The French and English of Freiburg camp had no monopoly in the secret service news served up by the propaganda press. About once a fortnight the few Australians there were in their turn stung. In a well-considered and far-seeing article it would be pointed out that the Australians were really the only troops amongst the Allies capable of forcing any results, so they were being used ruthlessly for desperate enterprises. There was, we learned, a double purpose in it, first to get results in war that English troops were not capable of achieving, in the second place to so reduce Australia’s manpower that she could not, for a long time to come, achieve that aim which was Australia’s dream and England’s nightmare: Australian independence, throwing off ‘the English yoke’. The synonym for ‘yoke’ is a very popular word in Germany. The writer, dear sympathetic chap, deplored that Australians should be so blind as not to see England’s plot. I met at least one Australian who did see it, or partly saw, but he, poor fellow, was, I’m sorry to say, a victim of German not English brutality, and at that particular time ‘mental’. A German illustrated paper often shown to us at that time for our enlightenment was Die Woche—or it might have been Die Bosche, both its sound and its sense were confusing.
The campus of the old university, as I have mentioned, was about a chain in length, though the camera made it a noble space, but its chief fault was that it only got the sunlight for about two hours every day. Still every move was southward with departing summer, and once again I heard with pleasure rumours of repatriation. It might happen any day. As winter approached, there were many attempts to escape from Freiburg, and they seemed to be especially hopeless. There was no barbed wire to break, certainly, in place of it old masonry walls about two feet thick. Sentries were bribed to bring in bars. Most of the rooms had big cupboards, and inside there the sanguine captives got to work. Some were weeks boring patiently and all seemed to conclude that the best plan was to break through the university chapel. In one case, after the prisoners had worked for days, they broke through the wall, only to find a detachment of Germans, wearing carpet slippers, waiting for them to get through.
Many got out of camp, some were very near the frontier when caught, but I can’t remember that anyone actually got away. Amongst those who tried and failed was Captain William Robinson VC, who brought down the first Zeppelin in London. There were finally about 80 sentries guarding 250 prisoners, yet attempts to escape continued as long as I remained at Freiburg. Whatever the risk, whatever the consequences, they were prepared to face them if they could get the first two requisites—a map of the border and civilian clothes. The discovery of someone missing was usually made at the first roll call but, if possible, someone else answered. Prison vigilance increased, the sentries paid surprise visits at night to see if all prisoners were in their beds, and more than once were bluffed for the moment with a dummy. It was a complete puzzle to the guards to find a bed vacant in the morning where there had been a sleeping prisoner at midnight. They took no risks afterwards but turned down the blankets, where only a tuft of hair showed, to see if there was also a face attached to it.
Before leaving Karlsruhe I was a Capitalist in dripping, had ten tins of it in reserve, and bread and dripping was a delicacy. But riches are fleeing, my wealth of dripping was not sent on to Freiburg, but went to help the enemy through a lean crisis.
Freiburg was a big military centre for soldiers either on leave or in training. From the infirmary I could see over the streets, and here again one noticed the absence of young men who were not in uniform. How slovenly and woebegone everything and everybody appeared to be!
All at once the weather began to get very cold and we had several heavy falls of snow. In order to keep warm the prisoners spent much of their time in bed. Each bed had a pair of very thin blankets but, by piling our overcoats and other clothing over them, we managed to keep fairly warm.
Amongst the orderlies in hospital was an Irishman who had been taken prisoner early in the war, and spent a good deal of his spare time in cursing Roger Casement, who had come to them on his recruiting tour of Germany. One day another Irish prisoner, he said, struck the renegade, who never visited them again except with an armed guard. This man was sent to Switzerland to be interned there, but as he was always getting drunk and giving trouble they sent him back to Germany.
Amongst prisoners brought to Freiburg were three Indians, two of them Ghurkhas, one a Sikh. The Ghurkhas seemed to trouble little about loss of caste in having meals prepared for them by Germans, but the Sikh was irreconcilable and much upset. The poor fellow seemed to be in the very depths of despair and would beat the walls with his bare hands. Some of the senior British officers went to the Commandant and explained that the Sikh had no wish to cause trouble; that it was a question of religion, and eventually a small room was given him apart from others. The Indians were a source of endless interest to the Germans who had either met or heard of the Ghurkha. They would often show us, in convincing pantomime, how the Ghurkhas, with their big knives in their mouths, stole upon the sentries in the darkness, cut their throats and took away their ears as a ‘souvenir’. They thought them terrible fellows.
Freiburg, like many of these old towns of southern Germany, is a really beautiful place. Situated close to the edge of the Black Forest, one could note the deepening of autumn tones in leaves that ‘reddened to the fall’. That ripening of the leaf over a whole countryside was a new and rare sight to us Australians, a new study in landscape beauty of which one never tired.
So the summer which I had seen come to life in Germany passed with great glory in gold and chrome and russet browns. Amid all its glory toiled to the last the women workers in city street and field, silent, often solitary, but always constant. If the curse of war had smitten the men of Germany, the curse of Cain had fallen upon its women in endless toil. The women, of course, are both as sewer and harvester no rare sight in Continental fields, and in Germany she is at best a kind of chattel. German men more than once expressed their surprise that Australians should be as absurd as to give women a vote, the same power as men.
