Came the day when the first strength exercise was undertaken. It was coupled with the happy news that I would soon be transferred from Bochum, where all the room was required for German wounded. There was no longer, as at Cambrai, the high hope that any change must be for the better. To know the Hun is to lose hope. The first experiment was in being lifted to the edge of the bed—and falling helplessly back again in a faint. Next day the aides held me for a little while, but the test ended with another faint. It was a case of forcing one to strength that might have been reached by easier stages, so they carried on. With support I was soon able to sit for three minutes in a chair, without becoming unconscious. Though months of neglect and ill-treatment are not to be remedied by a few days’ attention, I was able with resolution to sit up for half an hour on the fourth day. The gaping wound in the side, though bandaged, was still open, and it was months before it closed. About a week after the commencement of these exercises, I was put in a wheelchair and taken along the corridor to where sunlight came through a big window. It was the sunlight of heaven, such divine relief to the gloom and solitude of a cell, and in June the weather was becoming pleasantly warm. This went on for a few days, when I was placed upon crutches, and, with the Belgian friend steadying me from behind, entered on another acrobatic phase.
Life was less gloomy. I could see across the courtyard and, though the outlook was chiefly bare walls, it was something to have the walls. In the chapel attic opposite were some Belgian prisoners. One whistled to attract my attention, and then, gripping the bar with one hand, as I happened to be doing at the moment, started to scratch himself in imitation of a monkey in the zoo; a bit of a pantomime that was irresistibly funny. ‘Iron bars’ in this case quite clearly suggested ‘a cage’.
At first, and even with the help of ‘Belge’, I could only hobble for about a chain on crutches, and once when my pal left me for a few minutes I came a terrible cropper and had to be carried back to bed. The wound bled badly for some time, the blood being quite black. My broken right leg also turned quite black from the toe up to the thigh fracture.
One day hobbling about the hospital square I was attracted by the strange conduct of a Belgian prisoner. He would follow me, staring and silent. When I stopped he would halt, still staring.‘Do you wish to speak to me?’ I asked, and offered him a cigarette. He at once fell upon his knees and commenced to pray. When I tried to get him up, he burst into tears. He was one of many ‘mentals’ manufactured by German ‘discipline’, and the great difficulty was to get him to eat anything. Once I met him carrying an open tin of sardines, and, as he seemed to follow me always, his mates suggested that I might take him into the ward and persuade him to eat. After taking a mouthful myself I would offer him some, but he just picked it up, stared and put it down again. A few days later, however, they managed to induce him to both talk and eat.
Although a Belgian he had lived in England before the war and joined the King’s Own Manchester Regiment. He had been taken prisoner in the early fighting on the Somme, and some of those who knew the poor chap’s story said that he had been driven ‘mental’ by German cruelty. They do take the keenest delight in inflicting even mental torture. Before I commenced to receive parcels from the Red Cross, both German doctors and non-coms never missed a chance to jibe about my country having no use for me.
‘Why don’t they send you food?’
When it did come, they searched every packet, rigorously probing even into the meat tins to see if anything were concealed there.22 The one thing that perpetually puzzled them was that nothing in our food parcels was ‘substitute’. It did more than anything else to convince the intelligent that the stories told in their propaganda papers about England’s starvations were ‘hot air’.
On that floor was an Alsatian, who had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for refusing to fight against the French. When it might be done safely he spoke his feelings freely. There were many such cases as his where men of French parentage refused to fight their countrymen. He and his brother had been sent to Turkey, where his brother was killed and he was three times wounded. He had also fought against British troops in the North and, after being once wounded, refused to go out into the trenches again. He, with seven other Alsatians who had been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, was kept in one small cell. When the war was over and he completed his sentence he would, he said, go to England or France. There was no doubt at all as to where his sympathies lay. He just hated the Bosche. The Germanising of Alsace had evidently been an imperfect job.
All this time we had little news of war, save when it concerned success for the Central Powers, but ‘the blonde beast’ himself was an unfailing war barometer. When he was more brutal, more intolerable than usual, the Germans were winning; when he commenced to fawn a bit, to repeat the formula ‘We are not such bad fellows as they say’, something unpleasant had happened to them. The prisoners of different nationalities were not kept apart at Bochum, and sometimes the mixing had a sinister aspect. Many of the boys were convinced that Russians who reeked of dirt and disease were put into their compound with the sole object of infecting them, and it leaked out that this was done by direct order from German headquarters and was particularly desired in the case of the French. They wished, perhaps, to make them better acquainted with their Allies, for in all sorts of devilry the Bosche is highly efficient.23
Under the convention the Germans should have paid me a weekly allowance, but for months I never received a mark, the first payment was not until I reached Karlsruhe. From the few marks which the boys left I was permitted to buy a small bottle of beer each day as a substitute for acorn coffee. The price at first was about 2½d., and it was not even ‘Neer Beer.’ Of the two hops originally used, one must have hopped out before they corked it. The cost immediately began to hop too, first to 5d., then to 7d. a bottle. Their own supplies were so poor that they wished to discourage me from buying any.
One day, when I was hobbling down the hospital corridor, the Hun sentry took off his cap and put it on my head. I sent the thing flying, carefully brushed my head, and threatened him with one of my crutches. His object was to raise a laugh at my expense amongst some civilians who were then in the hospital. Later I complained to one of their non-coms, who said he was only having a joke.
‘If a British soldier played that sort of a joke with a German, he would get cells for it. It’s an indignity, and if it happens again I’ll report it to the officer in charge of the district.’
