A CAPTIVE AT CARLSRUHE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

BALLADS OF BATTLE
WORK-A-DAY WARRIORS
Each 3s. 6d. net.

A CORNER OF CARLSRUHE CAMP

A CAPTIVE AT CARLSRUHE
AND OTHER GERMAN PRISON CAMPS

BY JOSEPH LEE

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

“Now you shall have no worse prison than my chamber, nor jailer than myself”

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXX

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND

TO

ALL MY FELLOWS IN MISFORTUNE OF MY OWN KIN AND OF THE ALLIED COUNTRIES WHOSE VARIED COMPANIONSHIP HELPED TO LIGHTEN MY MANY DAYS OF CAPTIVITY

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I

CAUDRY—LE CATEAU—CARLSRUHE

A
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.

ARRIVAL OF THE PARCEL CART.

II
Life at Carlsruhe Lager

As we passed a sentry and turned in between high palisades heavily fortified by barbed wire, I had a feeling of disappointment, if not of dismay. I had hoped to live more closely to Nature, whereas Carlsruhe Camp lay in a central part of the town, and was overlooked at almost every point by high buildings, hotels, restaurants, and mansions. The few trees were, of course, meantime bare of leaves, and there were no traces of grass in the long stretches of court between the huts.

In the salon d’appel we were searched. My sketch-book was scrutinized, critically, perhaps, but not uncharitably, and I was permitted to keep it. Of what other poor possessions I now had, only my signalling whistle was taken.

Dinner that night consisted of soup, followed by Sauerkraut. Breakfast next morning, in my case, consisted of a cold shower bath and anticipations of lunch at midday!

There was a little chapel at Carlsruhe used alternately and harmoniously by English Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and Nonconformists. While we awaited service on this first morning of my arrival there was a distribution of biscuits—briquettes of bread really—which were received from their Government by the French officer and orderly prisoners at the rate of seventy per man per week; a plentitude which permitted of the orderlies trading them among the less-favoured British officers at anything from fifty pfennig to a mark each.

THE CHAPEL AT CARLSRUHE.

On the present occasion, when the baskets had been carried away, a few crumbs and sweepings of the biscuits were left upon the floor, while we stood around with our backs to the wall and our hands in our pockets. Presently one prisoner put forth an apparently accidental foot, which covered probably the largest of the pieces. Then, somewhat shamefacedly, he stooped and picked it up. Upon which signal, with one accord, and with as close a resemblance to a flock of city sparrows as anything I ever saw, we swooped down upon the fragments. For my share I succeeded in securing two pieces of quite half an inch square!

Those were indeed hungry days, when a man’s wealth was not to be calculated by the amount standing to his credit at Messrs. Cox & Co.’s, or even by the abundance of his blankets, but by the number of French biscuits which he had succeeded in securing. Here of all places in the world might one see a Brigadier-General crossing the square carefully balancing a mess of pork and beans upon a plate, or nursing the contents of a tin of sardines upon a saucer!

To be invited to tea by a friendly and more flourishing mess was the greatest beatitude that could befall a man. In these cases of ceremonious call the guest always carried his own crockery and cutlery.

COL. ALBERT TURANO, ARTIGLIERIA ITALIANO.

One such pleasant refection, with Col. Albert Turano, Artiglieria Italiano, lingers very pleasantly in my memory. In view of his rank the Colonel occupied alone a small chamber in one of the huts. On the wall was a crucifix, and a few reproductions of religious paintings and decorations by the Danish artist, Joakim Skovgaard. A shelf of Italian books, a deal table, two stools, and an iron bedstead, with above it a plant, to be unnamed by me, but which looked as if it might develop into a tree, in a flower-pot so tiny that it seemed as if it might have done service as a thimble. The Colonel prepared the coffee with great care, and served it with much courtliness. The entire contents of his larder consisted of a few fragments of hard French biscuits. These we steeped in the coffee, and of this quite delectable sop partook with much contentment.

In talk we turned over the art treasures of Venice and Florence, and when I referred to Dante, and particularly to the episode of Paolo and Francesca, the Colonel produced from his breast pocket a little marked copy of the “Divina Commedia,” in a chamois-leather case, which he had carried through the campaign, and read me the passage in Italian. Followed cigarettes, and a joint vow that if we foregathered in London our dinner at the Trocadero would be completed by just such a cup of coffee—à la Carlsruhe! Some time later, while he was being changed to another camp, the gallant Colonel succeeded in effecting his escape.

In retrospect the menu at Carlsruhe seems to have consisted of interminable plates of soup, followed by sauerkraut and anæmic potatoes. No effort was made—nor was there any need—to stimulate our appetites by surprise dishes or kickshaws; although on St. Patrick’s Day a wild rumour went round the camp that we were to have boiled shamrock for dinner! Some officers could achieve five plates of soup at a meal; one could rarely venture to brave the day on less than three. On Thursdays and Sundays there was a morsel of meat—the veriest opening and immediate closing of the lid of the flesh pot, as it were. On certain days, apples—for which we lined up in a queue—were to be bought at the Kantine at one mark per pound. Sardines cost five to six marks a tin; other prices were in proportion.

First Letters and Parcels

The coming of one’s first letter was a memorable event in camp life. The immediate impulse was to retire with it to the remotest corner of the court—as a dog with a bone, or a lover with a billet-doux—and there devour it, and for days after one was continually impelled to a re-perusal. A Portuguese officer who had made a vow, Nazarite-wise, not to shave or cut his hair until such time as news would come from the far country, was three and a half months in camp before he received his first letter. Then, amid loud laughter and cries of “Barbier! Barbier!” he departed with the precious epistle in his hand, and later in the day made his appearance, looking not unlike a shorn lamb!

The arrival of the first parcel was an event of even more general interest and import. If it were a clothing parcel it would contain a change of raiment, as grateful and as welcome as the wedding garment. If it were a food parcel it enabled you to extend pleasant hospitalities in more necessitous directions—one of the privileges and compensations of camp life.

