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 secrecy2 was displayed as to our destination by the Germans, and all sorts of places were mooted3 as possible by the prisoners themselves.
Shortly before we had heard the news of our impending4 departure, a strange thing happened. A battalion5 of young German soldiers marched into the German half of the camp, and very soon after their arrival [46]we were astonished to see another line of sentries6 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 Democrats7 were to have labour demonstrations8 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 previously10.
Nothing else happened beyond the arrest of five civilian11 Germans who were hanging about the entrance to the prison. Why they were suddenly seized and flung into [47]cells no one rightly knew, but we concluded that it had to do with these same May 1st demonstrations.
The preparations for the great exodus12 from the camp were full of comic and sometimes almost tragic13 incidents.
Some prisoners, who had taken the trouble to try to make their rooms comfortable when the camp became all English, were particularly savage14 over the move, and took care that nothing which they were unable to take away should be left to be sold again to another batch15 of prisoners at a later date. There was a considerable quantity of live sk of various kinds in the camp, and measures for the transportation of these furred and feathered belongings16 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 prolific17 breeders. They provided many an [48]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 accumulated much more stuff than would go into one box, and much grousing18 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.
[49]On the last evening at Crefeld, definite "move" orders were issued and our names were called by parties. I was detailed19 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 nominal20 roll-call was ordered that evening in order to ascertain21 the names of those who were missing. The Crab22 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. Muddles23 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 [50]occur in calling over the names of 750 officers of another nationality, the Germans were bamboozled24, 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 passed through the opening.
Now, of course, no certainty of keeping those counted from those uncounted could possibly be assured, 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 applied25 a match to an old broom found on a tennis court. It made an excellent torch and others quickly emulated26 his example. This was followed by a wild throwing about of these flaming missiles, and it not infrequently happened [51]that one of them pitched extremely near a German soldier forming one of the cordon27 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 trample28 out the flames, amid the laughter of all the prisoners. The alarm was sounded on a bugle29, 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 weird30 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 interfere31 to any great extent. When the order to disperse32 to our [52]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 quantity 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 [53]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 abreast33 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 [54]station and we saw our last of Crefeld. Extraordinary as it may seem, we were positively34 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 groove35 for the whole term of their imprisonment36. 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 milestones37 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 unnatural38. 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 [55]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," "wundersch?n" 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 [56]to hit something of importance there, so close together are the various workshops jammed.
At Gütersloh station we slowly passed 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 incessant39 repertoire40 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 Gütersloh we decided41 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 covertly42 watched our German guards when we produced white [57]bread and tinned beef sent from England. It was evidently a great surprise for them, and they could not help showing their astonishment43 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 rations9. It was very scanty44 and the small quantity 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 alacrity45 and became friendly from that moment, telling us all sorts of things that interested us exceedingly.
Apparently46, they in common with the majority of Germans, had mistrusted and even feared their English prisoners up till [58]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 trenches47 occupied by my brigade near the Chemin des Dames48 on the Aisne. He had no hesitation49 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." [59]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 intoxicated50 with victories actual and prospective51; 1915, confident but a little more calm; the big talk of capturing London, etc., had died down by then; 1916, [60]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 civilians52 of the lower orders.
By the Spring of 1917, real anxiety about the coming summer's fighting began to be evident, which was partially53 relieved by the events in Russia and the great promises and hopes held out to them by the submarine warfare54.
Their behaviour towards us followed the same gradual scale. At first, bullying55, truculent56 and brutal57, they became more docile58 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 [61]same time during the night which was approaching.
I watched very carefully that night, but never once did I catch them all unconscious at the same moment.
There can be no doubt whatever that they had had very stringent59 orders on the subject, owing probably to the escape of nine British officers from trains in the last three months.
The same watchfulness60 was displayed by the Germans throughout the train, as we found out on comparing notes afterwards.
The journey continued throughout the next day and we passed through Minden in the late afternoon.
We had now made up our minds that Stralsund, one of the rumoured61 destinations, was to be our new "home." Great was our surprise when we found that our train had stopped at a small town called Schwarmstedt, in Hanover, and that our new camp was some eight miles from there. The guards [62]got out and formed a close cordon completely round the train and we were told that we were not to be marched off till daybreak. The German soldiers from our carriage not employed on this cordon duty fetched us water at our request and we settled down to sleep for a few hours until the time for moving came. We were turned out of the train at 3 a.m. and after being formed up in fours we waited for an hour or so.
We had a grand opportunity of studying the Prussian method of enforcing obedience62 and smartness in the men during this wait. A captain and a sergeant-major kind of man, fairly screamed at the privates. On several occasions, livid with rage, one or other of them rushed at some hapless wretch63 and roared at him in sentences containing very choice German words—hardly of the endearment64 variety.
Our carriage guards had previously told us that the major, captain and sergeant-major were "Schweine" of the worst type, [63]but that the lieutenant65 was liked well enough. We could now judge for ourselves.
At last we got the order to move off, our hand baggage being left behind to be brought up by a miniature railway train especially constructed for the purpose of supplying the prison camps.
The camp with several others, as we found out afterwards, was situated66 on the Lüneburg Heide, some eight miles east-north-east of the town of Schwarmstedt and five or six miles on the Berlin side of the river Aller.
