Chapter 16

PAYING THE PIPER

Sheer Starvation--Slipping It Over the Sentry--The Court Martial--Thirty Days Cells--No Place for a Gourmand--In Napoleon's Footsteps--Parniewinkel Camp--"Like Father, Like Son"--The Last Kind German--Running Amuck--The Torture of the Russians--The Continental Times--"K. of K. Is Gone!"

Upon arrival at camp, we were put in cells for eleven days while awaiting our court-martial.

During that period we suffered terribly from sheer starvation. The daily rations consisted of a poor soup and a small quantity of black bread. Hungry though I was, there was only one way by which I could eat it--hold my breath and swallow. I am aware that the Germans consider this food quite palatable but that may be because they are accustomed to it. It was to us the resort of starving men. The cells were quite dark--four-by-eight-foot wooden boxes. The confinement and short rations on top of our arduous journey, during which we had had nothing but the two biscuits a day, caused us to grow weaker daily.

Our friends, however, contrived occasionally to get portions of their food to us. They maintained a sentry of their own, whose duty it was to watch for and report our trips to the latrine. It was unsafe for us to ask for this permission more than once a day with the same guard. As the latter was frequently changed, however, we were enabled to work the scheme to the limit.

At the worst, this let us out of our cells for a few minutes; and, if we were lucky, enabled us to get a handful of broken food. Seeing us come out, the prisoner on watch would stroll into the hut and pass the word. Shortly, another would come out to us and in passing frequently manage to slip us something. On one long-to-be-remembered occasion, a man of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, managed to "square" the guard, a pleasant-faced young German, in some manner we could never fathom, so that the latter actually brought to us two spoons and a wash basin full of boiled barley, which we ate in the latrine. That was the most humane act experienced from German hands during my fifteen months' sojourn in Germany.

On the eleventh day we were marched out to what would be the Germans' orderly room. A Canadian who had picked up a smattering of German acted as interpreter. He did what he could for us, which was little enough.

Asked why we had tried to escape, we feared to tell the truth, that we had been forced to it by ill-treatment; so merely stated that we were tired of Germany and wanted to go home. The presiding officer said: "Well, you fellows have been a lot of trouble to us. I've been told to tell you that if you give us any more; we'll have a little shooting bee." We were sentenced to thirty days' dark cells. That was our court-martial.

One lucky thing happened to us here: When they took our map away it fell in two, as a result of having been folded in our pockets. The officer crumpled one piece up, made a handful of it and tossed it away, at the same time shoving the other half at me, which I eagerly clutched. That piece showed the portion of Germany adjoining the Holland border.

Our thirty days' dark cells were spent in the military prison at Oldenburg. As before, they were four-by-eight feet in size, but with a high ceiling which gave me room to stand on my hands for exercise. Each of us was confined alone. The walls and floor of the cells were of stone; the shutters, of steel which were always closed. There was no furniture other than the three boards which served as the mockery of a bed and which were chained up to the wall every morning. A small shelf which held the water pitcher was the only other furnishing. No ray of light was permitted to enter the place. The month was February but there were no blankets, and the place was unheated. The rations consisted of half a pound of black bread and a pitcher of water, which were thrust in to us every morning, so that except for the guard who unchained the boards at night we had no visitation in the twenty-four long, long hours.

I cannot remember that I brooded much. Rather, I let my mind run out as a tired sleeper might, which was no doubt fortunate for me. My family were greatly in my thoughts. I wondered how my wife was making out and if she was receiving her separation allowance all right, for I had heard of many cases where the reverse had happened; and whether the boys were well and going to school. I hoped that all was well with them and that they did not worry too much over my lot.

As I was not permitted either to send or receive letters during the period of my trial and incarceration, my wife was in fact in great distress of mind about me as she received no word for many weeks and imagined the worst. And when at last I could write it was only to say that although I had been well I had been unable to write, leaving her to draw her own conclusions.

