When we left Crefeld, the prisoners were divided into two parties, with different destinations.
There were about three hundred of us in the party in which I happened to be placed, and I was particularly glad that Ross, my loyal companion and messmate, was to be with me. We had shared our meals since early Gütersloh days, and continued to do so almost until the end of my captivity. We were joined in the next camp by Pirie, who, like Ross, was a South African, and we three stuck together through all the trials and tribulations that followed after our exodus from Crefeld.
Our journey was an uneventful one. We had no idea as to where we were bound, but I had a presentiment that things were not going to be as easy for us as we had had so far. It was during this journey that we realised how serious the food question was becoming in Germany. At one station our train was shunted into a siding, and several women who were working in the goods yard, came up and begged us for food. As we had no food to give them, we offered them money, but they told us that money was of no use, that they wanted food which, they said, was scarce and often difficult to obtain in sufficient quantity.
We passed through Hanover, and into a somewhat wild and desolate country, sparsely populated, finally detraining towards evening, at a lonely wayside station. The march from this station was a weird experience.
I felt that we were going into an unknown and uncharted country. There was no sign of human habitation, no cultivated fields, no proper roads. We trudged across bogs and skirted silent woods. There was a peculiar stillness in the air – it was as if we were moving into a wilderness. After an hour or two of steady marching, still laden with the remains of our extraordinary assortment of packages and goods, in a stifling, humid atmosphere, we saw something that seemed uncanny and unreal. I felt as if I was walking straight into some fantastic fairy tale. Far away, a weird animal appeared to be running across the country at great speed. It was of huge size, with legs like those of a centipede that propelled it in regular rhythm. It gave me an odd feeling of mystery about the place, until, as it approached us, I found that it was a trolley running on a narrow gauge track. The “legs” were poles, with which about a dozen men were “punting” the vehicle along, keeping perfect time, and travelling at a rapid rate. The sight of human life was a great relief to us, after the feeling of uncertainty and unreality that had been gradually creeping over us.
At length we arrived at a camp – a collection of dilapidated huts surrounded by barbed wire fences, and at the first sight of the place our hearts sank into our boots, for the prospect of existence here for an unlimited period was unpleasant in the extreme.
As we entered the gate, we were welcomed by a stately white-haired gentleman and some other officers. Tall and thin, with an air of old-world graciousness about him, the old gentleman would have made a fine picture had he been dressed in correct uniform. But he looked like a comic opera figure – with field grey tunic, black breeches and brown leggings, a full dress Uhlan (lancers) helmet on his head, and a naked revolver stuck in his belt – a full dress belt with tassel complete!
He gave a speech of welcome in broken English, apologising for the somewhat inadequate accommodation provided for us, and begging us to excuse the incongruity of his costume, which, he explained, was due to his desire to dress as befitted the occasion, but that he had found, unfortunately, much of his wardrobe missing. He very kindly expressed the hope that we would be able to make ourselves as comfortable as circumstances permitted, and that he would do his best, as far as he could, to make our sojourn a pleasant one! He then introduced his officers, who all bowed stiffly and saluted, and we were marshalled off to our various quarters.
I think this Commandant really did do his best for us. He was an old veteran of the War of 1870, who had spent much time in Scotland where he had several friends, and who, it was evident, had a keen appreciation of British people, and always treated us with the greatest courtesy.
The camp consisted of half a dozen long wooden huts, three on each side of a central open space, within the wire, and three or four outside where were the German officers’ and guards’ quarters, stores, kitchens and baths. Inside the wire, also, were the quarters for our orderlies, and a hospital.
It was situated in the middle of the Hanoverian swamps, miles from anywhere, full of boggy, unhealthy ponds, and pine copses. The water being only about eighteen inches below the surface of the ground, we were practically on a floating raft, and, as can be imagined, extremely unhealthy.
The huts were in very bad repair, leaky and draughty, and daylight could be seen through innumerable cracks in the walls and roofs. These huts were divided into compartments and rooms, each holding half a dozen prisoners, and there would have been plenty of room had it not been for the fact that whenever it rained, and we had plenty of wet days and nights, we were obliged to move our beds from place to place dodging the leaks, with the resultant congestion in the one and only dry spot in the room!
Now and then, in the middle of the night, a shriek would echo in the building as some poor benighted prisoner received the toe of another benighted prisoner in his eye during their efforts to disentangle themselves from the general mixup of limbs, as beds were placed too close together and water was streaming in through the roof, which we one and all endeavored to avoid by climbing over one another.
We had quite a pleasant party in our room. “D-C”, an extremely short-sighted gentleman, was our pet entertainer. In the dark hours, a series of groans from the region of his bed indicated that he had lost his glasses. Someone would strike a light, and “D-C” would be found crawling over his bed with his nose half an inch from the bed clothes, muttering: “Where the blankety blankety blank have those blankety glasses gone to?”
