‘Did you keep a diary?’ many Australian friends have since asked. No diary is necessary to a wounded prisoner of war in Germany. Every little happening is indelibly stamped on the mind. ‘Left is a chapter of small miseries which the philosopher plucks smilingly,’ said a stoic. In Bochum life was a continuity of agonies mental and physical. If I ever smiled about them it was afterwards and over the wish that, when Germany was beaten, I could be military governor of Bochum for just one month. There is no difficulty in remembering. The Hun burns in his attentions as with vitriol.
I was taken to a small cheerless room, the only light in which came from a barred and frosted window. Alongside the wall was a heavy frame wooden bedstead. A small locker and a chair by the bedside was the only other furniture in this gloomy cell. On arrival I was taken first to the operating theatre by two German girls who appeared to be doing somewhat similar work to our VADs. They were about to lift me to the table, and I thought myself rather a hefty handful for two girls to manage, but was a little bit shocked when they made no more effort than with a featherweight.
One of my first acts at Bochum was to overcome as far as possible the consequences of a mistake. Just after the second operation at Cambrai I was visited by a German officer, apparently some high official, who asked questions as to my name, rank, battalion and division. A prisoner of war is not compelled to say to what division he belongs. The other details are necessary and compulsory. But, still muddled from the anaesthetic, the division slipped out. Getting hold of the papers afterwards I hid them under my shirt and, when opportunity offered, used an indelible pencil to rub out every trace of that indiscreet record. I had worried over it but, when duplicates were sent after me to Bochum, was relieved to find that there was no entry as to the division. I was rid of that nightmare. At Cambrai one Australian prisoner being asked to name his division declined. The Sergeant Major insisted for a while, then brought an officer, who repeated the question. The Australian, of course, gave the wrong division, when the German promptly retorted, ‘You are a liar. I only asked you to see if you would tell me the truth.’
On another occasion one of our prisoners questioned by a German intelligence officer was astonishingly candid. Every question asked was cheerfully answered. The German was delighted to find a man so well informed, yet so unsophisticated. At the close of the interview he was most cordial, smiling and bowing his thanks. Just as he was leaving the room the prisoner called him back.
‘I forgot to tell you about the new guns on the Somme,’ he said. ‘They’re a new calibre, very big, but we haven’t been able to use them yet.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Well, to tell you the gospel truth, the shells are so heavy that we haven’t enough men to lift them into the gun.’
The German swore volubly and tore up his notes.
On 17 March I was told that a card reporting me wounded and a prisoner in German hands had been sent away twelve days before. It was comforting to feel that my people in Australia knew the worst. On March 10th they had received an urgent cable reporting me wounded and missing, and they had a letter from an officer of my battalion, giving all details available. It was not until May 15th that my people knew officially that I was wounded and a prisoner of war. The German assurance that they had cabled on March 5th was as trustworthy as most things Prussian.
It was from Bochum that I wrote my first letter home and it was, I flattered myself, a masterpiece in dutiful deception. It occupied a page of foolscap and took fourteen days to write. For I was determined that, if possible, no wave of the pen should worry them. That letter was really painted, not written. The concentration in writing four or five words at a time was so great that it left me exhausted.21
The first meal in Bochum indicated in one respect at least a better cage. The ration included some good soup, a little boiled meat very well done, potatoes, red cabbage and a little milk pudding. But as time went on the ration shrank and coarsened, my mainstay being a liberal measure of milk from which the cream had been separated. At six in the morning they brought a cup of black coffee without sugar and a thin slice of bread. At nine o’clock breakfast was served, a cup of unsweetened acorn coffee and three small slices of bread, with a small portion of curd-like cheese in which were a few caraway seeds. Like so many things which the Germans genuinely consider a dainty it seemed to me vile, and I was never able to eat it. Another dainty brought on rare or special occasions was a bit of raw fish, not cooked or even smoked, but apparently cut just as the fish was taken from the water. They were greatly puzzled when I declined to eat it.
‘But you do not understand; it’s so good for you, a delicacy.’
Possibly it was good. I’m quite sure that they consider it so, but I had not been trained to eat raw fish, and they declined to spoil it by cooking. My bit of raw fish was always given to a Russian prisoner. As meals decreased in bulk they increased in aroma. The meat, apparently tinned stuff, was often rotten; the soup announced itself as soon as the door opened, but I honestly believe that most of the civilians got nothing better. Occasionally meals were forgotten altogether, but that was the fault of the attendants. Another dainty occasionally served, and apparently always eaten raw in Germany, was a very thin rash of bacon. Coming after the fish, my aversion to raw bacon was another matter for wonder.
‘It’s good for you. What do you want? All you Engländers expect roast beef and plum pudding.’
‘Not here,’ I explained.
On a few occasions they brought me a small piece of smoked fish which had evidently been stored for years and had turned green.
For a long time at Bochum it was a case of next door to death. For three months I was in solitary confinement, with not even a book to break the dreary monotony. Week after week I had very little sleep, all the while suffering almost intolerable pain. No trouble was taken about bed sores, and these were soon added to my other miseries. One of these sores had finally eaten so far into my back that it could no longer be either ignored or endured, so one day they turned me over and poured raw benzene into it. On my emaciated limbs the skin seemed dead and black, and peeled away in flakes. The flesh had almost wasted away. In the third month of captivity my weight, originally 12½ stone, was reduced to about 6½ stone. My face was gaunt and colourless, my hair, never cut or combed, was a curling, matted mass. For weeks they refused to shave me; for three months, in this hospital named St. Elizabeth, they refused even to sponge my body. One doesn’t care to dwell upon such unpleasant detail, but this is mainly a chronicle of Hun hospitals and Prussian mercy. My body, of course, was in a filthy state, for ointments and other matter adhered. Care was certainly taken to cleanse a narrow strip just about the wounds, and to prevent infection, but in every other way I was brutally neglected.