You pass your bread ration to the recently arrived officer who is your neighbour at dinner. “Do you care to have this bread, old chap? I have plenty.” He is an Australian, and there is considerably over six foot of him to be fed. He gives a gulp and a gasp now. “My God,” he says, “I thought I wasn’t to be able to say ‘Yes’ quick enough!”

I received my first parcel after two months of captivity. One officer, after the lapse of many barren moons, received twenty-six packets—an entire waggon load—at one time! Give me neither poverty nor riches!

Christmas at Carlsruhe

On Christmas Day, the Germans, if they could not give us peace on earth, probably made effort at an expression of goodwill even to Gefangenen! Dinner, at all events, consisted of soup, potatoes, an ounce or two of meat, one pound of eating apples, and a quarter of a litre of red wine—decidedly a red litre day! Christmas trees were raised and decorated in the salon d’appel; the Camp Commandant gave gifts to all the orderlies; a raffle, organized by the French officers, took place, when I was so fortunate as to secure a bar of chocolate, and there was a further distribution of apples at night, the gifts of La Croix Rouge, Geneva. I have probably not eaten on one day so many apples of uncertain ripeness since last I robbed an orchard as a boy.

In the chapel the Lieutenant—a layman—who customarily took the Anglican services, read the hymn from Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” and several carols were sung. I may say that all such services concluded with the lusty singing of a verse of “God Save the King.”

THE CAMP COMMANDANT.

Roll-call in the morning was at ten; in the evening at 8.45; lights out at nine o’clock. I shared a hut with seven other officers, three of them aviators, who had all, like Lucifer, son of the morning, fallen to earth violently and from varying altitudes. On New Year’s Eve we blanketed our windows, kept lights burning, and at midnight drank a modest glass of port to the coming year.

Our scale of dietary not conducing to exuberance of spirits, or urging to violent exercises, most of the officers spent a considerable part of these short winter days in reading or in card-playing. As unofficial limner to the very cosmopolitan camp, my pencil was kept continually sharpened in effort to capture the varying characteristics of some seventeen different nationalities.

One day I found the Commandant looking over my shoulder. He was keenly interested, suggested that he might give me a sitting, and reverted several times to the question of price. Finally I hinted that while I could not dream of accepting monetary recompense, he could, if he cared to be so complaisant, connive at my escape by way of part payment!

No one, I believe, ever escaped from Carlsruhe Camp, though various efforts were made by tunnelling. To make exit by a more direct method three high palisades and barbed wire fences had to be scaled, and that in almost certain view of numerous sentries without and within. Sitting by the barbed wire in a remote part of the court, a Posten outside would open a little slit in the paling and turn upon me an eye which was alone visible, rolling round watchfully, and with much of the effect of the Eye Omnipotent with which we were awed in boyish days.

We saw and heard little of the life of the surrounding town. Now and then a housemaid would shake a cover or a cushion from a window in one of the overlooking houses, or the Hausfrau herself might gaze gloomily forth. One night after we had retired to bed, and certainly at an hour not far from midnight, we heard what appeared to be a quartette of girls singing outside in the street. We flung open the windows and listened with vast pleasure to a very beautiful rendering of what may have been an Easter hymn; possibly a more pagan chant to the Goddess of Love.

A GAME OF CARDS.

Sometimes, of an afternoon, one would hear from the other side of the palisade the sound of marching men—a sound as seemingly resolute and relentless as the progression of Fate. Sometimes came the playful and laughing cry of a little child. One day as I read and mused in “Rotten Row,” two schoolboys, doubtless home for the week-end, and at all events perched holiday-wise upon the roof of an hotel, made their presence known to me in pleasant and friendly fashion by a cheerful whistle. Having attracted my attention, they proceeded with true boyish humour and with eloquent turnings of the head, to invite me to a companionship upon the roof!

On a June evening, walking with a French Commandant, and endeavouring to recount to him in French one of the fables of La Fontaine, we were brought to a pause by what was a wistful picture to us at one of the overlooking windows—a father, a mother, and sweet little girl, enjoying the quiet twilight hour together. The Commandant, when we had resumed our walk—which we did whenever we were discovered—confided to me that he had three boys, of ages gently graduated, and that the youngest, Michael, was very sad because he had not seen his father for so long a time.

FUNERAL OF A PRISONER OF WAR

A SERBIAN COLONEL.

III
Funeral of a Prisoner of War

One morning at roll-call the German N.C.O. all unwittingly called, “Captain H——!” Then more insistently, “Captain H——!” And still again.

There was no reply. Captain H—— had died in hospital the night before of pneumonia, contracted through exposure when his ship was torpedoed.

I was appointed to represent our hut at the funeral. That morning, immediately after breakfast, something of a stir was to be observed about the camp, and presently the officers who had been elected to attend the funeral began to assemble in front of the Commandant’s hut.

Many of the uniforms presented considerable compromise; several of us, myself included, who had been taken in shrapnel helmets and trench equipment, having borrowed Sam Browne belts and aviators’ caps. The Serbian Colonels, however, were decidedly brave, if slightly bizarre, in their brand-new brown greatcoats, with crimson facings, lapels and linings, their horned caps and general appearance conveying to my mind a somewhat whimsical impression of armed, aggressive, and mail-sheathed beetles. The Italian Major of mountain artillery was there with a slanting feather in his cap, while the Commandant himself was resplendently martial in his spiked helmet, with, for decoration, the Iron Cross and, I think, l’Aigle Noir.

Three or four great wreaths, sombre with fir branches and bay, and bearing coloured streamers, are allocated among the various nationalities represented, and forming up more or less in processional order, the party, followed by the somewhat envious gaze of those who remain behind, moves towards the gateway. Some of our number have not been outside these gates for well-nigh a year; one officer, indeed, has preferred to forego this opportunity of liberty for an hour or two in order that he may achieve a complete year of incarceration in the Kriegsgefangenenlager, his anniversary falling due in a few days.