I believe he slept in them and suffered from shortsighted, blurred dreams if he had not got them on.
Brown, who slept next to me and with whom I shared a table, was another individual who helped to liven us up. His untidiness was a disease. Being painfully tidy by nature myself, he gave me intense annoyance by spreading his goods and chattels over my half of the table. I would brush all his rubbish over on to his half and in five minutes it would be back again on mine and dropping onto my bed. After a few attempts at keeping his things stationery, I would blaze up and shoot the whole of his stuff onto the floor, and Brown, getting into bed, would leap on to me with a yell and a tie pin sticking into the sole of his foot.
The food issued by the Germans here was horrible and uneatable. It consisted almost entirely of a mushy concoction of unknown substances, with a suspicion of chopped straw about it. We never touched it, relying entirely on our parcels from home for sustenance, and several pigs were kept by some of the guards which managed to wax fat, somehow, on our rations. As we had no kitchens of our own, and no cooks to prepare our meals, we were perforce obliged to construct stoves ourselves out of odd pieces of brick and bits of tin, and cook our meals. These stoves were to be found all round the camp in odd corners, and being out in the open, in wet weather cooking was a perfect nuisance.
Collecting fuel, too, was a difficulty, as at first we were only allowed out of camp twice a week for walks on parole, and gathering firewood had to be undertaken on these occasions. We had our meals in a dining room, but there were no table orderlies, and meals were, therefore, rather in the nature of picnics. There was a canteen in the dining shed where we could purchase sundry articles, but the whole camp was very badly equipped and we had a more or less wild existence. After the comparative comfort of our previous camps, we found it hard at first to get used to “roughing it.”
Laundry was another question which we had to solve ourselves, the chief trouble being lack of washing soap. Toilet soap was used by most of us, and that pretty sparingly – and hot water, which owing to the small amount of firewood available, was reserved entirely for drinking purposes.
It was intensely hot, and being out in the wilds was in this case an advantage, for most of us lived in a state of semi-nudity. The Wilbern Studio attempted to eke out a precarious existence here, and, although there were no theatricals and no magazines, Willoughby and I worked steadily in the dentist’s room in the hospital, which we were allowed to use as a studio six days in the week. With only the felt covered roof over our heads and the sun beating down on it in full strength, the room was like an oven, and we simply worked without a stitch of clothing on – rather a unique experience for us!
The great bugbear of our life here was monotony. There was absolutely nothing to do, for most of the prisoners, from morning till night, and those who had certain definite work to do were looked upon with much envy. This monotony of existence began slowly to eat into the lives of the prisoners, and take root, developing into what became known later as “barbed wire disease,” a kind of madness in a mild form, which left its mark on most of us in the form of “nerves.”
In spite of the consideration with which we had been treated, and the apparent ease and comparative liberty in our actions, there had always been present an atmosphere of petty annoyances from the Germans. Individually of not much account, these “pinpricks” had little by little worked their way into our brains, like minute doses of poison, injected day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute. It would be difficult to explain just what these annoyances were: a jeering word, perhaps, a look of scorn, a shrug of the shoulders. There was so much of “Verboten” about everything – little things that did not actually matter as far as we were concerned, but irritating. It was like being tied on the end of a rope – you could move round and round, but every time you walked straight, you were pulled up with a jerk. And there was the feeling all the time that we were shut up in a cage, surrounded by soldiers with loaded rifles, that our guards were our enemies, whose brothers were killing our own people in France, and we could do nothing. We were impotent.
For a large number of men of all sorts and conditions to be living in very close contact day after day, with absolutely no privacy, leading a most unnatural existence, it is not to be wondered at that we were slowly getting “queer.” Our captors were the “top dogs,” and they could not hide the fact, for all their indifference and unconcern. Unconsciously, there was a battle raging between the prisoners and the Germans. Very gradually, but definitely, a wall of defence was being built around us, which was knitting us even closer together.
It can be imagined, therefore, that humour played a great part in our lives. We simply had to see the funny side of things in order to keep ourselves from becoming thoroughly stagnant.
Our morning and evening parades were occasions when much merriment was caused, chiefly owing to the inability of the Germans to make themselves properly understood when giving out orders. The interpreter was quite an excellent fellow who could speak English passably well, having lived in the United States for some time before the war, but for some reason best known to the Commandant, his services were not availed of. The Honourable Ivan Hay, a page to the Queen, and an officer of one of the Guard’s regiments, who was a fine linguist, was usually called upon to translate communications on parade. Being of an extremely humorous nature, he invariably kept us in roars of laughter by translating literally what the Germans said, following the German grammar word by word – joining various words together, putting the verb at the end and so forth.
