CHAPTER IA CAMP IN BEING

A broad, level, methodically cultivated plain; a horizon of wooded slopes with, every few degrees or so, the suggestion of winding valleys and watercourses; to the northward, the river Weser, Nature’s barrier beyond the wire, flowing between us and freedom, and visible from our upper windows in an occasional gleam of silver against the shadows of the steep further bank; to the west the town, red-roofed and picturesque with adjoining allotments; on the edge of the allotments a large square walled enclosure containing two very recent architectural abominations, eyesores in the general prospect—to wit,KaserneA and B of theOffizier Gefangenen Lager[2]Holzminden, that highly advertised Brunswickian retreat which, on a day in September 1917, flung open its hospitable gates to its first English guests, an advance instalment of about thirty from Karlsruhe. Such—in a paragraph—was Holzminden Camp and its environment.

2.Officer prisoners-of-war camp.

The new Camp had been freely boomed; theLager“Poldhu” had got hold of it and done wonders with it—that mysteriousLager“Poldhu” of Germany in war time, which spoke not through wires or wireless and seemingly lacked all means of transmission, but which percolated, none the less, fromLagertoLagerin some mysterious way, so that what should by rights have remained a close secret in theKommandantur[3]at X in Baden was known all over the Camp at Y in Silesia within a week or so. Thus it was noised abroad in a dozen camps that four had got out from Freiburg and were still at large, that a tunnel scheme had been discovered at the last moment at Magdeburg, and that poor old C— had got “jug” again for hitting a sentry in the parcel office at Ströhen.

3.Kommandantur means in a prison camp that part set apart for the German personnel, and includes the Commandant’s office.

Holzminden—so ran the “Poldhu”—was to be the real thing, a prisoner’s Mecca—fine, brand-new buildings, spacious grounds, good scenery, good air. The report was discussed and swallowed or pooh-poohed according to temperament. The Schwarmstedt crowd took the news of their impending departure thither with a pronounced sniff. They were—had been for several months—in the Xth Army Corps Area. Holzminden also was in the Xth Army Corps. There could no good thing come out of the Xth Army Corps. Schwarmstedt was in fact sufficiently sceptical of the Xth Army Corps to have remained gladly in its flea-ridden huts, had it not been that the prospect of a winter on the bog-wastes in those flimsy buildings seemed almost intolerable. That fate was reserved in the actual event for Italians, with the usual leavening of neglected Russians.

Accordingly, an advance party of the ‘nineteen-fourteeners’ and ‘-fifteeners’ of Schwarmstedt packed up their household gods and suffered themselves to be transported to Holzminden. They were told authoritatively that this was going to be merely a stopping-place on the way to Holland and exchange; so they threw chests-full of tins at the starving Russians who were remaining behind, left their heavy luggage to follow after them, and arrived only with the clothes they stood up in and a suit-case of tins to last them till they reached the border. The border took most of them three months to reach; the suit-cases were empty in under a week. It was galling, after having been led to believe that they would be dining at the Hague in a few days, to find that they were to remain prisoners for an indefinite period in a camp in which the feeding arrangements were, to put it mildly, as yet incompletely organised. But they had acted unwisely. Three and a half years of doubt and uncertainty should have taught them better than to travel empty-handed so far from their refilling point, or to rely on exchange until they were actually at the border.

Fortunately, however, they were only the advance guard; the main party from Schwarmstedt had yet to come, and when the nakedness of the land and the bleakness of the immediate exchange prospect was really discovered, the wires were set in motion and injunctions passed to the remainder to save what could yet be saved. Anything edible had long since disappeared down the throats of the Russians and would, in any case, have been difficult to reclaim from our unfortunate Allies. But other things of less immediate value were salved; and the main party from Schwarmstedt pulled out in their turn from the bog camp, resigned at least to a temporary stay in their new abode, and properly equipped with the more essential things. It was a regal transport. There were 200 of them, not to mention their hand-luggage, which assumed vast proportions, since everything that was left behind as heavy luggage stood an even chance of being lost in transit, even if transport exigencies in the Fatherland permitted of it ever being put on board a train.

