Some days later the submarine put into Heligoland, and the Captain was transferred to an underground cell ashore. Later, after scanty and bad food had made him ill, he was marched with other prisoners from merchant ships to a camp. Kept naked in intense cold for three hours while his clothes were being searched, German officers stood about laughing. His garments were returned to him wet, and he was put in barracks, where his only covering was verminous blankets.
In another compound the conditions were better, but the food uneatable. The prisoners were skeletons in rags. If they fell down from weakness they were kicked and clubbed, beaten with the flat of swords, and kept standing at attention in freezing weather. They had to fight like wild beasts for food that a dog would refuse. Funerals were a daily occurrence.
Transferred to Brandenburg, where he lived five and a half months, the fare was such that, by the time his own parcels of food arrived, he had lost twenty-eight pounds in weight. Twenty degrees of frost have been registered on the inside wall of the barrack in the mornings, and in Summer the heat was intolerable and the flies and mosquitos very trying. Sanitation was almost nil; 850 Russians died at that camp earlier in the war, and several were burned to death there shortly before the Captain arrived.
Rebuilding Disabled Soldiers
Wonderful Work That Italy Is Doing to Render Maimed Men Self-Supporting
By PROFESSOR RICCARDO GALEAZZI
[Lieutenant Colonel Italian Royal Medical Corps]
Professor Galeazzi is at the head of the Milan Institute for the After-Care of Disabled Soldiers. The article herewith presented is published by Current History Magazine by arrangement with The London Chronicle.