I myself have been captive in this camp for less than two months, yet I feel a panting and palpitating as we wait for the guard to turn the key in the gate; I seem to breathe more deeply when we have passed into the street. In a word, as he moves among us, the senior British officer has warned us that we are on parole.

Two electric tram-cars, connected, await us, and we mount and take our places. It is a cold morning, one of the coldest for some months. A small crowd which has collected gazes silently and not unsympathetically upon the scene. The group consists mostly of children, going schoolward, and perhaps it is owing to the severe cold, but their faces are pinched and thin. It moves me mightily to imagine that we are in any sense of the word at war with these little ones.

As the car speeds through the streets we rub the frost from the panes and gaze out upon the world like a batch of schoolboys on an excursion. Old Maier, the German orderly, indeed, takes particular pains to point out to us places and objects of interest as we pass; the Stadthaus; the monument to the Margrave Charles William, founder of the city, which encloses his dust; the various churches. The architecture is interesting, although, as I understand, we are moving through the least opulent parts of Carlsruhe.

On the outskirts of the town the cars stop in front of a church, where is drawn up a German guard of over a hundred, with a brass band, and a firing-party of fifty men. We file into the chapel, and the wreaths are laid upon the black coffin, which rests under the shadow of a great cross with a bronze Christ. This, and a painting of a miracle of healing, are the only adornments of an interior which is dignified and harmoniously coloured in greys and greens.

“That is the General of the district with the Commandant,” whispers Maier in my ear.

The service is brief and simple. The Lutheran pastor, in black cap and white bands, delivers a short address, reads a few passages from the Scriptures, and engages in prayer. Then the bearers take up their bitter burden and pass down the aisle. One green wreath lies on top of the coffin; it falls off, and I stoop down and replace it. As we reach the door Maier is once more at my ear. “That wreath is from the Grand Duchess of Baden!”

As we pass down the steps the band is playing somewhere in front, softly and sorrowfully, then there is a few minutes’ silence while the procession passes into the avenue leading to the cemetery. Here and there are a few desolate-looking civilians. Now comes the sound of drums; something between a distant thunder-roll and the heavy dropping of rain in a thunder shower. Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” I have never heard it played in a more fitting environment. The dark-grey body of German soldiery winds among the trees, which throw up gaunt, leafless branches agonizingly against a dull grey sky.

How illogical is war! I have seen a hundred men—as many as are here assembled for the burial of one—huddled into what was practically one common grave! Surely we are not come forth entirely to bury the dead with ceremony; but to persuade ourselves, to prove as convincingly as may be, that the ancient courtesies, the old kindlinesses, are not entirely dead and buried!

As the music passes into the lyric movement of the march I see wistfulness in the faces of some of the veteran warriors; regretfulness in the very stoop of their shoulders. There is something moving at all times even in the formal and ceremonial grief of man; it is accentuated when he is clothed in the full panoply of war.

A short service over the grave, then the firing-party throw their three volleys into the air, as if making noisy question as to the scheme of things at the unanswering heavens. The brasses seem to make mournful reply that no answer has indeed been vouchsafed. Then, the body being lowered into the grave, each of us casts upon it three shovelfuls of earth, making the sign of the Cross or saluting the military dead according to our creed and conception. And so we leave the poor dust, till it be disturbed by music more insistent and clamorous than the clarions of men!

THE CATHOLIC PRIEST.

A French soldier who has died in hospital is also being interred, and, though it is bitterly cold, we all wait until the cortège has arrived, and the burial service—in this case performed by the Catholic priest—has been carried out. As we return through the avenue we overtake the sad, solitary figure of a widow in sombre black leading a boy of six or seven by the hand. Both figures are suggestive of refinement, both faces are pale, and that of the mother is grief-stricken. As we pass I am so near that I almost brush them. I turn and look back at the boy, whose face is full of beauty. The insistent gaze of an enemy officer seems to frighten him, and he shrinks closer to his mother’s side.

A Lecture on Abyssinia

THE REV. MR. FLAD.

The Rev. Father Daniels, the Roman Catholic priest to whom I have referred, made regular visitation to the camp, and we had, furthermore, occasional ministration from a Protestant divine, the Rev. Mr. Flad. This gentleman appeared in our midst with great suddenness one morning, and there was much ado to beat up a creditable congregation for him. This ultimately being forthcoming, and at the moment when the pastor was inviting us to accompany him with a pure heart to the Throne of Heavenly Grace entered Hans with an urgent and whispered message, which turned out to be an invitation to lunch from the Grand Duchess of Baden. The summons left the good padre obviously preoccupied during the service, and necessitated a postponement of the Communion until the afternoon. This led to a suggestion that the pastor might lecture us in the evening on his experiences in Abyssinia.

The father of Mr. Flad was a missionary in Abyssinia during the reign of King Theodore. His mother, a friend of Florence Nightingale, was a deaconess in the Church. When trouble arose between the King and the British Government—through the ignoring of the former’s letter suggesting a latter-day crusade for the liberation of the Holy Land from the Turks—Flad senior and fifty-eight other Europeans were imprisoned, and many of them had to undergo the punishment of being chained to a native soldier for four and a half years.

The native soldier, it is a relief to learn, was changed every week—a transaction which one can imagine as being welcome as a change of linen!

Ultimately Flad was despatched as Ambassador from King Theodore to Queen Victoria, with whom he had two interviews at Osborne, his wife being meanwhile held as hostage for his return. “I have here your two eyes and your heart,” said King Theodore.

During these difficult and dangerous years Mrs. Flad kept a diary, which was published, but which is now out of print. With the coming of Lord Napier the prisoners were released, and King Theodore came to a tragic end by his own hand. The pastor is hopeful of some day taking up his father’s work and he passed round a book printed in Geëz, I take it, a page of which he reads every day. His father used to tell him how in the native cafés he had heard discussion as to whether the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon was ruler of Abyssinia or Arabia.

