13 Days Part 3

I think the Germans had hoped to annoy us army officers by this introduction of merchant seamen. If this was so they failed utterly to achieve their object. The greatest good feeling existed between the two lots in the camp, and after three or four weeks the merchant sailors were removed to another camp where I am afraid they were less comfortable. The Germans were not the only surprised people over this affair. The French, although Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity is their national motto, were very astonished at the way in which good fellowship and camaraderie was fostered between army officers and merchant seamen.

When the Russian revolution broke out, we all wondered how the Russians in the prison camp would take it. The majority of them seemed to have very little decided opinion on the subject, but were generally inclined to think it a good thing for their country. It was then that we were told that the Russians were all to be sent to another camp, which made the whole camp think furiously as to the reason for this move of the German authorities. Was it peace in sight and the prisoners were to be concentrated in camps by nationalities near the frontiers of neutrals bordering their own countries preparatory to the general exodus at the end of the war? Did it mean a separate peace with Russia?

These and other theories were discussed backwards and forwards.

Eventually the Russians went and many of us were very sorry to lose them, as it meant a loss of all means of continuing to learn the language from their Russian friends. Two hundred English arrived from Gutersloh in their place, and then the departure of the French began.

The leave-taking between the French and English was very cordial and annoyed the Germans very much, as while the former went from us we all sang the "Ma.r.s.eillaise." The English continued to sing it until the French were out of sight along the road to the station. Then we became an all English prison-camp. There seemed to be no room to move, as everyone was out of doors, and a great percentage of the Russians and many of the French had kept to their rooms a great deal.

We were only about six weeks in this state, as in May once again the Germans turned the camp upside down, this time ordering its complete evacuation by all the English.

CHAPTER II

THE MOVE TO SCHWARMSTEDT

Many and varied were the aims ascribed to the Boches when the news of the move from Crefeld, ordered in May, 1917, reached the ears of the prisoners.

We were divided into parties of varying sizes. My party was the strongest, consisting of four hundred officers and about seventy soldier-servants.

The greatest secrecy was displayed as to our destination by the Germans, and all sorts of places were mooted as possible by the prisoners themselves.

Shortly before we had heard the news of our impending departure, a strange thing happened. A battalion of young German soldiers marched into the German half of the camp, and very soon after their arrival we were astonished to see another line of sentries posted round the camp outside the barbed-wire fence.

These sentries were only twenty yards apart and were dressed in active service uniforms. In addition to these, machine guns were posted at each corner of the camp so as to command the roads running past it.

These precautions were taken a day or so before May 1st, the day when the Social Democrats were to have labour demonstrations throughout Germany.

We were naturally extremely interested and wondered what was to happen.

These German soldiers were far from being on the best of terms with our old Landsturm men, who continued to carry out the usual guard duties as they had done previously.

Nothing else happened beyond the arrest of five civilian Germans who were hanging about the entrance to the prison. Why they were suddenly seized and flung into cells no one rightly knew, but we concluded that it had to do with these same May 1st demonstrations.

The preparations for the great exodus from the camp were full of comic and sometimes almost tragic incidents.

Some prisoners, who had taken the trouble to try to make their rooms comfortable when the camp became all English, were particularly savage over the move, and took care that nothing which they were unable to take away should be left to be sold again to another batch of prisoners at a later date. There was a considerable quant.i.ty of live stock of various kinds in the camp, and measures for the transportation of these furred and feathered belongings had to be undertaken. The rabbits had to have special boxes made for them so that they could be carried by hand.

These rabbits had been in existence some six months at Crefeld and were very prolific breeders. They provided many an excellent meal for their owners and were objects of great interest, being watched by a small crowd of the prison inhabitants every day.

Quite a number of canaries, a dog or two and a cat, were also in the camp, and would have to be taken away by their owners.

We were told that our heavy baggage might in due course follow us to the new prison camps and that we could take one box each, which was to accompany us. Of course we all had acc.u.mulated much more stuff than would go into one box, and much grousing and desperate thinking was the result of this order.

The commandant promised to have our special boxes of tinned food sent on to us as soon as possible after our departure. Although many of us never expected to see the things again, he kept his promise, greatly to the delight of everyone. These food boxes arrived some three weeks after we had got to the new camp.

