Wavering between life and death, and with the balance ever threatening to swing the wrong way, I still saw and realised sufficient to know that Germany was even then in serious straights for food. Even when they assured me boastfully that their U-boats were starving England, they knew by actual personal privation that their own case was desperately bad. For a morning meal they brought me a cup of acorn coffee and a hunk of black bread made from a mixture of rye, potatoes and wood pulp. At midday there was another cut of black bread with a watery vegetable soup—or by way of a chance a plate of sauerkraut or boiled carrots. Every second day I got a cup of cocoa or real coffee without milk or sugar.
One orderly, a little more considerate than the rest, asked if there was anything I wanted. I suggested that he might give me an injection with his hypodermic needle each night so that I might sleep and get relief from pain. He did so, but a few days later the surgeon explained that I could have no more morphia, as in my weakened state it would be sure to kill me. A couple of days later there was a second operation in which a large splinter of bone from the shattered thigh was removed. Just as I came out of the anaesthetic a German surgeon was bending over me, and in my half-delirium I swung a quick right handed blow, and fortunately for myself I just missed his nose, which was a very red one. For some days I was in a very low state and they pumped saline into the veins to make blood and keep me alive.
At about that time a new surgeon took over at the hospital, and proved to be one of the most absolute beasts whom I have ever encountered; a man with about as much humanity as one might expect in a Bengal tiger. His professional methods may have been correct, but he coupled with them the deliberate intention to torture. In cleaning the wounds he drew rough-cloth, see-saw fashion, back and forward through my side while I ground my teeth in agony and prayed that I might not gratify him with a groan.While probing the wounds he would look at me with a grin and ask, ‘Does it hurt?’ I could just manage to gasp, ‘No,’ though fully aware that such an answer meant more brutality.
In the next bed to me was a German soldier, who on the first morning that he saw this malignant beast dress my wounds turned sick. He waited until he was quite sure that the surgeon had left the ward, then looked towards me, said something in German and shook his head in a pitying way. Prior to that he had not noticed me, now he would nod to me in the morning, and whenever the surgeon came to dress my wounds this soldier used to put both his hands over his eyes so that he should not see the torture. With pus and blood the mattress of my bed had got into a horrible state. As it dried and hardened it was cutting into the flesh, and one morning with some reluctance I asked if the bed might be shaken out. The intellectual gentlemen flew into a rage, shook his fist in my face, and said: ‘You swine-hound Engländer, it’s good enough for you. You are lucky to be alive!’ He was a particularly vile product of German Kultur.
After he had left the ward an orderly who could speak a little English whispered, ‘Say nothing and I will fix it for you.’ Four of them lifted me gently to the floor, furtively as if they were committing a crime. Keeping watch to see that the coast was clear, they brought a new mattress, explaining that I must keep silent about it or they would be punished for helping an Engländer. The orderly seemed to think that for the reputation of the hospital there was something owing to me, for that day he ransacked another man’s kit, got a small parcel of sugar and brought it to me with the acorn coffee, remarking, ‘You will be able to drink that stuff now.’
One morning there was a commotion in the hospital— the orderlies rushing excitedly about shouting, ‘Engländer! Engländer!’ Some of our fliers over head—so near and yet so far! My inquisitive friend, the Sergeant Major, after many visits came at length to the point. One morning at about the time when the British were taking over part of the former French front, he came with a map and pointed out the lines as they were now held. Having shown their own positions he said carelessly: ‘You have taken over from the French from here,’ with his finger on Ypres, ‘right down to—let me see— which side of Péronne does your line end?’
That was the vital question, and it had taken quite a lot of clever camouflage to get to it. I looked at him, put my finger across my lips, and smiled.
‘Oh, I did not mean that,’ he protested in quick appreciation. ‘I did not mean anything—I forgot. I am sorry.’
A few days later he came up for another try, but there was ‘nothing doing’. His interest in the Engländer immediately ceased.
Such distraction or entertainment as one might have had in these incidents was overshadowed always by the positive horror with which every morning I waited for the coming of that surgeon. I used literally to sweat in apprehension, never thought of him without a shudder. He was simply the last possibility among human brutes; a man who, I am confident really enjoyed the sight of suffering, a special and extraordinary type even amongst a brutal people. For the mental attitude of the German, even when he is not deliberately laying himself out for overbearing brutality, is, to say the least of it, peculiar. In the ward which I occupied was a German soldier who had become ‘mental’. The antics of this poor demented wretch were a perpetual joy to the orderlies. They used absolutely to shriek with laughter over them. Once he tried to throw himself from a window, and, laughing still, they dragged him back to his bed, while patients who were not badly wounded joined in the mirth. The attempt at suicide was just the cream of the joke. I noticed, too, that even in dressing the wounds of their own soldiers there was little care used. Bandages were never eased off as they would have been in a British hospital. They were torn off quickly, possibly by order of surgeons who had their hands too full to waste time on mercy. Several of the wounded Germans in the ward tried to converse with me, and one youngster of about nineteen showed me with great pride a cake of toilet soap which his friends has sent him. Soap seemed to be a prize everywhere, that supplied to the hospital being made chiefly from sand. One day he passed me over his tin of jam and invited me to put some on my bread. Having neither money nor Red Cross supplies, the only luxury that came my way was an occasional bowl of barley broth.