Whenever I passed that sentry again he jumped to the salute instantly.
Although many prisoners in working compounds about Bochum tried to escape, I heard of none who got through, and the penalty of failure was ‘heavy punishment’ with a German inflection. They kept trained dogs, a type of wolfhound, to track the fugitives by scent. When a prisoner escaped the dogs were immediately taken to his bed or given some of his left clothing to smell, so that they might get the scent, and the fugitives hit upon rather an ingenious plan of baulking them. They would save pepper from their Red Cross parcels and, before leaving, dust it freely over their bed and clothing. One sniff was sufficient for the hounds; they lost all interest in the runaway. Of course the Huns discovered the trick and no more pepper came in Red Cross parcels, while most of the drugs were also ‘commandeered,’ for what reason was not explained.
On one occasion an angry prisoner drew his clasp knife to a sentry and thenceforward the points of all knives were broken off. Most of the sentries were home service men who, unfit for active service, had never been to the front, but that only seemed to make them the more brutal. It was very noticeable indeed that the few guards who had fought in the war were invariably more humane and considerate. That was my own and I think almost every prisoner’s experience. The home-staying Hun was all Kultur. The searching fires of war, had, in the others, discovered some humanity.
However strict the discipline of the Bosche may have originally been, prisoners who had money, all furnished in the form of special camp notes, had no difficulty in bribing sentries to arrange with civilians for a supply of clothes, a compass, map and other outfit for an attempt at escape. Their ‘poverty, if not their will’ consented. Of course the prisoners picked their men and tested them freely in little and innocent purchases before asking for things the purpose of which could not be concealed. The sentry who had compromised himself in little things was then afraid to report them. Money meant much to them, because prisoners told me that they frequently saw German soldiers pick up old jam or milk tins from Red Cross packets which had been thrown away, and scrape them out, mouldy bread or biscuits being also gathered. Any prisoner who possessed a couple of cakes of soap found bribery easy, and there were few, if any, instances of prisoner being ‘given away’. There was never a case of the recaptured prisoner ‘giving away’ a sentry, however brutally they treated him.24
The irony of Fate was especially illustrated in the case of three fellows who tried to escape from Bochum. They got well away, reached and actually crossed the borders of Holland without knowing it. At that point the boundary jutted out in a cape or salient. The poor fellows went out of sanctuary on the other side and walked right in to the arms of the German sentries.
Another trick of the enemy proved effective until prisoners got to know it. About three miles from the frontier there was a line of posts with notices printed in Dutch, the purpose of the ruse being obvious. Many were taken in by it when just upon the edge of freedom. Later they were careful not to reveal themselves until they were many miles beyond the frontier. The hope of escape, whatever the risks or the punishment, was general. Few were content to sit still and see it out. They were rarely docile and made no secret of their feelings. Men, who in ordinary life would have had every regard for the contentions, had none for German feelings. The road to the cemetery passed close to Bochum hospital, and there were many civilian funerals. Few passed without some for the prisoners cheering and calling out, ‘Hooray, another dead Hun!’ and before the Pacifist can justly criticise their conduct he needs just a little of their experience.
The Russian Pole who had for a time bandaged and cleaned my wound was about that time given an extra job of white-washing, and had little time to spare for patients. He left me without any attention for sometimes five days at a stretch, and by that time the stench of escaping pus was so intolerable that no one else would take on his neglected duty. This continued until within about a fortnight of my transfer to Karlsruhe, when I was again bandaged daily.
Of all the prisoners held in German compounds the Russian was the most hopeless. Their surrender was complete, their servility abject, the only excuse being that for them came no food from abroad, no comforts of any kind. I watched them often, dull, heavy-featured, dirty and diseased, driving carts through the streets, doing all sorts of work without a guard, with neither hope nor thought of escape, underfed, badly treated, yet always docile slaves. The German understood them as thoroughly as he despised them. They had little or nothing to eat. Other prisoners, getting food supplies, passed on their thin soup to the Russians who drank it by gallons until they became bloated and dropsical. It seemed to me that 80 per cent of them had dropsy, their flesh being in such a state that if you pressed it with your finger the impression remained. It was awful to see them in the food line, always craving for more, yet incapable of protest or resentment, literally ‘dumb, driven cattle’. Reformers who talk lightly of Russia’s liberty should have seen that sorry sight to realise the utter hopelessness of reformation for Russia ever coming from within. It is one of our great after-war problems, part of the White Man’s burden:—
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of Peace.
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the Sickness cease.
And when your goal is nearest,
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought
The Russian, as we knew him at Bochum, seemed indeed a hopeless case, without resolution, without self-respect. They would follow anyone who smoked a cigarette until the butt was thrown away, then seize and smoke it to bed rock. Once I gave three cigars to a Russian who absolutely danced with glee—about the one sign of emotion or animation I ever noticed. They seemed to be peasant people and one could see little hope of shaking them into any political impulse that was not purely primitive.
A German non-com who, like most of them, spoke English perfectly, once said to me, ‘What do you think of them? They are just about as much use to you as the Austrians are to us. They just about balance each other.’
Out of the experience of Bochum I learned one thing, and that was to set a more just value upon the character and calibre of the Belgian. The Australians in France had ‘no time for him’, a prejudice mainly due to spy stories. Taking them man for man, I found no finer type, none keener to fight the Hun to the very last extremity. Whatever designs Germany may have had of capturing Belgium either by force or by peaceful penetration is gone for a century at least. In future there should be no footing, no safety for the Hun inside Belgium.