One need not be in Abyssinia to be chained to a black mood at least, if not a black man. Sitting in the court at Carlsruhe, watching the barbed wire shake and shiver like a man in an ague to the play of my foot, I have been seized with a sudden fear of the horrors from which I have emerged. This fear in retrospect, so to speak, was greater far than anything I can confess to have felt in actuality; as if one who had boldly and blindly crossed a profound abyss on a tight-rope should faint or falter, grow dizzy and fall, having reached firm ground once more; as if one had all the past still to pass through, and it were not possible that one should safely pass through it.

To me, on such an occasion, appeared my buoyant young Italian friend Cotta, who, passing an arm through mine, haled me off for a glass of the atrocious white wine of the country—or at least of the Kantine. Thereafter we walked together in the Close, Cotta giving his English an airing.

“Yes, I speak English very well, very well. Have you see the donkey?”

The little donkey, which, yoked to a little waggon, brings us on most days a load of parcels, and which has become so friendly to an alien officer that even in charge of a somewhat obdurate driver it will make a sudden detour from its course in order to shove its muzzle into my hand, was grazing in the circular grass plot in the centre of the square.

“It is the better German in the camp!” says Cotta. “Ah, I am very sad, very sad,” he proceeds. “I have no letter from my girl, and the Germans have take from me her photograph. Damn! damn!”

AN ITALIAN MAJOR OF MOUNTAIN ARTILLERY.

PLAYBILL FOR LADY GREGORY’S “THE RISING OF THE MOON”

OUR ORCHESTRA.

IV
Entertainment in Exile

Man cannot live by bread alone—nor may he, even with a supplementary basin of soup! Immediately after dinner on the Saturday evening of my arrival in Carlsruhe, a steady stream of officers set in towards the salon d’appel. Being still without chart or compass as regards the camp, I also drifted in this direction, and found that at the far end of the hall a stage was erected, and that a cosmopolitan audience was already gathered in the expectant dusk of the auditorium. A few rows of forms from the court served as dress circle and stalls; later arrivals brought their own chairs or stools from the dormitories; standing in the background, the orderlies, obviously washed of their week’s labours in the kitchen or the camp, were the gods, and from their Olympus gave occasional encouragement, or passed comment and criticism upon the performance.

On this particular evening, together with various musical and vocal efforts, there was a very capable representation by a cast of French officers, of Max Maurey’s comedy in one act, “Asile de Nuit.” Prior to the enactment, and for the benefit of those in the audience who might be innocent of French, a British officer gave out the motif in English.

As I sat contentedly in my place—the burden of the wearinesses of the last weeks fallen from my shoulders—it was borne in upon me that much of the success of a play is in the eager and receptive mood of the audience; also that in the naïve freshness of an amateur performance is a charm which has too frequently perished in the more finished production of the professional actor. At all events, in “Asile de Nuit”—the “Night Refuge”—I found indeed refuge for the night!

Monsieur the Superintendent of an—uncharitable—institution, is pompous, proud, and overbearing, particularly to his unwelcome clients. It is just on the closing hour of nine, and he is preparing to depart for the business of his favourite café, when one of these waifs blows in. Monsieur storms at the tramp for the lateness of the hour, for the ludicrousness of his name, for anything and everything, and ultimately, after passing him over to a brow-beaten assistant for the condign punishment of a bath, goes off himself for a beer.

He returns almost immediately, quite chapfallen. He has learned that the Superintendent of another “Refuge” has been dismissed for failing to entertain an angel unawares in the person of a disguised journalist. He is persuaded that the piece of ragged illiteracy which he himself is harbouring is a pen also charged and pointed for his undoing. Consequently the amazed vagrant is overwhelmed with clothing from the Superintendent’s own wardrobe, cigars from his private cabinet; he is even finally permitted to escape the last indignity of ablution!

A CARLSRUHE CONCERT PROGRAMME.

Into the service of the theatre I immediately found myself intrigued and impressed, in the somewhat composite character of scene-painter, scene-shifter, poster-artist, actor, prompter, “noises-off,” and playwright. My first essay in this latter capacity was entitled “A Chelsea Christmas Eve,” the scene being a studio, embellished with sundry artistic audacities—nudes and nocturnes, post-impressionisms and cubisms—and from the cardboard window of which was a view of the Thames, including the Tower Bridge!—there entirely for economical reasons, and not geographic.

“A CHELSEA CHRISTMAS EVE,” AS PLAYED AT CARLSRUHE LAGER

So pleasant, nevertheless, was this little make-believe interior that we rarely entered for a rehearsal without discovering and disturbing sundry reading animals who had crept into it as a quiet and congenial environment, and who frequently and regretfully suggested that it would be desirable as a permanency. During the performance the on-coming of a monstrous and realistic pie, built—not baked—in a wash-hand basin, filled with boiling water, and covered with a richly-coloured cardboard crust, was nearly provocative of an assault upon the stage by a hungry and overwrought audience!

Another dramatic effort, devised for the bringing on to the stage of my good friends—and the good friends of all the camp—Bertolotti, Calvi the pianist, and Lazarri the sweet singer, was “An Italian Vignette.” The scenery, which was painted on paper readily reversible, so that one could very literally have “a prison and a palace” on each side, I evolved from pleasant if somewhat untrustworthy recollection of a fortnight’s stay in Venice many years ago.

There is a glorious city in the sea.

The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets—and that after such sort as proved somewhat disconcerting to the two Venetians present in camp. Owing to the circumscriptions of the stage the scene was more suggestive than realistic, the gondola, instead of entering from below the Ponte dei Sospiri, swimming in a canal running parallel with the Bridge of—Sighs—but of no dimensions!