The cell door opened promptly at five o'clock every morning. We were allowed ten minutes in which to clean our cell, go to the lavatory and wash up, all under guard. These were the only occasions during which we had an opportunity of seeing one another or the other prisoners. These rites were all performed in silence, and communication of any description was forbidden and so keenly watched for as to be impossible. However, Simmons and I got what small comfort we could out of seeing one another frequently, and by this time there had grown up between us such a mutual respect as to make us value this highly. The other prisoners included Germans as well as our allies and there were some civilian German prisoners. The German soldier prisoners were mostly in for committing the various crimes of soldiering which in the British Army would have put them under the general head of defaulters. That classification, however, had been done away with in the German Army. The slightest infringement of discipline was punished with cells. Noncommissioned officers received the same punishment as the men, without, however, losing their rank, as would have been the case in our army.

Upon finishing the ten minutes allotted to us we were forced to re-enter our cells and stand against the wall, at the back, so that we could neither see nor communicate with one another until the guard got around a few minutes later and looked in to see that all was as it should be before slamming the door.

There was no use in trying to stretch the ration out for two meals. I tried to and gave it up. And after that I ate the bread, filled up on water and sat down on the cold stone floor for another twenty-four hours of waiting.

My thoughts dwelt greatly on food. We were supposed to receive soup every fourth day, but we did not. The prisoners of other nationalities did, and in addition were exercised regularly. At least we could hear the rattle of their spoons against their bowls and the tramp of their feet. The slow starving was, to my mind, the worst. And after that the loss of sleep. If one did drop off, the cold soon caused a miserable awakening. I tried not to think, and did all the gymnastic drill I knew, even to standing on my hands in the darkness of the cell. I knew that if I gave up it would be all off, for I could daily feel myself getting wabbly as the confinement and starvation, added to my already enfeebled and starved condition when I entered, began to tell on me. It must be borne in mind that I had already served eleven days' solitary confinement on insufficient food, after several days of jail on ditto, and eight days while escaping, during which I had been continually wet and without food, other than the two biscuits daily, before beginning to serve this sentence. Simmons, of course, was in the same plight.

The last day, that of February 22nd, rolled around finally. We were taken from our cells at nine o'clock and marched out for an unknown destination which we knew only as a stronger punishment camp than the others we had been in. Ahead of us we saw poor Brumley; but were unable to communicate with him, and I do not know whether he saw us or not. That was all we ever learned directly of his fate. His wife, in Toronto, has since informed me that he is still in Germany and has only lately been recaptured after another attempt at escape.

At eleven that night we arrived at our destination. This was the strong punishment camp of Parniewinkel, in Hanover, on the road over which Napoleon had marched to his doom at Moscow. We wondered if we, too, were going to ours.

We had had no food that day, nor did we get any that night, but were shoved into a hut full of Russians, who did not know what to make of us. We were so long of hair and beard, so ragged, so emaciated and so altogether filthy that they must have thought us anything but British soldiers.

Later we found that there were, in all, between four and five hundred Russian, eighty French and Belgian, and, including ourselves, eleven British prisoners, of whom Simmons and I were the only Canadians, all shoved into two huts in the middle of the usual barbed-wire laager.

As Giessen was the best camp, so this one was the worst of all those we were to know. It was not so wet as the swamp at Vehnmoor, but the drinking water was even worse than the brackish, peat-laden water there. The general sanitary arrangements were terrible and the food was worse than at Giessen, the camp in which that lack had been the worst feature among many bad ones. And on top of it all the treatment was very bad, much worse than any we had previously known.

A soup, made from a handful of pickled fish roe and a few potatoes, was a stock dish, and terrible to taste. On one night a week we received a raw herring fresh from the brine barrel, which we were supposed to eat raw and uncleaned, but could not. On one day in seven there was a weak cabbage soup and of course, a small daily ration of potato-and-rye bread. Fortunately, our parcels were beginning to arrive by this time, so that, in fact, we fared better than at any of the better camps, in the matter of food. With the Russians it was different, and we used to give our soup to them in exchange for their share of boiling water, which we used in conjunction with the contents of our parcels and which they had no use for anyway, especially for washing purposes.