When requested to stand out and translate some order, he would don a short cape, tilt his cap over one eye, and stalk out like some comic opera prince, and turning round to face us, strike an attitude, looking for all the world like Napoleon gazing out across the sea, on St. Helena. He would then perform various evolutions with his Adam’s apple, ostensibly to clear his throat, and waving his arms like an orator, give out some absurd order which was usually quite unintelligible to us. “Die Herren Offizieren” would be translated into “the Messrs. Officers.” Sometimes he would imitate the voice and inflections of the German officer giving the order, and even his manners and pose. When he had finished he would bow politely to the officer, and walk backwards to his position in the line, still bowing.
The absurd part of the performance was that the Germans never realized that their legs were being pulled and took it all very seriously.
By this time the question of escapes was being taken up in earnest by most of us. Schwarmstedt was a comparatively easy camp to get out of, the great obstacle to a successful escape being the distance to the frontier – roughly about two hundred and forty miles.
When it is considered that travelling had to be done entirely by night, hiding during the day time, and walking the entire distance, with the direction governed by compass reading and small scale maps, together with the fact that the amount of food carried was necessarily limited, the problem was not an easy one to solve. A great deal of careful preparation was required in regard to the kit to be carried, compasses, which were mostly home-made, being constructed out of odd bits of material – the body usually the top of a cocoa-tin, covered with waterproof paper, the needle cut out of a small piece of tin from a biscuit box, and magnetised – had to be reliable. Maps, the most important item, were required to be pretty accurate. These were copied from a master map smuggled into the camp – this being one of my special duties. Not only maps covering large areas were necessary, but for difficult localities, small detail maps of larger scale were also required.
Kit consisted of a “ruck-sack,” containing maps, compass, biscuits, cereals (which were eaten raw), meat extract cubes (oxo), sugar and salt, and changes of socks – as many as could be packed in. For the remainder of the food, the escapers would rely on potatoes and green stuff dug out of the fields en route, and eaten raw, as obviously fires for cooking meals would be out of the question. Those who were able to get small cookers with solidified alcohol fuel included them in their outfit. There were a few lucky ones who managed, somehow, to get hold of civilian suits, which of course were a great asset, for anyone found prowling about at night in a British uniform was a certain loser, whereas, in mufti, the chance of detection was lessened considerably.
Gradually, a sort of escape club was developed, anyone with duplicate articles pooling their “spares” and “experts” in any particular line of work being allotted tasks – map making, compass manufacture, and so on. However, as yet, no definite organization was established and individuals carried out their own plans, or made their own preparations on their own, seeking assistance only when required. The P.T.’s, as far as I know, having been split up when we left Crefeld, were by this time disbanded.
There were quite a number of us secretly gathering together the kits for escapes, and the Germans, by some means, got wind of it. Raids on our rooms became more and more frequent, though usually without result. We would be told on parade that we were to remain in our positions for an indefinite period, while a party of soldiers under an officer would invade our quarters, and carry out a systematic search. Many were the ingenious methods employed to hide the “verboten” articles.
On one occasion, a really funny incident took place. There was a raid, under a small and excitable officer known to us by the name of “Pip Squeak” on account of his falsetto voice, during our morning parade. The raid was a farce from the start, as we broke loose and a number of us dashed back to our quarters, for we had not been prepared for it, coming as it did only a few days after the previous one, and some of our belongings were not as well hidden as they should have been. To hide a ruck-sack full of escape gear was not an easy matter, and though as a rule the various articles were scattered about in different places, only being put together as opportunities for getting out arose, on this occasion at least three complete ruck-sacks were known to be lying about.
There was a hasty entrance through windows, and of course, in a twinkling, all compromising articles had disappeared as if by magic. It was really remarkable how everyone instinctively helped each other. For instance, a map would suddenly shoot out of a window in front of some prisoner. Without a moment’s hesitation, he would seize the nearest object and put it on top of the map, or perhaps nonchalantly sit down on it and start to light his pipe as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Or something would drop out of a hole in the wall. The man nearest to it would, with the greatest unconcern, bend down to tie up his shoes, and while doing so, pick up the object and put it in his pocket. A glance through the window would satisfy the owner within that all was well. In time we all became born actors! It would all be done so naturally that not even a prisoner, knowing what was going on, would suspect anything unusual.
It so happened during this particular raid, that “Pip Squeak” found a complete ruck-sack. His joy was something wonderful. Beaming all over his face, he handed the ruck-sack to a soldier just behind him, with the strictest instructions not to lose it on pain of dire penalties. He was to hold on to it like grim death.