For months I received no mails from home. My first Red Cross food parcel came in the sixteenth week of captivity. The constant discharge of pus from the wounds worked even through two squares of black sheet that were placed under me, and soaked into the mattress. There were other English prisoners of war in the hospital, but for a long time none of them were allowed to visit me. It was solitary confinement, with dirt, degradation and pain superadded. My conviction was that they had determined to drive me ‘mental’ and but for a one little decorative detail of that cell they would probably have succeeded. Near the ceiling the greenish grey wall had its one note of relief in a coloured frieze. Counting the dots of colour in that frieze was my mind’s salvation. First I would count them singly, then by twos and threes, hoping that the totals would not agree, so that I might count them all over again. Even counting dots of paint upon a prison wall is poor recreation, but after an hour’s thinking I always found myself taking tally again, counting, conjuring. If suffering is part of man’s inheritance I got at Bochum all that was coming at me.
With the help of morphia I could generally sleep for an hour, the rest of the night as just staring into darkness, suffering, thinking. With the mind thus void, strange thoughts come into it; some of them perhaps come to stay. That I should have gone mad I have little doubt, but, with the belief once established that it was their will to drive me mental, came the same obstinacy that helped me, I believe, to fight successfully against death at Cambrai. My body at that time seemed already doomed to living death. I could move only my arms. Even the smallest trifles became important. At midnight the German sentry, who stood guard outside my prison, was relieved. He would go to the next room, and it was a relief even to hear him throw his boots upon the floor.
What wattle walks I took in imagination then! It was autumn in Australia, but that mattered not. Memory may supply abroad even that which Nature denies at home. In the good land beyond the sea, peopled with happy memories, it was always spring time.
Twice a day my wounds were dressed by a Russian Pole who, having been in German hospitals for fifteen years, was in sympathy wholly German. Even with such experience in a land which claims superiority in surgical science as in so many other things, his knowledge of cleanliness as a detail of hospital treatment seemed to be wholly elementary. And there was no excuse for it. Soap might be scarce, but water was abundant. Once a week they moved me, and then for twenty-four hours came fresh agony before I could settle comfortably down again. It was at the close of one of those regular pain swells that they brought me an air-cushion to ease the pressure of the bed sores. I knew that if I moved the pain would begin again, so refused it. A couple of days later I asked for it, but the attendant said, ‘No, when everything is offered again, you’ll learn to take it. Now you may grin and bear it.’
After forty-eight hours he evidently thought I had been punished enough, so brought back the cushion. He was in some ways a queer contradiction, solicitous, careful in the treatment of wounds, indifferent as to anything else. He would wash carefully around about the wounds with methylated spirit, further clean them with peroxide of hydrogen, but, though I implored him to do it, he never once sponged my body, a great concession being a small bowl of water for the face. He differed wholly with the surgeon as to the possibilities of my case, and I was surprised to find the German doctors frequently listening to him attentively, even adopting his suggestions. After about two months I got my first shave. Two boys brought in a huge can from which they lathered my face, and I was happily unaware then that the same pot had just done the round of the wounded Russian prisoners. The Russian is, by choice and habit, dirty; he is also frequently diseased. ‘Where ignorance is bliss ‘tis folly to be wise.’
One day, to my astonishment, the door of my cell-ward was opened and with a, ‘Ha! Engländer!’ and two German NCOs walked in. After a few remarks of a rather silly nature, one of them opened a newspaper and showed me a picture of the famous L Battery at Néry. All the guns excepting one were knocked out and the only surviving gunner was firing that one at point blank range.
‘England kaput. Deutschland über Alles!’ one of them remarked. ‘Gott strafe England!’
‘Ja, ja!’ I grinned. ‘Gott strafe England und England strafe Deutschland!’
One of them took it very nastily indeed, the other who had some sense of humour laughed loudly at his friend’s annoyance. About an hour later the angry one returned with a paper upon which some questions were written in French. The first was:
‘You call us barbarians and say that you are fighting the cause of Civilization. Why then do you use black troops to fight against civilised white men?’
‘They are not fighting civilised peoples,’ I wrote in reply. ‘They are fighting Germans. No people guilty of such atrocities as you committed in Belgium and France could call themselves civilised, and no black man, even if he were an ignorant savage, could possibly do worse.’
Again he stamped about in a rage, yelling, ‘It’s not true!’ He had a big voice but a rather weak intellect, and with another ‘Gott strafe England!’ he finally disappeared.
My experience of the Hun in all his forms, kultured and otherwise, may have been unusually unfortunate, but it seemed to me that while his devotion to his Kaiser and country was undoubted, the deficiency both in his mental equipment and moral standpoint is that ‘sporting instinct’ and sense of fair play which so conspicuously animates the Briton. It is especially lacking in the Prussian, who could in no circumstances be a sportsman. His code is better suited to crime than chivalry.
A queer experience commenced when I had only been a few days at Bochum. One day I noticed the door open very slowly, then it was pushed a little farther, so slowly that I had lots of time to imagine some new injury or insult from a bright particular NCO, who visited me frequently but never apparently with any other purpose than to bait and abuse. When the door had opened, a foot, a face slowly filled the space. And such a face—old, rugged, with a cavernous mouth wide open and only a few black stumps of teeth left at intervals. Then the face slowly distorted into a grin, until one felt uneasy. It seemed as if the whole top of the head were lifting like a lid from a tea pot, for the apparition was a German woman. Day after day she came thus to stare silently for a long time, then disappear, fading out like the grin of the Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland. It went on for weeks, and in my mental condition had a most depressing effect.