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CAPTIVE AT CARLSRUHE
Cap improvized from
an aviator’s boot.
A modern Icarus.
Chausseur à pied.
FELLOWS IN MISFORTUNE.
I
The First Day
As we limped and stumbled into Caudry in the dusk we presented a very disturbing spectacle.
Two young French women stood at a cottage door, and, when our doleful procession passed, one of them flung herself into her sister’s arms in a paroxysm of grief.
The good folk of the town would have slipped bread into our hands, but our German guards pressed them back with their rifles. Bayonets and rifle butts could not prevent them, however, from flinging us words of cheer and encouragement. “Courage! Bonne chance! Bonne nuit!”
How illogical is war! This very morning, as we entered the first village in which German troops were billeted, we found them waiting to serve us, with outset tables on which were clean glasses and pitchers of clear water! Earlier, while the enemy attack was still developing, I observed a German—himself at the charge, and with at his elbow Death, the equal foeman of all who fight—wave a reassuring hand to a British soldier prisoner who was showing signs of distress.
So in the dark we came to a grim factory, into which we were shepherded for the night. We had had nothing to eat all day; we were to have nothing to eat now. There was, however, an issuing of bowls of what, for lack of a better name—or of a worse—was designated coffee.
There was now also to be a search, and a giving up of all papers, knives, razors, or other steel instruments—bare bodkins by which we might be disposed to seek redress, relief, or release. Search had already been made at a German headquarters within a few miles of the line. Prior to which, as we marched down heavily flanked by our guards, I had, with surreptitious hand thrust into my tunic pocket, succeeded in tearing up and scattering over the land, sundry military papers, and the proof sheets of a book of mine in which were some very complimentary references to the Kaiser. Here it was also that a wounded fellow-officer, giving up his letters, and asking me to explain that two from his wife he had not yet read, the gnarled old German officer handed them back with a salute.
It was difficult to parade the men for search now. They raised themselves on an elbow or sat up and endeavoured to shake the sleep from their eyes, and then dropped heavily back upon the floor again. Ultimately they were herded to one end of the factory, from which they emerged in file, dropping as they passed their poor, precious epistolatory possessions—letters with crosses and baby kisses—into an outstretched sack. One man approached me and asked that he might retain papers, including a written confession, necessary to divorce proceedings against his wife. I put the case to the German officer; he put it to his military conscience, and decided. Yes, they might be retained.
That first night I slept without dreaming; it was when I awoke that I appeared to be in a dream.
At noon next day I received the first meal of which I had partaken for the last forty-eight hours. It consisted of a mess of beans and potatoes, which I, being then in fit state to sympathize entirely with Esau, found more than palatable. Later, in the afternoon, when a red sword lay across the western sky, we marched to Le Cateau. Here there was a separating of sheep from goats, the senior officers being housed somewhere with more or less of comfort, doubtless, while all below the rank of Captain were packed into another discarded factory, whose only production for some time to come seemed likely to be human misery.
Followed four melancholy and miserable days, whose passing was not to be measured by figures on a dial or dates upon a calendar, but by the clamour of appetites unappeased; by the entry of our dole of bread and our basin of skilly. In our waking hours we discussed only food; by night we dreamed of monumental menus displayed on table-covers of snowy whiteness. Scenting a possible profit, a German soldier insinuated into the camp and put up for auction some half-dozen tins of sardines, to the provocation almost of a riot.
Our billets were dirty and verminous. Properly organized and harnessed there was a sufficiency of performance and activity in the fleas to have supplied the motive power to the whole factory! We could not shave, because we had no soap nor steel; we could not wash, because the water was frozen in the pump, and icicles hung by the wall.
If there was little to eat there was even less to read, the only literature in the whole company consisting of one Testament and one Book of Common Prayer, and these being in continual demand.
On the fifth day there came a break in the monotony, some sixteen of us being removed to the headquarters, where had been an examination on our arrival. As we waited for admittance a few French folk gathered around, and two girls from a house opposite made efforts at conversation. Our guards menaced them not too seriously with their bayonets, whereupon they scampered for their house and slammed the door. In a few minutes the door was cautiously opened again; there was a ripple of laughter, and two mischievous faces, with a mocking grimace for the Army of Occupation, appeared round the post.
In our new quarters eight of us occupied one room. Report had it that the walls, besides various pieces of pendent paper, had ears, a dictaphone being supposedly secreted on the premises. That being so, the Germans are never likely to have heard much that was good of themselves.