As regards dresses, it was possible to hire through “Hans,” the German orderly, one evening dress suit, one blue ditto, one odd pair of quite unmentionable “unmentionables,” and one Homburg hat. To prevent effort at escape these garments had to be returned to the authorities immediately after each performance. Nothing in anywise approximating to a garb mediæval being obtainable, each man—and “woman”—must dress the part to the best of possibilities.

Clelia (Lieut. Smith), for example, of whom I, as Marco, was supposed to be enamoured, trusted to hide his identity—particularly as disclosed by his feet—in a few yards of chintz, rather unhappily of identical pattern with the stage curtain! A cardigan jacket, frilled and ruffled with an edging of white linen torn from a frayed pocket handkerchief, made a quite presentable doublet for me. Toulon, the French orderly’s béret, turned up at the corners, and bearing red plumes, held in place by a shining tin pipe-top, served as headgear. The lid of a boric ointment box suspended from my black lanyard formed a distinguished-looking decoration of merit; the tasselled cord of a dressing-gown made an admirable sword-belt.

An Italian military mantle completed my costume. A mandolin—an instrument of torture to be dreaded above all others, but which musically was mute in the piece, and pictorially represented a guitar—was borrowed from an orderly.

In passages where “A Venetian Vignette” did not awe the audience it at least amused it. Owing to an eleventh-hour timidity on the part of two of our Italians I had to touch the light guitar and raise my voice in apparent song, while off, Lieut. Calvi, with piano muted with newspapers, and Lieut. Lazarri, with distended larynx, supplied the actualities, and this with such success that the many new-comers among the audience, knowing neither Joseph nor Lazarri, were deceived, and I received a very ill-deserved ovation for Toselli’s “Serenade.”

SCENE FROM “A VENETIAN VIGNETTE”

The Portuguese Captain Teixeira, who had wonderful imitative faculties, so that twice I have seen him hypnotize young birds to within a few inches of his hand, as a nightingale “off,” “trilled with all the passion of all the love songs that have been sung since the world began”—an interpolation made by the dramatist in his dialogue to permit of an effect so original! “Noises off” tolled the bell—the great kitchen poker—which was intended to warn the lovers of the fleet passage of the hour, just about five minutes behind time, making his thus tardy entry on the principle that nothing be lost.

Lieut. H., who had taken part in bull-fighting in Southern America, gave me the coup de grâce in his own fashion, between the shoulder blades, and, judging by the force, with a momentary forgetting of the fact that he was only in Southern Germany. With a “Mio Dio! Io sono morto!” for the sake of local colouring, I and the curtain fell almost simultaneously.

“The Secret: A Shudder in 3 Scenes,” was probably most memorable from the secret fact that it secured me a few inches of forbidden candle, which I used in surreptitious reading after “lights out” for some nights after. “The Brigand: a Musical Absurdity,” written by a versatile Roman Catholic padre, was apparently sufficiently realistic to procure me the first visit next morning from an officer in the audience who had lost his watch! Unrehearsed effects in this performance were the igniting of the cardboard brazier by the toppling over of the candle set within to illuminate it; the rolling across the stage of an empty and otherwise rather suspicious looking bottle, and the violent antipathies evidenced by “Bobby,” a French officer’s adopted fox-terrier, which I had to keep at bay with my double-barrelled cardboard blunderbuss.

A CARLSRUHE PLAY-BILL.

Emerging from the hall within a few minutes of roll-call and with our faces masked by the vigorous colourations of our brigandage “under the greenwood tree,” we discovered to our dismay that the water supply had been cut off. For days afterwards my knees had a brownness unknown to them since I discarded the Black Watch kilt.

POSTER FOR A FRENCH PLAY.

A very creditable performance was given of Bernard Shaw’s one-act play, “How He Lied to Her Husband”; Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” abridged to one act, was essayed with great earnestness. The French players gave us some very adroit performances, particularly of such comedies as Labiche’s “J’invite le Colonel.”

One day there arrived in camp Lieut. Martin, late of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, a little Irishman with a big brogue, a fund of humour and of its concomitant, good humour, and a budget of news of literary import, as that W. B. Yeats was married, and that G. B. S. had taken his place at the theatre.

It was suggested to Martin that we might stage one of the Irish plays. He had had copies of a number of these in his valise when he was captured, but, of course, these were lost. He was able ultimately, however, to write out from memory Lady Gregory’s “The Rising of the Moon,” and for my guidance he gave me a little paper model of the staging as designed originally, I imagine, by Jack Yeats. For the performance the German authorities lent us a huge beer barrel—entirely empty. The cast was an all-Irish one, Lieut.-Colonel Lord Farnham playing the part of Sergeant of the R.I.C., Lieut. Martin playing the supposed ballad-singer.

A week later, when Martin departed for another camp, he slipped into my hand a scrap of paper bearing a scrap of philosophy from “The Rising of the Moon”: “’Tis a quare world, and ’tis little any mother knows when she sees her child creepin’ on the floor what’ll happen to it, or who’ll be who in the end.”

Well, I hope that I may yet chance across the humoursome little Irishman once more before the final—setting of the sun!

“The Homeland”

While we were thus making effort to entertain ourselves within the camp, outside in the Fest Theatre in Carlsruhe there was a performance, for the benefit of the Eighth War Loan, of “The Homeland,” a war vision by Leo Sternburg. A translation of this appeared in the Continental Times, a ridiculous and half-illiterate propaganda sheet which we could receive thrice weekly at a cost of 2.70 marks per month.

The scene is the battlefield. Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, moves amid the dead men that lie about. The dawn is coming up the skies. Soldiers of the Medical Corps carry stretchers to and fro. Occasionally the mutter of the distant battle rolls over the scene.

The Wandering Jew laments that he has been unable to find extinction even in this welter of the world war. A dying soldier greets him as a messenger from the Homeland:

Give me your hand—that hand from home. They have not left me to die alone in a strange land. They have sent me greetings.

Ahasuerus: No, no!

