm, but humane. Physically, they had nothing to complain of; they were fed and quartered on the same standard as our own men. But they were given to understand from the very outset that we would stand no nonsense, and that they must do exactly what they were told. Few of them ever gave us any real trouble.
The subsequent employment of prisoners of war did not come under my jurisdiction, and it was seldom that any prisoner working parties were available to me. My Corps area rarely extended sufficiently far back from the front line to carry it beyond the zone in which, by agreement between the belligerents, the employment of prisoners of war was forbidden.
Australian soldiers are nothing if not sportsmen, and no case ever came under my notice of brutality or inhumanity to prisoners. Upon the contrary, when once a man's surrender had been accepted, and he had been fully disarmed, he was treated with marked kindness. The front line troops were always ready to share their water and rations with their prisoners, and cigarettes were distributed with a liberal hand.
On the other hand, the souvenir-hunting instinct of the Australian led him to help himself freely to such mementos as our orders had not forbidden him to touch. Prisoners rarely got as far as the Corps cage with a full outfit of regimental buttons, cockades, shoulder-straps, or other accoutrements. Personal trinkets, pay-books, money and other individual belongings were, however, invariably respected; unless, as often happened, the prisoners themselves were anxious to trade them away to their captors, or escorts, for tobacco, chocolates, or other luxuries.
Before I leave the subject of prisoners I should mention my impression of the German officers, particularly of those who were more senior in rank. Whenever a Regimental or Battalion Commander was captured, and time permitted, he was brought before me for a further interrogation. It was an experience which was almost universal that such officers were willing to give me little information which might injure their cause; on the other hand, they exhibited an altogether exaggerated air of wounded pride at their capture, and at the defeat of the troops whom they had commanded.
It was that feeling of professional pique which dominated their whole demeanour. They were always volubly full of excuses, the weather, the fog, the poor moral of their own men, the unexpectedness of our attack, the Tanks, errors in their maps—anything at all but a frank admission of their own military inferiority.
There were two amusing exceptions to this experience. The day after the fighting for Péronne, when a large batch of the prisoners then taken was being got ready to march out of the Corps cage, officers in one enclosure, other ranks in another, the senior German officer, a Regimental Commander, formally requested permission to address some eighty other officers present in the cage. This request was granted.
He told them that they had fought a good fight, that their capture was not to their discredit, and that he would report favourably upon them to his superiors at the first opportunity. He then went on to say that on his own and on their behalf he desired to tender to the Australians an expression of his admiration for their prowess, and to make a frank acknowledgment to them that he fully recognized that on this occasion his garrison had been outclassed, out-manœuvred, and out-fought. The whole assembly expressed their acquiescence in these observations by collectively bowing gravely to the small group of my Intelligence Officers who were amused spectators of the scene.