We were given two days’ notice of another exchange, this time to Heidelberg, another of the famous old university towns in which many Englishmen have finished their education, not only in days just before the war, but right through the last century. It was in this old association that so many of our Victorian towns in Australia, such as Heidelberg and Carlsruhe, got their names.
We were well treated on our journey to Heidelberg, given first-class carriages which had been heated for the journey. It seemed to me that the whole process with prisoners for repatriation was one of thawing out. Commencing with black bitterness that had bitten deep in, we were being given time to change our minds about Germany, so that last impressions should be the best. So in the last stage, the road to old Heidelberg, everything was in apple pie order.
There were very many of the old regular officers both at Freiburg and Heidelberg who had been prisoners since 1914, and had not realised that in the military spirit and practices of England great change has taken place in their absence, that the military caste had, in the great upheaval in contact with wholly new and character-making conditions, lost much of its exclusiveness. Most of them had managed in time to make themselves comfortable with folding beds and trunks of clothes. At Freiburg we had been distributed in different barracks, a few officers of the new army, two of them Australians, being given one long shed. A Colonel of the regulars desired it and gave them a polite hint to clear out, but even a Colonel of the regulars discovered that this was not quite the right way to go about it. Coupled with a lamentable want of veneration for army traditions, he discovered disconcerting gifts in free and easy persiflage, heard the old generation referred to as ‘bow and arrow merchants’. Having asserted their right, the juniors allowed the Colonel to have the room.
One of the regulars remarked that I was very young to be a Captain; promotion, he said, seemed to be easy, and mentioned that he had fought in the Boer War.
‘It took nearly twenty years to make Captain then,’ remarked another officer. ‘It only takes thirty dead officers to do it now.’
As there was not enough barrack accommodation at Heidelberg, some of us had to go into leaky huts, through gaps in which the winter wind howled dismally, and they had the additional defect of being dirty. The officials, however, had acquired ‘the farewell manner’, and were not exacting. In my hut was a Canadian General who had had a sad experience and was mentally broken in consequence. He had been taken at Ypres in 1916, after being rather badly buried by a shell explosion, and seemed to have suffered every torture, including long spells of solitary confinement, that only the malignant German mind could devise. In lucid periods he explained that he knew he was mad, and that the solitary confinement had done it. I began then to see a new significance in my Bochum experience. Any noise seemed to drive the poor fellow frantic, almost every day he seemed to have the impression that something terrible was just about to happen. He had as a special attendant an old Scottish soldier of the regulars, who had obtained great influence over him. He believed that all the French and Belgian officers had some design against him, and the old soldier would say soothingly, ‘Oh, just leave them to me. I’ll see that they do no harm.’
Near the camp was an aviation school, and often when passing over the young German cadets used to make a sudden dip at the prisoners to cause a scatter, and play other antics for our confusion and their own diversion. One day something happened. The machine dipped, skimmed close over a group of prisoners, and took the ground just clear of the fence. It taxied for some distance, and then one of the wings struck a tree and went whirling wildly. A roar of cheers broke from a hundred prisoners’ throats in appreciation of the collapse. The young aviator was carried in and died soon afterwards. There were no further stunts of that kind. On the day before Christmas a squadron of our machines bombed Mannheim and flew close to Heidelberg, but their formation had then broken up and with heavy anti-aircraft fire it seemed to us that they were able to do little, though the papers next day admitted great damage from the raid.
Ever since October, McQuiggan and I had been saving up some things for a Christmas dinner, amongst the stock being some tinned meat, a Christmas pudding and custard powders.We were asked to dine with another party, so passed over all our supplies. Some good foragers had managed to steal potatoes, and about ten of us had a great spread, roast potatoes being one of the chief luxuries. That evening we were told that on the following day some of us would be leaving for Switzerland, but I was not particularly overjoyed to find my name in the list, because my Canadian pal was being sent to England a little later. Feeling a ‘bit fed up’, I complained to the German officials, who assured me that it would be all right. I had a strong feeling, however that it was all wrong. Before leaving Karlsruhe a Scottish flying officer was brought in prisoner. He had got far behind German lines, made an important reconnaissance over Douai, near the French frontier between Lille and Arras. He was most anxious that the information should get back to headquarters as soon as possible, and as it seemed likely that I would be repatriated early, he asked me to take it. To have put anything on paper would be dangerous, so he drew maps of the locality which I could reproduce from memory, and repeated the vital facts until I was quite sure of them. He must have spoken about it outside afterwards, and my impression is that the Germans at least heard enough to be suspicious, and to determine that while they had no reasonable excuse for holding me longer as prisoner, I should not, if it could be managed, reach England. I have already mentioned the fact that in the bag which I had been compelled to leave at Bochum were some very candid notes as to the German treatment of prisoners. I had some uneasy moments when that bag afterwards arrived and was about to be searched by the interpreter. I thought it better in the circumstances to take the bull boldly by the horns.
‘You will find in that bag some notes made at Bochum which are not at all complimentary to you. But I was very much down on it then. Don’t make too big a mouthful of them.’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t see or say anything.’ So he handed me the papers which, with a feeling of great satisfaction, I at once destroyed. They thought possibly that a few months in Switzerland might help me to forget.