Soldier: Your hand——

Ahasuerus: You have it. It is well. The most homeless of men stands before thee—he is as homeless as thou.

Soldier: As I! I who die for home—I homeless!

Ahasuerus: Thou art in error. The homeland would not die for thee.

The Wandering Jew goes on to speak of apathy among the people, and reminds the soldier that “not only arms win victories to-day. The war of all men against all men has been unloosed. War against the woman and the child. War against fields and forests and farm and house. Peaceful labour turns to battle. The metal of the church bells fights. The seed fights as it falls into the furrow. Money marches in ranks.... But ... men eat and sleep and wax fat. They hear of the death of millions, and say: ‘Yes, yes.’ Gods that descend before their very eyes, and the wonders of a heroism half divine, no longer move their senses—no sacrifice can stir them out of their daily rut. They have but one care to trouble them—it is that you might return greater than when you set forth.”

Soldier (emphatically, to the men of the Medical Corps): Away! away! I would die of life and not of death.... Let me lie down beside mine enemy, he that hath endured what I have endured, he, as a comrade that understands me.

Ahasuerus: Come, thou mayst deem thyself blest in that thou diest so that thou mayst not behold a race of lesser men. Ye have grown beyond human compass in the fires of your time, your heads would strike the ceilings in your little chambers.

Ultimately, however, new troops enter, and one of these gives reassurance to the dying man.

Second Soldier: Property hath converted itself into armies, and the joy of riches means only the capacity to give.... Coffers and chests fly open. Countesses bring their silver, the legacy of famous ancestors, the old maid-servant her hoarded wage. The widow gives up her golden chain, the last love gift of her dead mate; the merchant his gains, and the old peasants the walnut tree in whose shadow they played as children.... The whole land becomes a mighty armoury ... they hammer, hammer, hammer, day and night.

Dying Soldier: Do you not hear the thunder of Wieland’s hammer? The ringing armour of the Valkyries? Do you not hear the hoof-beats of their stallions?

Second Soldier: Yea, rivers and fields, mountains and woods dream anew their German dreams.... Silently the women offer up their beauty ... the park of roses becomes the potato patch. The savant is his own servant. The mother can no longer mother her child. Work puts out the torch of love ... but all bear this ... they bear it for the sake of the blood which flowed for their sake.

Soldier: I die ... I die happy.

[He dies.]

Ahasuerus: O Fate! This moment outweighs all my two thousand years of torment. I am reconciled with my sorrow, in that the centuries have spared me to behold the mighty heroism of this people.

[Curtain.]

ONE OF OUR ORCHESTRA.

ENGINEER OF THE “HITACHI MARU.”

V
Victims of the “Wolf”

Carlsruhe Kriegsgefangenenlager being what was known as a Distribution Camp, there was a continual coming and going of officers. Here we had no continuing city. An occasional prisoner might linger on—as if entirely overlooked and forgotten—for a year or even two; in the majority of cases, however, the stay only extended for a few weeks, sometimes merely a few days. On three consecutive weeks the cast for one of our plays was removed almost en bloc. Friendships were formed overnight, to be violently disrupted by departure on the morrow. In our little world was a complete epitome of life.

One afternoon in early March there arrived in camp a cartload of trunks and sea-chests bearing strange hieroglyphics, with a rumour that these would be followed by the officers of various nationality, including Japanese, captured from the ships sunk by the notorious German cruiser Wolf.

Two days later they arrived, sailormen from the seven seas, British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, so that the next morning their blue suits and brown boots gave the salon d’appel the appearance of a mercantile marine office when a crew is signing on. Some of the Captains, grizzled and weather-beaten, had an easy gait, a quiet laying down of the foot, which inevitably suggested the bridge or the moving decks of ships; different entirely from the more formal military stride. Some of them were doubtless glad to stretch their legs, having been cruising in the piratical Wolf for a year or fifteen months.

The Japanese officers made me very heartily welcome to their hut, on a shelf in which I noticed immediately on my entry a little statue of Buddha. While I sketched some of these placid, not readily fathomable faces, I heard, in broken English, the tragic story of the broken life of their Captain, the Commander of the Hitachi Maru.

The Captain had intended suicide from the time he lost his vessel—thirteen of her crew were killed in the fight—and simply awaited his opportunity. This came to him in the darkness and amid the floes of Iceland, when the Wolf, with fangs red with blood, was running back for Kiel.

Engineer Lieut.-Commander K. Shiraishi, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is speaking, his immobile face—so that I may complete my sketch—as rigid as that of the little Buddha which I can see behind him. He has shared a berth with the Captain, and tells me that on the night of his disappearance he left the cabin, “and he come not back.” He had slipped quietly overboard—“in the dark and among the ice”—thus embarking on a final voyage, new and strange.

“All night we hear the ice grinding past the ship,” said my Lieut.-Commander, without the flicker of an eyelid. “In the dark—and among the ice!”

Returning to my hut, by a literary coincidence not uncommon, I opened Joseph Conrad, and read in “Il Conde”: “He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breast-bone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operation of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one’s feelings.”

Captain Meadows, of the Tarantella, the first steamer sunk by the Wolf, was a man of Herculean build, and quite apparently, and as befitted the skipper of a ship named as his was, he had led the German Commander something of a dance. Every morning, until he was caught in the act, the Captain used to empty the water from his bath into the sea, and with it a bottle giving the bearings of the Wolf, and some account of her depredations. Even when the time came that two or three German sailors flung themselves suddenly upon him, he succeeded in “mailing his letter,” and when he received a vehement reprimand he made retort that if the Commander thought it necessary to shout even louder he might use his megaphone!

CAPTAIN OF THE “TARANTELLA.”

The Wolf apparently employed a hydroplane with great effect in locating her prey, and in evading capture. The Captain of the Matunga showed me a snapshot—from which I made a sketch—of the last moments of his sinking ship.