A READING OF THE PICKWICKIANS.
A search disclosed treasure in the shape of sundry parts of the Pickwick Papers, not certainly the famous original parts in their green—shall we say their evergreen covers?—but sections devised for the simultaneous satisfying of a number of readers. These parts we carefully gathered together, when it was discovered that the immortal transactions began with the celebrated bachelor supper given by Mr. Bob Sawyer at his lodgings in Lant Street, in the Borough. Here, indeed, was matter to cause gastronomic agitation in starving men! Yet, need we, then, go supperless to bed? Shall we not also become Pickwickians, and, constituting ourselves members of the Club, drop in upon the party as not entirely unwelcome guests? And so I read until “lights out” sent us perforce to bed.
Recalling that it was my birthday, and by way of a gift to myself, I succeeded in persuading the Unteroffizier to purchase for me a sketch-book and pencils, with which I amused myself and comrades by a series of portrait studies of more or less veracity. One of these my fellows in misfortune was a sculptor who had exhibited at the R.A., and who now exhibited a photograph of one of his works—a statue of Sappho—which he carried in his pocket. We two decided to hang together—unless we were shot separately—as we had heard amazing reports of ateliers to be secured in certain Läger by humble followers of the arts graphic and plastic.
During all the days of our stay here, and precisely at four o’clock of the afternoon, a bell tolled solemnly from the church under whose shadow we lay. It was for the burial of German soldiers killed at Cambrai.
Early on a Sunday morning, while the stars still shivered in a frosty sky, we set out to entrain for Carlsruhe, very optimistically with one day’s rations in our pouches, and that a day’s rations which would have shown meagre as the hors-d’œuvre of an ordinary meal. We arrived at Carlsruhe on the evening of Tuesday, and in the interim would probably have succumbed to starvation for lack of food, if we had not been in a state of suspended animation owing to the cold.
A SCULPTOR.
Only one incident of that journey do I desire to recall. In the middle of the night I awoke shiveringly from a fitful sleep to find that the train had come to a stop in a large station. I glanced idly from the window, and an arc lamp lit up a great signboard, on which was painted in large ominous letters the one word—SEDAN.
From Carlsruhe Station we passed through streets not uninteresting architecturally, and without exciting undue curiosity or comment, until we came to the Europäisches Hotel. This to famished men seemed to suggest something at least of hopeful hospitalities, but, on entering, the place was obviously as barren of festivity as a Government Board room. We shall have food to eat at five o’clock. At five we wept that it had not come; at six, at seven. We wept even more when at eight it actually arrived.
I observed then, and on subsequent occasions, that after a meal, myself and Marsden (who, as befits a good sculptor, has fashioned for himself a frame of fine proportion) were inclined to emerge from a more or less languorous state and kick up our heels like young colts.
The Vulture
We discovered that by climbing on to the frame of the iron bedstead, and clutching perilously at the ventilating portion of the window in our cell, we could just succeed in gaining a glimpse of the street. To the right we seemed to be in the neighbourhood of a zoological garden or an aviary of some dimension. The only inhabitant of the cages visible to us, however, was a large vulture, which sat there day after day, an unchanging picture of sullenness and stolidity. I wondered if perchance it scented or visioned the red fields which lay not so many miles away.
And so the days passed. After considerable agitation I succeeded in securing a few volumes of the Tauchnitz edition, amongst them Stevenson’s “The Master of Ballantrae.” This possibly, however, induced in me a greater home-sickness for Scotland than ever.
THE UNTEROFFIZIER.
Finding a draught-board to our hand outlined upon the table, and making counters of paper white and blue, we four prisoners on a day played for the championship of the cell and a superadded stake of four thin slices of bread. I won somewhat easily, being a Scotsman, and something of a player as a boy; indeed, heaven forgive me! it was I who suggested the game. As victor, however, I was seized with compassion and compunction, so that, while I retained the title, I returned to each man his share of that staff of life, on which, it has to be confessed, we were having to lean somewhat heavily.
At last came the order that we were to shift from the hotel to the Offizier kriegsgefangenenlager. Whereupon, clapping my steel helmet upon my head, and thrusting my uneaten morsel of bread into one of my tunic pockets, I was ready for the road.
CHRISTMAS DAY AT CARLSRUHE.