What an arrival that was—the main body from Schwarmstedt! We raw ‘seventeeners,’ fresh up in our ordnance boots and Tommies’ tunics from the sorting camps of Heidelberg and Karlsruhe in mild Baden, could hardly credit it. We had what we wore, plus, perhaps, an odd shirt which the Belgian ladies in Courtrai might have given us. Here was an eye-opener—Schwarmstedt Camp come to Holzminden under a camouflage of suit-cases! We leaned out of the windows of “A” Barrack as they staggered in at the main gate, and the Schwarmstedt advance party hailed their friends as the stream rolled on through the inner gate into the camp grounds, and bawled out amidst the general babel disparaging comment on the new camp and its personnel.

Irish Mick in our room was in great form. “Bury your notes,” he sang out, “bury your notes. They sthrip ye mother naked.” Every one in three of the incoming cortège had not less on him than 50 marks in German currency notes. (Strengstens verboten, of course, and a search on arrival was the accepted thing.) So, taking Mick at his word, they sat them down on the dustySpielplatz, made unobtrusive graves with pocket knives, and dedicated their money to the land. Perhaps they were seen. Perhaps the scratches were in some cases too obvious. At all events the Germans became wise; and one of their N.C.O.’s going round betimes next morning before the party had been able to see to their investments unearthed no less than 2000 marks! The Schwarmstedt party lost the first round.

We have digressed somewhat: but those first few days at Holzminden were days of digressions, of alarums and excursions, of administration too chaotic even for a serious strafe. The best organisation in the world will not get 500 more or less passive resisters satisfactorily transplanted from one place to another without considerable difficulty, and the German arrangements at Holzminden were ludicrously insufficient for their task. The buildings were there, and that was about all. The crockery had not arrived; there were three large boilers in the German cook-house to cater for the bodily wants of 500 English officers and 100 Germans; there were two or three wretched cooking-stoves for our private use; there were about half a dozen British orderlies—the rest, we were told, were on their way; the bathroom had not even been begun; the parcel room was not yet open, nor was the canteen; the German staff were incomplete, new to the ropes, and totally inefficient. The Commandant was a kindly old dodderer of about seventy who left everything in the hands of the Camp Officer; and the Camp Officer, as we were to know before very long and as a good many knew quite well already, was the most plausible villain and the biggest liar in Germany. Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer will figure perforce largely in these pages. Let him be introduced to the reader as he introduced himself to us on our arrival in the camp. It was one of his stock ‘turns.’

Twenty-five of us had arrived at midnight from Heidelberg, dead tired and hungry, and had been greeted in fluent Yank beneath the flaring electric lamp at the door of the Kommandantur by someone whom at first sight and sound we took to be rather a genial and sympathetic person. He told us that he was glad to see us, that he was always glad to see any Englishman, that he had been great friends with the English himself before the war, and that he hoped to be so again. But that in the meanwhile war was war. That we had better, y’know, write straight away to our friends for our thickest clothes, y’know. It was very cold here in winter, y’know—(he did not then add that there was also very little fuel and that wood was going to cost us 18 marks a pailful). He concluded his speech of welcome on a note of old-world hospitality which made us think of bedroom candles and a comforting ‘night-cap’:—

“So now, yentlemen, I expect you will be glad to go to your bedrooms. I will wish you good-night. You will be searched in the morning.”

We crawled upstairs full of hope and were sorted out into three of the upper rooms reserved for newcomers. There was nothing to eat and no night lingerie to slip into; and we were locked in because we had not been searched.

In the morning we appeared again, empty and unshaven, for the search. Our kind mentor of the night before must have pierced our secret, for almost his first enquiry was whether we had breakfasted. A menial was then despatched to bid the cook provide breakfast for theHerrenwith all despatch, and we solaced our impatience with unreasoned thoughts of a sizzling rasher, or at least somewurst. Breakfast, when it came, was one cup each ofersatzcoffee, and lukewarm at that. But the genial Karl pretended not to understand our disgust.