Clinging to Office

However unwillingly officers may have come to Carlsruhe, there was always a certain loathness to leave for another camp, on the principle, doubtless, that it is better to “bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” There was something hugely diverting in the tenacity with which prisoners clung to whatever shred of office or appointment they could lay claim to. The members of the Cabinet cannot be more reluctant to leave hold of their portfolios than were the Gefangenen to pack up their portmanteaux.

A SERBIAN OFFICER PRISONER OF WAR

One officer was Secretary for the English section; another was Assistant Secretary, while there were a number of Committeemen whose labours were not over-arduous. Two or three of us attended to the distribution of food to the needy; two or three to the doling out of clothing to the nude. Then there were the masters of music; pianists, violinists, and at least one ’cellist; the dramatic entertainers under the “O.C. Theatres”; and a group of choristers who in chapel every Sunday evening at evensong did lustily raise their voices in “Magnificat” and “Nunc Dimittis”; partly, it must be confessed, that the Lord might let His servants remain in peace!

A REHEARSAL.

A Debating Society was formed, whose primary object, when the secrets of men’s hearts are laid bare, will probably prove to have been the providing of permanencies for the President and the Secretary. At these meetings, by the way, we gravely discussed problems so original as the Reconstitution of the Lords; the Influence of the Press; Classical or Modern Education in Public Schools; and with equal gravity on a more irresponsible evening the profound question, “Should bald heads be buttered?” To the best of my recollection we arrived at the conclusion that they should at least be boiled.

A French Captain, who in civil life was a wine merchant, gave a lecture on the wines and vineyards of France, the designing of a series of drawings and maps illustrative of which permitted me to pass out of my captivity for a spell, and wander in the pleasant region of the Gironde.

These were our only feasible ways of escape at Carlsruhe. A bird might flutter past the window of my chamber with a sharp little flight of song. At once I was out and away with it, not necessarily to the magnificences and splendours, but perhaps to almost penurious patches and spaces on the outskirts of the dour old town of my nativity, where pavement and grass-plot touch, and where, amid the lamp-posts and the telegraph poles, there are familiar trees to be recognized and loved—where, indeed, one may lift to the lips and kiss the hem of Nature’s somewhat bedraggled skirt. And still—“You can’t get out!” said the starling.

One morning, lying alongside him in my cot, I remarked to a fellow-prisoner, “You look very happy.” To which, being well versed in the Scriptures, he immediately retorted, “I am happy in all things saving these bonds!”

It is not good for man to be alone, but doubtless Gefangenen had a little too much of the gregarious—one felt a recurring need for some seclusion deeper than the common captivity. Such a place of retirement I ultimately discovered, not in the chapel, but in the more mundane environment of our tiny theatre, crawling mouse-like into a crevice between one of the sidewings and the wall. Here I was safe from even those who made their casual entrances and exits. Here also could I read to the plaintive accompaniment of M. Calvi’s violin busy on a Vieuxtemps “Air Varié,” or of M. Lazarri rehearsing a vocal number for Saturday evening’s concert—could indeed afford time to cheer and encourage these kindly artistes at the close of each piece by muffled applause from a hidden but not entirely anonymous audience.

At one corner of my narrow cell was a portion of a window giving on to the quadrangle, so that by raising an occasional eye I could see how our little world was wagging. To the rear was part of a set scene showing a lurid and blood-red sun setting over the waters, even in which primitive art there was the suggestion of many sunsets that I have seen; many that I yet hope to see.

A Straining of the Entente

Even in this quiet retreat, however, one could not count on being entirely free from faction and fight. On an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon, an English aviator at the piano and a French officer with a violin have fallen into feud over a matter of musical precedence, and within a few feet of each other are playing at the same time entirely different tunes, and that with vehemence and vindictiveness. The pianist, firmly planted on the piano stool, where he has spent most of the day, passes without pause or punctuation from Chopin to ragtime and from ragtime to absolute incoherence.

The Frenchman sits on a form with his back to the wall—literally and metaphorically—and vents his spleen on the catgut. I stand it for full fifteen minutes by my watch, and then, going quietly into the empty chapel and leaving the door sufficiently ajar, I open the organ, pull out all the stops, brace my knees against the swell pedals, and so burst into a sort of Grand Chœur in G.

When I emerged the Frenchman had fled and calm was once more settling upon the piano keys. Blessed are the peacemakers!

Our piano was ultimately a “baby” grand, though its tone was less infantile than suggestive of that of an old roué. Indeed, there was little grand about it, except that there was so little “upright.”

Early next morning I discovered the French violinist in the court taking a variety of exercise, running, circling on the horizontal bar, and jumping over the forms and seats, in an effort doubtless to keep the muscles and sinews of his body as taut as his fiddle-strings.

A “Stirring Time”

There was one respect in which we could quite legitimately claim to be having a stirring time in camp, and that was as regards our ceaseless culinary operations. Recurrently as cook it was one’s duty to see that the members of one’s mess did not perish of starvation, surfeit, or ptomaine poisoning. Frequently with inadequate means as regards fuel, so that I have suggested to an officer endeavouring to thaw tinned sausage over burning paper that he might try Thermogene! Personally I achieved something of repute—or disrepute—for two dishes of my own contriving, one a mock Scottish haggis, and the other what I am afraid was little more than a mockery of English plum-pudding.

It was through no reflection on our cooking, however, but simply for the reduction of a steadily increasing embonpoint that one of our number undertook a voluntary five days’ fast. Besides being under ordinary conditions extremely good-natured by day, X had a mirthful habit of laughing in his sleep, the only case in a considerable experience of somnambulistic phenomena among soldiers during the war which I have yet encountered.

In the early hours of the final morning of his fast he indeed laughed, but in a minor key, just a ghost of a guffaw, with a very apparent and pathetic tendency to merge into a sob. That morning he finished his fast and his breakfast almost simultaneously. In order that he should break the glad tidings gently, so to speak, to his famished and clamant stomach, we had specially reserved for him a tin of rice and milk, very happily designated “Amity.” This was followed up later in the day by a handful of stewed prunes, and he was soon once more in his right mind, if not so essentially clothed upon. He had, in fact, dropped just about one stone in weight in these five days of fasting.