Two ends of an incident are sometimes curiously connected. On the return to Australia I met one of my own lads who had also been wounded and taken prisoner in our last raid. He had been for some time in hospital at Cambrai, on the next floor above me, and mentioned one day that a German Sergeant Major had been very friendly and attentive.
‘What was he like?’ I asked.
He gave me a word-portrait of my cordial friend, the Pumper with the war map, which was so very faithful, so very entertaining in some little fancy touches that I enjoyed it thoroughly. The Sergeant Major had told him there was an ‘Englishman’ in hospital very badly wounded. ‘He has no chance,’ he used to explain. ‘He must die tonight.’ Next morning he would remark, ‘Well, he didn’t die last night, but they don’t expect him to last through tonight.’
The next incident of interest was that I was to be taken away from Cambrai; whither I neither knew nor cared, having the strongest belief that, with that scourge of a surgeon at the head of it, there could be no worse torture chamber than Cambrai. With wider knowledge of Germany I might have been less sanguine, and the sufferings attacked to that transfer will neither be forgotten—nor forgiven.
It was March 15, 1917, still black winter in Germany and with snow falling, when I was taken with a number of German wounded by stretcher and hospital-train, or streetcar to the railway station, where a hospital train was waiting. We were taken first to the platform where there was shelter, until casualty checks had been attached. Then the German wounded were immediately taken into the train and put to bed, but that was not my luck. I was taken along the permanent way close to the tail of the train, dumped into about three inches of snow, and left there. The only garment I wore was a cotton shirt, my only other covering a single blanket—chiefly cotton. A bitterly cold wind was blowing, and for nearly an hour I lay exposed to it. More than once I asked them to take me into the train. They merely grinned and passed on. There was no decent reason for not putting me under shelter at once. No reason that a white man could understand for taking me out of the shelter of the station into the snow. Finally two stretcher bearers, who, I had not previously seen, carried me into the train and told me to get to bed. As they spoke and understood English, I explained that my body was partly paralysed and that I could not possibly move. One of them gripped me by the back of the neck, the other by the legs, and pitched me into bed. It was just German cruelty and might have meant manslaughter.
For days I had been bandaged very tightly in order to stop the flow of blood. It was painful, but, as they explained, necessary. It seemed a pity to take trouble that might be wasted in a few seconds of careless or callous handling by stretcher bearers who were either ignorant or indifferent as to life or suffering.
As in all hospital trains the blanket had been placed in a roll at my feet, and with a grin they left it there. My body was blue from exposure; the cold almost numbed the pain. They watched me while I worked slowly, patiently and painfully with my left toe, trying to edge the blanket up within reach of my hand. Only one thing warmed me, pure, primitive resentful rage. There are many things which a prisoner in Germany’s hands might desire. The one gift I would have taken in preference to all others then was just five minutes of my former life and strength, and those two Huns alone to share it with me. In the fighting line I had often lectured men of my own command who, because of something they had seen, or of which they had learned, vowed that they would never take another German prisoner. I had pointed out that an enemy, either wounded or prisoner was no longer an enemy, and that it would be murder to kill him. Many experiences in Germany helped to strengthen the point of view that the only good Hun is a dead Hun.
In that hospital train I met the first Red Cross nurse I had seen behind the German lines. She spoke such perfect English that for a moment I assumed that she was an English nurse who had been detained when war broke out.
‘Are you English?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she explained, ‘but I was in England for some years.’
Not long enough, apparently, for reformation, because I found her afterwards German in every fibre, as coarsely indecent as the worst kind of German can be. The male of the species, if often efficient, is almost always brutal, but brutality is sometimes preferable to gross vulgarity, and my sincere wish afterwards was that I might not meet another German ‘sister’.
On the second day I was taken into the operating car where about eight surgeons examined me. They seemed to be professionally interested in the wounds, some of them sympathetic, but one of them laughed and appeared to enjoy the spectacle of an enemy so badly mangled. ‘You have something to suffer,’ one of the surgeons said. ‘Drink this,’ and he offered me brandy. On my refusing he said, not unkindly, ‘You must drink it, or I’ll pour it down your throat.’ They bandaged me very decently, and while doing it one of them put a cloth across my eyes and said, ‘You must not see. It may make you down-hearted.’ When I laughed they looked at me in wonder—they knew nothing of what I had seen and suffered at Cambrai.
That train-journey, with many interruptions, lasted for the greater part of three days, and they tried to make it as happy as possible with occasional sleeping draughts. At some of the stations where we halted women came into the train with biscuits and other comforts for the wounded. One of them was handing me some biscuits when an officer called out, ‘Engländer!’ and after a moment’s hesitation she passed on. On a second occasion, his warning was ignored. The lady called a companion who could speak English, and after a few kindly enquiries they gave me some biscuits. The journey ended at Bochum, which is not far from Essen in Westphalia, and I was taken by motor to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. In my recollection it was always be ‘Black Bochum’.