On the last evening at Crefeld, definite "move" orders were issued and our names were called by parties. I was detailed for No. 2 camp, which was to have over half the 750 officers at that time at Crefeld.

Another party consisted approximately of three hundred officers, and the remaining fifty or so were distributed among two or three other new camps.

Owing to finding out that five or six officers were missing at the final roll-call, another nominal roll-call was ordered that evening in order to ascertain the names of those who were missing. The Crab was in charge of this roll-call, and he stood at the opening of a wire netting fence dividing two tennis courts, while the English officers answered their names and filed past him. Muddles very soon occurred, and what with officers who had already answered their names wandering back among the uncounted ones, so as to answer to the names of those missing, and the mistakes which naturally occur in calling over the names of 750 officers of another nationality, the Germans were bamboozled, and had no idea what they were doing. This roll-call was a fearfully slow one, and it became dark before two thirds of the officers had pa.s.sed through the opening.

Now, of course, no certainty of keeping those counted from those uncounted could possibly be a.s.sured, unless a large number of soldiers were employed to prevent persons slipping from the counted crowd to the uncounted crowd. Accordingly a strong force of German soldiers was sent for, and for some reason or other they made matters worse instead of better.

This state of affairs continued for some time, until someone applied a match to an old broom found on a tennis court. It made an excellent torch and others quickly emulated his example. This was followed by a wild throwing about of these flaming missiles, and it not infrequently happened that one of them pitched extremely near a German soldier forming one of the cordon round us. This sport gave place to bonfires.

In a moment some old benches were torn up and three or four fires started. This roused the Boches and they cleared the bonfire stokers away and proceeded to trample out the flames, amid the laughter of all the prisoners. The alarm was sounded on a bugle, and yet another small army of soldiers arrived on the scene, but they did not tackle the largest bonfire which burnt merrily on undisturbed.

It was a weird sight. The red flames lit up a wide area, in which the greater part of the prisoners were strolling about surrounded on all sides by German soldiers in field gray uniforms and carrying rifles.

However, the whole affair was only due to over-boisterous spirits, and there was no bad feeling displayed towards the Germans, who very wisely did not interfere to any great extent. When the order to disperse to our rooms was given the prisoners went off quietly enough and the whole affair died out without any trouble occurring. However, at times it had been touch and go, whether the Boches would fire at us.

The hour for parade next morning was extremely early, and we had to wait for hours before we eventually moved off. Prior to leaving the camp our personal baggage, which we were to carry by hand, had to be searched. A large number of young German officers and _Feldwebels_ were brought into the camp to carry out this task. They were quite civil and polite and got through their job fairly quickly.

My party was the first to move out of the camp. We then found we had to walk to the station, a mile or so away. It was now that many discovered what a quant.i.ty of baggage they had got with them. Everyone had been under the impression that we should go by trams to the station, and consequently had much more to carry than they would have had if a walk to the station had been expected.

It was an awful procession. Every fifty to a hundred yards the column had to halt while bags were changed to the other hand or bundles re-adjusted. We walked four abreast and on both sides of each four was a German soldier.

It was an absolute nightmare. Some prisoners threw some of their belongings away, and a few sat down unable to move a yard further without a rest. At last, after an absolutely agonising time, we reached the station. We were put in the carriages four at a time, with three to four German soldiers in each carriage with us. In my carriage there were four Germans, one of them an Unter-Offizier. The Germans appropriated the corner seats, to prevent us being near the doors.

This of course allowed the four of us to play bridge in the middle of the carriage.

Eventually the train moved out of the station and we saw our last of Crefeld. Extraordinary as it may seem, we were positively annoyed at leaving; far from being keen on seeing new places and settling down in new environments, the majority would have preferred to remain in the same old groove for the whole term of their imprisonment. Time seems to go by much more quickly when nothing happens to mark its flight.

The two and a half years spent in that prison had slipped by without milestones and it was extremely hard to realise what the two and a half years really meant. One sometimes felt that life previous to the war was really the invention of a dream. It often seemed to one that "prison" was the natural state of existence and anything outside of it unnatural. Perhaps the animals at the Zoo have the same impression of the outside world.