There was a suggestion that after the war some of us would be qualified to publish a cookery book: “Mrs. Beeton Beaten!”

TWICE WOUNDED

ORDERLY HANET—“LE PÈRE NOËL.”

VI
Air Raids and Other Activities

Carlsruhe Lager was located on the spot where a hundred people, mostly women and children, were killed during an air raid on Corpus Christi Day, 1916. A few days before the second anniversary our mess was at tea in the hut, when Father Daniels, the German priest, arrived in search of the Roman Catholic padre, and partook of a cup. Our talk was of raids, of which there had been a succession, and of the air raid in particular.

“It happened,” said Father Daniels, “just outside the window of this hut; there, where the pole is.” The pole is only a few feet away. It is used as a bumble-puppy pole now. The trees around still bear marks of the explosion; pieces of shell and shrapnel embedded in the stems. There was no Corpus Christi procession, however, as so often claimed; simply a crowding for admission into a circus and menagerie. Old Maier, the German Lazarette orderly, had a son wounded that day.

Carlsruhe and Mannheim both suffered heavily from our aircraft during the period of my captivity. In one week there were eight raids—one every day and two on Sundays, so to speak. In the early hours of the morning we would awaken to the melancholy music of the warning sirens, and, getting out of bed and into slippers, would find all the heavens intersected by searchlights.

Soon the shrapnel would begin to fall heavily into the courtyard, the pieces striking the ground and the roofs of our huts very viciously. In the morning we could usually pick up a large amount of shrapnel, some of the ragged shreds being almost a foot in length. During the night the sounding of the air-raid warning signal was customarily greeted by ironical cheers from the Allied prisoners; during a day attack we would stand out in the court and watch proceedings, although, with a commendable anxiety for our safety, the German authorities would urge us to take cover.

One such air raid took place about nine o’clock on the morning of the 31st May, the day after the festival of Corpus Christi. An arrangement had been arrived at between the belligerents, I understand, that no bombing should take place on that day, but, in their usual absent-minded fashion, the Germans had committed a misdemeanour. So here were our boys over first thing with a gentle reminder. This consisted of ten bombs—a sort of decalogue of imperative “thou shalt nots”—several of which fell quite near to the camp. Heavy damage was done, and there were a considerable number of casualties among the civilians. We were so unhappy, however, as to witness one of our ’planes brought down in combat, and later we learned that a second machine had fallen.

FUNERAL OF TWO BRITISH AVIATORS

This last fell into a marsh, and neither the craft nor the crew were recovered. The other two men, however, were buried the following afternoon. Besides representation from all the other nationalities in camp, the funeral party included twelve British officers. After selection of the aviator officer prisoners and the senior ranks five places were still available, and these we balloted for. I drew a blank, but R., successful, was not too keen about going, and I secured a gift of his place, helping him to a decision, if truth must be told, by a little present of two tins, each containing one hundred cigarettes!

This was my second time outside the gates during the whole of my seven months’ captivity at Carlsruhe. The journey was the same as before, though now was visible the whole wondrous work of Nature in these last few months of spring and early summer. In church I sat in the second row immediately behind General von Rinck, and could not help observing how his grey hair and his grey, deeply-engraven face, harmonized and were at one with the field-grey of his uniform, but that in that face there was no note of answering colour to the red facings of his tunic, or to the finely-arranged ribbons of his many decorations and distinctions.

The service was similar to the former, and throughout the brief time that it lasted the sides of the two black wooden boxes which lay before the altar, a wreath at the foot of each, appeared to fall asunder, and I seemed to see clearly the poor mangled bodies which were therein. The same impressive music as we passed from the church and up the avenue to the cemetery; the same word of command to the firing-party; the same volleys fired upward into futility; the same tribute paid by each of us, a spadeful of dust—to what would soon be but a spadeful of dust. There is little variation in Death, or in the ceremonies by which we endeavour to disguise from ourselves his distressing and disturbing realisms. Being Saturday, there were many civilians in the cemetery, staid old men who seemed to have come in from the country; students and schoolboys standing at the salute; women weeping at the burial of the dead who have caused their dead!

A few days later the civilians, mostly factory girls, killed in the air raid were buried, but we neither heard nor saw any evidences of the funeral. The German communiqué read: “Shortly after 9 a.m. an attack ensued on the open town of Carlsruhe. Ten or twelve bombs were dropped, which fell, partly in open country, partly in gardens. Some damage to houses caused. Unfortunately, four people fell victims to the attack; six others were badly hurt, partly from their own fault. At 9.45 the alarm was over.”

And—the four aviators and the four civilians were lying very quiet!

An Inimitable Imitator

Sometimes, after “lights out,” a warning siren would be blown in camp, which, to the initiated, simply made warning that Captain Teixeira, our inimitable imitator, had been induced good-naturedly to give a performance. Then might be heard the Captain sawing his way to freedom, to the bringing in of the disconcerted guard. Followed imitation of all the fowls in the farmyard, and all the feathers in the forest, or, most humorous of all, “an infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry.” Perhaps I would suggest twins, whereat the Captain, who is a family man, would revert to poultry, and give an imitation of an exultant hen, whose cackling we found none the less realistic in that we have a tin of “eggs and bacon” under way for to-morrow’s breakfast.

CAPTAIN TEIXEIRA.

Captain Teixeira could not only imitate the song of birds. He was a singer himself. Among many other manifestations of friendship, he gave me a set of improvisations, “Songs from Coimbra”—Coimbra, a University town and capital of the Portuguese province of Beira, giving its name to that school of poetry which had inception in 1848 with the publication of “O Trovador.” I have made effort to convert these “Cantares” into English verse:

I

Let my coffin be