It must be admitted that he did not confine his innocent pranks to the newly captured. All was fish that came to his net. The only difference was that he got so little change out of those who knew the ropes. They, for instance, might have guessed what “breakfast” (German 1917 version) meant. Also they knew their rights and how far he—and they—could go, pretty well to the last centimetre. So, be it added, did he. It was one thing for the whole camp to laugh at him onappel(roll-call). Laughing and shouting onappel—Homeric ripples of merriment or short sharp barks from the entire assembly—were recognised as means of entering effective protest when the Germans began to exceed their prerogatives. But it would be quite another thing to tell Niemeyer to his face to shut up. One officer did this and was promptly marched off to the cells. These two had waged bitter war since Ströhen days and the Englishman had renewed the offensive by openly refusing to shake Niemeyer’s hand on arrival at Holzminden. It was natural that the latter should get back on him as soon as the opportunity arrived. Holding, as he did, all the scoring cards, Niemeyer never went out of his way to avoid trouble. On the contrary, he welcomed it. His power to deal with the situation to his own satisfaction only failed when, as sometimes happened, his temper passed completely beyond his control.

Under him, and in charge of Kaserne A, was one Gröner, a saturnine, sallow, heavy-moustachioed fellow, reputed a schoolmaster in civil life, and from all appearances a worthy exponent of Kultur. By the Schwarmstedt lot he was known and loathed, and his stomach bulged temptingly as he stalked on to ourappel.

And there was Ulrich, who arrived shortly after the opening of the camp and assumed command of B Kaserne and its two hundred and fifty inhabitants. Ulrich had stopped something very recently in the Passchendaele fighting and was generally understood to be “swinging the lead.” At all events no brisker or jauntier figure was to be seen most days of the week. But if a General hove in sight, or there was a rumour of further drastic combings-out in the home service cadres, Ulrich forthwith assumed a halt and woe-begone gait. His chest caved in, his left leg lagged behind his right, and he appeared supremely miserable and C3. These seizures were chronic, but were noticed to be of brief duration. For the rest, Ulrich was polite, but a doubtful character. To a privileged few he was communicative and expressed his doubts as to the orthodoxy of the conduct of prison camps in the Xth Army Corps. But his billet depended on his keeping in with the authorities; he was a border-line case for the front, and he had a wife and numerous children. What would you, or he?

Let us take the opportunity to introduce the rest of the minor characters. There was aFeldwebel-Leutnantcalled Welman who rejoiced—justly enough—in the sobriquet of the “Jew Boy.” He had never been to the front, was reported to be permanently unfit and to get fifty per cent. of the profits of the canteen. At all events he was the officer in charge of the Quartermaster’s Department in this Camp, and was credited accordingly with a snug war billet. He was not discourteous, but if unduly harassed by his own superiors, or by a long row of sneeringly critical English, he became excited, and his voice used to sound as if it came out of the bridge of his Semitic nose. He spoke vile Berlinese and was generally regarded as a harmless enough little soul with a capacity for business.

There was “Square-eyes,” an old farmer Feldwebel who had been promised his discharge months since and loathed his present job. He never made an enemy among the English in the camp and used to speak broken English, beaming through enormous horn spectacles. Unfortunately his reign did not last long. Either his discharge came, or he was regarded by the authorities as too mild for his job. At all events he left us comparatively early.

And there were other gentlemen Feldwebels who construed their duties too humanely for the taste of the authorities and were removed; and one or two who gained full approbation, and remained to add to the gaiety of things.

What a fate to have the charge of officers in a prison camp! Theirs was not an enviable lot. If they were too severe, they forfeited all moral control over us. If they were too complaisant, they risked losing their jobs. There was no more difficult fence on which to sit and preserve balance. A few—the more democratic—were doubtless intrigued by the idea of exercising control on the sacred officer class; on most it weighed as an irreconcileable anomaly.

One little fellow, Mandelbrot, curiously combined respect and authority in his behaviour to us. He was an incorrigible disciplinarian and never allowed any liberties. But if he had to address a British officer, whatever the officer’s rank, he would click his heels together and stand to attention.