On settling down for our journey to that unknown destination, we had an opportunity of studying our guards. They were men of about thirty years of age and had all been to the front for long spells. For several hours they were very sulky and only answered our remarks and questions in monosyllables.

When we reached Essen they expanded a little in order to point out to us what a wonderful place it was. It certainly was wonderful. Miles of workshops and factories, and in many of them one could see guns, new, old, and damaged, lying about. The Germans in our carriage were evidently proud of this place and talked quite a lot about it, using many adjectives of the "kolossal," "wunderschon" type. We, of course, told them that we had hundreds of places in England of a similar nature and that they would one day see their wonderful Essen burnt to the ground. We thought naturally of air raids on Essen, and in view of the bombing of this place early in the war, we carefully examined it, and came to the conclusion that a bomb would be bound to hit something of importance there, so close together are the various workshops jammed.

At Gutersloh station we slowly pa.s.sed a train conveying a German battalion towards the West front. We were able to examine the men well. This particular battalion consisted of very fine looking men, but there was no "Joy in the War" expression, as the German papers call it, on their faces, and they were not singing or shouting the incessant repertoire of the front-going German soldier. In fact they looked resigned to their fate, and took very little notice of us. Of course we talked to each other about "Kanonen Futter" for the benefit of the guards in our carriage.

On clearing out of Gutersloh we decided to have a meal. As we had prepared for two or three days in the train if necessary, we had plenty of food with us. It was with great curiosity that we covertly watched our German guards when we produced white bread and tinned beef sent from England. It was evidently a great surprise for them, and they could not help showing their astonishment in their faces. It did not look to them as if England was starving if white bread could still be made, and as for the meat, they had not seen so much during a whole week as we each proposed to eat at one meal.

They had had a meal themselves just before we began ours, so we had been able to estimate what had been given them as their rations. It was very scanty and the small quant.i.ty of bread was exceedingly poor looking. In the hopes of getting them to talk a bit, we offered them some beef and a little bread. They accepted with alacrity and became friendly from that moment, telling us all sorts of things that interested us exceedingly.

Apparently, they in common with the majority of Germans, had mistrusted and even feared their English prisoners up till then. Very probably they had all been warned to be suspicious of us, and given to understand that we might overpower them at any moment and escape from the train. There must have been some such fear in the minds of the senior German officers, as there were machine guns on the train in addition to four hundred armed soldiers.

The under-officer told me that he had been wounded twice and been on the Russian front for a very long spell. He had also been on the West front in 1914, and I discovered that he had been in an attack on the very trenches occupied by my brigade near the Chemin des Dames on the Aisne. He had no hesitation in saying which was the nastiest front. He was absolutely fed up with the war, as were the others in the carriage. They asked us when we thought the war would end, and out of principle we said in a year to two years' time. I was often asked the same question while at Crefeld and always answered--"a year or more."

This seemed to depress them and they used to blame England for being the cause of the war going on so long. Nearly every day I went to the canteen, and, according to my usual custom, talked to the German soldiers doing duty as salesmen there.

The war was always the subject of conversation and I generally asked them, laughingly, when the great promised defeat of England was going to come off. One day, one of them became quite serious and leant across the counter to me and said in a low tone so that only I could hear--"Germany will never defeat England." As an afterthought he added, "but England can never defeat Germany." I laughed and told him to wait.

It was extremely interesting to observe the gradual taming of the Boche.

In 1914 he was intoxicated with victories actual and prospective; 1915, confident but a little more calm; the big talk of capturing London, etc., had died down by then; 1916, general depression, and towards the end of the year actual and open fear for the future and hate of the war was to be observed among the soldiers and civilians of the lower orders.

By the Spring of 1917, real anxiety about the coming summer's fighting began to be evident, which was partially relieved by the events in Russia and the great promises and hopes held out to them by the submarine warfare.

Their behaviour towards us followed the same gradual scale. At first, bullying, truculent and brutal, they became more docile as time went on, until when we left Crefeld in May 1917, their behaviour was not so far removed from what one had a right to expect from prison guards and officials towards their officer prisoners.

Although the guards in our railway carriage had become quite friendly by now, they did not relax their vigilance, and it was quite evident that they would not sleep all at the same time during the night which was approaching.