Tom Slade on a Transport Part 19

At last, after an all day's ride, they reached their destination. But alas, there was no such place as Slopsgotten! Tom was sorry for this for he liked the name. It sounded funny when his English friends said it.

Schlaabgaurtn, was the way he read it on the railroad station. He felt disappointed and aggrieved. He was by no means sure of the letters, and p.r.o.nunciation was out of the question. He liked Slopsgotten. In Tennert's mouth he had almost come to love it.

It was the only thing about Germany that he liked, and now he had to give it up!

Slopsgotten!

FOOTNOTE:

[4] Kill.

CHAPTER XXIV

HE GOES TO THE CIVILIAN CAMP AND DOESN'T LIKE IT

"'Ere we are in bloomin' old Slops! Not 'arf bad, wot? Another inch and we'd bunk our noses plunk into Alsice! Wot d'ye s'y, Freddie?"

"I s'y it's the back o' the old front. The only thing in the w'y is the mountains. Hi, Yankee! You see 'em? It's the ole mountains out of the song."

Tom looked at a distant range of blue-gray heights. Crossing those somewhere was the battle line--the long, sweeping line which began far off at the Belgian coast. How lonesome and romantic it must be for the soldiers up in those wild hills. Somewhere through there years ago Frenchy had fled from German tyranny and pursuit, away from his beloved ancestral home. Funny, thought Tom, that he should see both the eastern and western extremities of France without ever crossing it.

He was much nearer the front than he had been when he talked with Mr.

Conne in the little French cemetery. Yet how much farther away! A prisoner in Germany, with a glowering, sullen Prussian guard at his very elbow!

"We used to sing about them when I went to school," he said. "'The Blue Alsatian Mountains.'"

"I'd jolly well like to be on the other side o' them," said Freddie.

Tom clutched the little iron b.u.t.ton in his pocket. Something prompted him to pull a b.u.t.ton off his trousers and to work his little talisman into the torn place so that it would look like a suspender b.u.t.ton. Then he turned again to gaze at the fair country which he supposed to be one of France's lost provinces--the home of Frenchy.

"There ain't much trouble crossing mountains," said he; "all you need is a compa.s.s. I don't know if they have tree-toads here, but I could find out which is north and south that way if they have."

"Blimy, if we don't listen and see if we can 'ear 'em s'ying 'polly voo Fransay' in the trees!" said Tennert.

"But a feller could never get into France that way," said Tom. "'Cause he'd have to cross the battle line. The only way would be to go down around through Switzerland--around the end of the line, kind of."

"Down through Alsice," grunted Tennert.

"'E'd 'ave a 'underd miles of it," said Freddie.

"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 Gottingen. 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 pa.s.sed 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 Emba.s.sy 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.

There was absolutely no rule of life in the prison camp. They were simply kept from getting away. Besides conferring this favor upon them, about the only thing which the German government did was to send a doctor around occasionally to look down their throats and inspect their tongues. If a prisoner became ill, it behooved him to find another prisoner who had studied medicine and then wait until old General Griffenhaus was in a sufficiently good humor to give him medicines.

General Griffenhaus was not cruel; perhaps he would have been pleasant if he had known how.

As fast as Tom learned the custom, he adapted himself to the lazy, go-as-you-please kind of life. He scared up a rusty tin plate, made himself a straw bed in a boarded-in box stall, got hold of an old burlap bag which he wore as a kind of tunic while washing his clothes, and idled about listening to the war experiences of others. He had thought his own experiences rather remarkable, but now they seemed so tame that he did not venture to tell them. Fights with German raiders, rescues after days spent on the ocean, chats about the drive for Paris, the "try" at Verdun, the adventures of captured aviators--these things and many more, were familiarly discussed in the little sprawling groups among which he came to be a silent listener. In a way, it reminded him of camping and campfire yarns, except for the squalor and disorder.

Of course, there was general work to be done, but the officials did not concern themselves about this until it became absolutely necessary. No one could say that the German discipline was strict. When the prisoners discovered that one or other of their number was good at this or that sort of work they elected him to attend to those matters--whether it was sweeping, settling quarrels, cooking, writing letters, pet.i.tioning "Old Griff," shaving, pulling teeth, or what not. Each prisoner contributed his knowledge and experience to make life bearable for all. The camp was a _democracy_, but Germany didn't seem to object. If the prisoners wished to dig a drain trench or a refuse pit, they asked for shovels.

And sometimes they got them. Prisoners, ragged and forlorn, came to be known by the most dignified t.i.tles. There was the "consulting architect," the "sanitary inspector," the "secretary of state," the "chairman of the committee on kicks," etc.

And one momentous day Tom met the "chief engineer."

CHAPTER XXV

HE VISITS THE OLD PUMP AND RECEIVES A SHOCK

"It's all happy-go-lucky here," said a young American from somewhere in Kansas, who had been raked in with a haul of prisoners from a torpedoed liner. "We used the water at the pump as long as the engines worked; then we shouldered our buckets and began going down to the brook. When the buckets went to pieces, we made a few out of canvas and they're not half bad."

Tom had inquired why they went down to the end of the oval to get water when there was a pump up in the middle of the grounds.

"So there you are," concluded his informer.

"Is the engine supposed to pump water up from the brook?" Tom asked.

"It isn't supposed to do anything," said the other, "it used to be supposed to, but it's retired."

"I thought Germany was so efficient," said Tom. "I should think they'd fix it. Can't it be fixed?"

"Not by anyone here, it seems. You see, they won't let us have any tools--wrenches, or files or anything. If you mention a file to Old Griff, he throws a couple of fits. Thinks you want to cut the barbed wire."

"Then why don't _they_ fix it?"

"Ah, a question. I suppose they think the exercise of trotting down to the brook will do us good. I dare say if the chief engineer could get hold of a file he could fix it; seems to think he could, anyway. But gas engines are funny things."