M -, a former member of the P.T. and one of our brightest sparks, made up his mind that he would retrieve it at all costs, and together with three or four others, on the same mission, dogged the footsteps of the search party. From one room to another they went. In the last room, Pip Squeak suddenly turned round and gave a sharp order to the custodian of the treasure. And here the notorious discipline of the German Army was his undoing – for the soldier immediately dropped the ruck-sack in order to stand to attention to reply: “Ya, Herr Leutnant” in the customary correct manner. Like a flash the ruck-sack was picked up by M -, handed to the prisoner just behind, and it was gone – !
Suddenly, the wretched soldier gave a yell. Pip Squeak turned round, and shrieking “Where is the ruck-sack?” gave vent to his feelings in a series of painful screams. Like a madman he tore from one room to another, while the miserable cause of his apoplexy followed like a demented soul at his heels, with the perspiration streaming from his livid face. I don’t think Pip Squeak ever got over that experience. Thereafter his whole manner toward us changed, and he regarded each and all with suspicion and distrust!
I think it was during the next raid, which again resulted in a stampede, that another incident took place which gave us a great deal of amusement. Shepherded again by Pip Squeak, a search party had entered a room in which sundry portions of compasses in the making were lying on a table. The prisoner-manufacturer had jumped in through the window and was in the act of sweeping the whole works into a cardboard box when Pip Squeak’s eagle eye fell upon the proceedings. The prisoner was trapped, for the grinning face of a “Feldwebel” had appeared at the window. Fortunately for the victim, a party of Britishers, passing the door, saw his predicament and one of them, with great presence of mind, seized a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall by the side of the door, and threw it out of the window on the outer side of the passage. Landing squarely on its plunger, and falling with the nozzle towards the wire fence, it proceeded to eject the whole of its liquid contents with great force, luckily right in the face of a sleepy sentry on the outside of the wire. This gentleman gave a shout, and no doubt with the idea that the whole camp had broken loose, ran yelling towards the gate, cocking his rifle as he ran. The Britishers thereupon ran backwards and forwards in the passage, making as much noise as they could, and this performance was taken up by several others outside. Pip Squeak, on hearing the rumpus, turned towards the door to investigate, as did the other members of the search party, which enabled the compass-maker to leap through the window and away to the hut on to the opposite side of the centre clearing, followed by the puffing “Feldwebel,” whose portly dimensions were not equal to the task, and who gave up the chase with as much grace as he could muster before he reached the hut.
Of the most strictly forbidden articles, revolvers took pride of place. It was considered a very grave offence to be in possession of any firearms, for obvious reasons. However, there were several in camp, though how their owners managed to get them will always remain a mystery. One of these belonged to a titled gentleman of the Lancers, known to all and sundry as “Alf.” During one of these raids, his greatest concern was for the safety of his precious weapon. In the centre clearing were two pits full of water, intended for use in case of fire. Having somehow managed to gain possession of the revolver, he developed an intense desire to hide it with all speed in case of a personal search being made. Seized with sudden inspiration, he dropped the revolver into one of the pits. The following morning the amazing spectacle of several distinguished British officers seated round the edge of the pit, fishing with rod and line, greeted the prisoners. In spite of extraordinary patience and diligent care, no catch was made for several days, and poor Alf was almost in a state of collapse until a lucky bite resulted in the revolver being hauled out of the muddy water, and handed over to him.
One of the German officers was a kindly old man whom we used to call “The Coachman” on account of his resemblance to that character. He was the best of all the German officers with whom I came in contact. He used to take a great deal of interest in Willoughby and me in our work, and paid daily visits to our studio. It was doubtless due to his consideration for us that he was removed from the camp after a short while. Before he left he gave us a speech of farewell, and concluded by saying:-“Gentlemen, before I came to this camp to look after you, I had been told that British officers were wild and unmannerly men. I came here with the idea that I should have a great deal of trouble with you, and I was prepared to deal severely with you. But after being associated with you even for such a short time, my feelings are entirely changed. I have learned that British officers are gentlemen, and I shall have nothing but pleasant memories of you. You have treated me with respect and kindness, and I appreciate it very much indeed. It is my earnest hope that very soon you will all be returning to your Fatherland.” Or words to that effect. He was a good sort, and we missed him quite a lot after he had gone.
In course of time we were allowed out of camp every day, on parole, and many of the prisoners spent their time digging a bathing pool not far from the camp. It was a good sized pool, complete with diving platforms, springboards, etc., and was very popular. The country round the camp consisted mainly of pine woods and it was very pleasant to get into the shade of the trees and read.
Owing to the heat, mainly, walks were not undertaken by most of us. On one occasion, however, we attended the funeral of one of the officers who had been shot by the Germans. The place of burial was in a village some miles away from the camp. On one of the few walks I went for, we met a British soldier, a prisoner, working on a farm. He seemed very pleased to see us, though apparently he was quite happy and well treated by the farmer, and proudly introduced us to a girl, who he said was his helpmate and companion, who mended his clothes and darned his socks, and looked after him generally.
Reported Missing 