It was difficult to get an opportunity to boil water for the making of tea or cocoa, even when parcels furnished the essentials, as there were so many men and so few stoves that it was a constant struggle to get near the latter.

However, as we had refused to work, we did not require very much food. We used also to give our black bread to the Russians, for which they insisted on doing our washing, though it was little enough of that they did for themselves. They were very good and simple men.

Ours was a good bunch of fellows and gave freely to one another and to the unfortunate Russians, who rarely received parcels. There was no selling or trading on misfortune here, as in some of the other camps we had been in. The Germans themselves were short of necessities here. They hated to come to the _Engländers_ to buy, so used to send the Russians to beg for soap which they would not use in any event, and in this case simply sold to the guards. Discovering this, we shut down on indiscriminate giving. Soap or any other fatty substance was by that time very scarce in Germany, amongst the lower classes at least. I was the only "non-com" in our lot, and so put up the stripes I had taken down to avoid giving _Augen Rechts_ at Vehnmoor. I used that authority now to persuade my fellow Britishers to give to the unfortunate Russians rather than to the French, who, like ourselves, were receiving parcels.

A boy of five years or thereabouts used to come regularly to the wire, upon which he would climb and hang like some foul spider on its web. Grasping it in both small hands and kicking vainly at it and us, he would scream: "Engländer Schwein," and I know not what other names, spitting venom like a little wildcat. This was not the riffraff of the camp. The boy was the son of the camp Commandant, and the apple of his father's eye and the thing was often done under that eye and amid the vicious applause of the young father and his terrible crew.

The Commandant was a young chap, a lieutenant. What he lacked in years he made up in hate. He was known as an England hater. We were poison to him. The latrine, a mere shallow pit, was just outside the door of our hut and the Commandant saw to it that the latrine fatigue was always wished off on to the British. We were made to bail it out daily with buckets, which we then carried to the surrounding fields, on which we spread the contents while the Commandant and guards laughed. The _unteroffizier_ in immediate charge of us, if left alone would not make us do this. He was the last kind German I remember, and I have mentioned all whom I can recall as having performed the slightest act of kindness to us, even of the most negative quality. He used to say that it was a pity to treat us so; that such a job was good enough for the Russians, who were no soldiers, anyhow, and who smelled bad and would not wash; but for us who were soldiers it was a great shame.

The vermin were so bad here that we chanced further trouble by writing on post cards as though to friends in England, and complained. We knew that they would be intercepted and go to the Commandant. They did. We were marched to Cellelaager to go through the fumigating machine. We went into a large hut, stripped, tied our clothes in a bundle and shoved them into the large oven to bake for five hours while we sat round with nothing on but a smile. In the interval we were made to run the clippers closely over our heads and bodies. There were sores on some of the Russians as big as a hand, eaten deep into by the vermin and the bones threatened to break through the skin of some as we sat about naked, shivering. Uncleanly at best and denied soap here, the lower class of them neglected all the rules of cleanliness. Their "non-coms" were the reverse, being almost without exception men of some education and general attainments.

Upon our return to this camp we were told by a friendly Russian in the orderly room that the post cards were being held there as evidence against us. We begged him to give them to us. He did so, and we had barely finished destroying them when a German officer, accompanied by a file of men, entered and demanded them. We explained that they had been destroyed. He would not believe us. We pointed to the charred ashes. He searched our bodies, our beds and the scanty furnishing of the hut, naturally without avail. The Russian orderly was severely admonished and our fire was cut off as punishment.