Crossing the river and leaving the valley through which it flowed, we quickly entered a wild tract67 of country, through which the only road was a rough cart track. The soil was peaty with a deep layer of sand and black dust on the top of it. For the first two or three miles we passed through several very fine pine forests interspersed68 with young plantations69 and rough scrub.
This type of country gave way to a flat [64]marshy-looking area covered with rank vegetation and stunted70 fir-trees. Streams and ditches cut up the land, and it struck one as being a very wet place even in the summer, in winter it would probably be a swamp.
At last we reached the camp and found ourselves looking at a collection of wooden huts with tarred felt roofs, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, seemingly planted at random71 in the midst of the wildness.
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1
varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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secrecy
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| n.秘密，保密，隐蔽 | |
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mooted
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| adj.未决定的，有争议的，有疑问的v.提出…供讨论( moot的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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impending
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| a.imminent, about to come or happen | |
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battalion
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| n.营；部队；大队(的人) | |
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sentries
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| 哨兵，步兵( sentry的名词复数 ) | |
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democrats
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士( democrat的名词复数 ) | |
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demonstrations
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| 证明( demonstration的名词复数 )； 表明； 表达； 游行示威 | |
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rations
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| 定量( ration的名词复数 )； 配给量； 正常量； 合理的量 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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civilian
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| adj.平民的，民用的，民众的 | |
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exodus
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| v.大批离去，成群外出 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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batch
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| n.一批(组，群)；一批生产量 | |
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belongings
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| n.私人物品，私人财物 | |
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prolific
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| adj.丰富的，大量的；多产的，富有创造力的 | |
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grousing
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| v.抱怨，发牢骚( grouse的现在分词 ) | |
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detailed
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| adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的 | |
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nominal
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| adj.名义上的；(金额、租金)微不足道的 | |
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ascertain
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| vt.发现，确定，查明，弄清 | |
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crab
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| n.螃蟹，偏航，脾气乖戾的人，酸苹果；vi.捕蟹，偏航，发牢骚；vt.使偏航，发脾气 | |
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muddles
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| v.弄乱，弄糟( muddle的第三人称单数 )；使糊涂；对付，混日子 | |
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bamboozled
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| v.欺骗，使迷惑( bamboozle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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emulated
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| v.与…竞争( emulate的过去式和过去分词 )；努力赶上；计算机程序等仿真；模仿 | |
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cordon
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| n.警戒线，哨兵线 | |
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trample
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| vt.踩，践踏；无视，伤害，侵犯 | |
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bugle
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| n.军号，号角，喇叭；v.吹号，吹号召集 | |
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weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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disperse
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| vi.使分散；使消失；vt.分散；驱散 | |
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abreast
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| adv.并排地；跟上(时代)的步伐，与…并进地 | |
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positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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groove
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| n.沟，槽；凹线，（刻出的）线条，习惯 | |
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imprisonment
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| n.关押，监禁，坐牢 | |
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milestones
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| n.重要事件( milestone的名词复数 )；重要阶段；转折点；里程碑 | |
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unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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repertoire
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| n.(准备好演出的)节目，保留剧目；(计算机的)指令表，指令系统， <美>(某个人的)全部技能；清单，指令表 | |
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41
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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covertly
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| adv.偷偷摸摸地 | |
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astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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45
alacrity
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| n.敏捷，轻快，乐意 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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trenches
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| 深沟，地沟( trench的名词复数 )； 战壕 | |
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48
dames
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| n.（在英国）夫人（一种封号），夫人（爵士妻子的称号）( dame的名词复数 )；女人 | |
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hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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50
intoxicated
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| 喝醉的，极其兴奋的 | |
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51
prospective
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| adj.预期的，未来的，前瞻性的 | |
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52
civilians
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| 平民，百姓( civilian的名词复数 )； 老百姓 | |
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53
partially
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| adv.部分地，从某些方面讲 | |
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54
warfare
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| n.战争(状态)；斗争；冲突 | |
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55
bullying
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| v.恐吓，威逼( bully的现在分词 )；豪；跋扈 | |
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56
truculent
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| adj.野蛮的，粗野的 | |
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57
brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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58
docile
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| adj.驯服的，易控制的，容易教的 | |
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59
stringent
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| adj.严厉的；令人信服的；银根紧的 | |
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60
watchfulness
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| 警惕，留心； 警觉（性） | |
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61
rumoured
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| adj.谣传的；传说的；风 | |
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62
obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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wretch
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| n.可怜的人，不幸的人；卑鄙的人 | |
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64
endearment
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| n.表示亲爱的行为 | |
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65
lieutenant
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| n.陆军中尉，海军上尉；代理官员，副职官员 | |
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66
situated
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| adj.坐落在...的，处于某种境地的 | |
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67
tract
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| n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林) | |
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68
interspersed
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| adj.[医]散开的；点缀的v.intersperse的过去式和过去分词 | |
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69
plantations
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| n.种植园，大农场( plantation的名词复数 ) | |
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70
stunted
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| adj.矮小的；发育迟缓的 | |
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71
random
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| adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动 | |
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