The treatment at this camp was uniformly bad. The next morning the _Raus_ blew at four-thirty instead of five, as was customary. While we were still engaged in dressing the guards rushed in, some with fixed bayonets, others with them gripped short, as with daggers. The leader wore a button, the insignia of non-commissioned rank. He gave a berserker roar of rage and charged furiously at an inoffensive Russian and stabbed the poor fellow in the neck; while his victim lay back in pleading terror, with outstretched arms. And then, still roaring, he slashed a Frenchman who was walking past, on the back of the head. Going down the hut, he espied Harckum, of the East Lancashire Regiment, tying his shoes. Without warning he plunged at him, and, striking, laid open the entire side of the man's face, splitting the ear so that it hung in two pieces. This was all quite in order because we were slow in dressing.

The Russians, with the exception of a lucky few who received some from a Russian society in England, got no parcels, and suffered accordingly. They were more amenable to discipline than we were, and perhaps because of their hunger used to go out daily to work on the moors from daylight until dark. They were a cheerful lot, considering everything, little given to thinking of their situation and not blessed by any great love of country nor perhaps the pleasantest recollections of it; and to that extent at least appeared to be comparatively satisfied, even under ill treatment. Ill fed as they were, they used frequently to fall out at their work from sheer exhaustion, which the Germans said was only laziness and malingering and for which they would be returned to a point near the laager, where we were, for their punishment. By the Commandant's orders this consisted of forcing them to run the gauntlet of two lines of soldiers who jabbed them with bayonets if they fell into a walk--until the victims could run no more and dropped in their tracks. The Germans would then roll their eyelids back for signs of shamming, and if any such indications were shown, they were jabbed again--and usually were, anyhow--until their failure to respond proved that they were really unconscious.

This happened with alarming frequency on a regular schedule, forenoon and afternoon, to all Russians who refused to work. On one occasion we saw six or eight of them laid out unconscious at one time in this manner. We wished to do something for them, but were refused permission, and one man who was thought to be a ring leader was selected to make an example of; he was awarded seven days' cells.

We had previously agreed that if we were awarded this punishment; we should refuse to run the gauntlet and should let them do their worst. There was no more heard of all this, but after that the Russians were punished on the other side of a belt of trees just outside the laager, where we could not see them, though their piteous cries could plainly be distinguished.

Three of the Russians broke away from this camp, and finding themselves near the stores, crawled in the window and stole a half of a pig. They were recaptured, and, after doing thirty days' cells, were forced to work out the price of the pig at the rate of thirty pfennigs--or six cents--a day, which ordinarily would have been credited to them for the buying of necessities. And pork came high in Germany.

There was one kind of pill for all ailments. That however, may have been only stupidity. At least the practice is not confined to the prison camps nor the army of Germany, as all British soldiers know. But even these were not for the British.

On another occasion a party of Russians arrived from another camp twelve miles away.

They said that some Englishmen there who had refused to work had been shot at until all were wounded in the legs.

We continued to receive our old friend, the _Continental Times_, here, and through it first learned of the Skager-Rack or Jutland battle, in which, the paper claimed, over thirty major British ships had been sunk, in addition to a larger number of smaller ones. The _Times_ said it was a great victory for the Germans. The last we doubted and the first we knew to be untrue, since some of the ships they claimed to have sunk had been destroyed previous to our capture, nine months before. It was in the _Times_, too, that we first heard of Kitchener's end. We could not believe it, and for a month laughed at the guard's insistence on the story, until one day a post card arrived from England, saying: "K. of K. is gone." That was a terrible blow to us, for to the British soldier; Kitchener was the tangible expression of the might of his Empire.

Some of our party of eleven British had been prisoners since Mons and they were in a very bad way. The poor food, the lack of the fundamental necessities of the human frame, the terrible monotony of the continual barbed wire, the same faces round them, mostly unfriendly, all combined to have a most depressing effect, not only upon their bodies, but upon their minds. Many of them will never be of any use again. Compared to Ladysmith, when that place was besieged in the South African War, the latter, terrible though it was, was far and away better than this, even if we did live on horse meat at the last in Ladysmith.

There was a certain amount of vice here, induced by the life. A kilted Highlander was accused of having fathered a child in a German family, where he had been employed. We did not learn the facts of the case; but such, at least, was camp gossip and it served to detract materially from the habitual despondency of our lot.