The first ten days at Holzminden were chaos itself. Even Niemeyer was unable to exert himself as actively inimical in the complete disorganisation. He was too busily engaged in strafing his own staff. Moreover, he was as yet only Camp Officer. The doddering old Commandant still reigned and Niemeyer’s time was largely spent in interposing his unwelcome oar into conversations between the Commandant and an aggrieved senior British officer.

The English, moreover, were at sixes and sevens amongst themselves. It was frankly a struggle for food. Schwarmstedt, as stated, had brought very few tins. We from Baden had none. The German commissariat was of course execrable. There was no “common box” or relief store of tins and food for new-comers such as had been instituted in the prosperous days of Crefeld and Gütersloh, when the odd captives straggled in from the battle of the Somme and found plenty awaiting them. Parcels had in many cases been already countermanded on the strength of the Holland rumour, in others they were in process of being diverted from Schwarmstedt, and this would probably be a matter of weeks. For the first time since 1914 the old campaigners were casting about for their next meal. It was a new experience. The German canteen, of course, had nothing edible for sale. There was barely fuel enough for our few stoves; the baths were not yet open; the beds were hard and rocky.

It needed but a brief acquaintanceship with the Xth Corps to be able to put one’s finger on thefons et origo mali, which went much deeper than the doddering Commandant and his graceless Lieutenant. Everything that was unpleasant in our new surroundings had been hatched, we might be sure, at H.Q. from the brain of von Hänisch, the fox,General Kommandierendeof the Corps. Now von Hänisch, besides being by nature fox-like, had got a bad hammering from the English on the Somme, and had lost many men, and his field command into the bargain; and now, with a third or so of the British officer prisoners-of-war in Germany under his amiable tutelage, he was not the man to waste any time in getting back on the country which had been the means of breaking him.

The camp was not ten days old before von Renard took a preliminary prowl round his prize covert to appraise the value of his new hunting grounds; the magic word went forth “Inspection.” The taps were turned on; the available brooms were brought forth; the British orderlies—what there were of them—were set on to every conceivable form of fatigue; the German staff worked overtime, and general electricity pervaded the place. And amidst the general preparations the senior British officer girded up his loins for a battle royal and noted down with his faithful adjutant a long list of complaints....

It is the next day, some time after morningappel, which the General has attended and which has passed without incident. The senior British officer, the better to forward his many just claims, has ordered a punctiliously correct parade.

From Room 69 on the second floor of Kaserne A we may get a good view of the interview which, one way or the other, is destined to fashion our existence for the immediate future. The General having made a tour of the Camp is about to pass through the gate into the precincts of the Kommandantur. Our senior officer will apply for an interview. The General will doubtless unbend so far as to go through the form of one.

He is surrounded by his staff, as well as by the old Camp Commandant, with his insufferable Camp Officer, the Paymaster, and the other officers attached to the camp. They are grouped respectfully behind their Chief, very splendid in their best uniforms, and stiff as pokers. Every now and again he turns and addresses a question to one of them, and then the poker back grows even stiffer, and the gloved hand goes up to the peaked cap in salute and stays there till the General is pleased to turn away again. How we used to loathe this German habit. One conceived a frantic longing to tear their hands forcibly away and fasten them down. It seemed so thoroughly Prussian, this habit of talking to their superiors as if they were shading their eyes from the sun! How infinitely better our own brisk method seemed than this long-drawn apotheosis!

The interview is graciously accorded and takes place on the bleak patch of grass graced by the euphemistic title ofSpielplatzand already worn bare by the trampling to and fro of 500 pairs of feet. Here, against the back wall of the squalid cook-house, across one of the dining room tables (symbol of conference!), ringed in by smug supercilious Huns, and with the eyes of his own countrymen riveted on him from the adjoining barrack, our senior officer joins the issue. It exemplifies the scant attention which has been paid to the spokesman of the British community that the interview should be held in the open air, almost as an afterthought, instead of, as it should properly have been held, in the Kommandantur itself.

The senior British officer has no enviable task, but he has at least the armour of experience and knows how far he may go and to what he is entitled. Years of this sort of thing—ever since First Ypres—have taught him that only too well. There is nothing novel to him in this interview; only that the nature of the Hun opposite to him partakes of the attributes of the fox rather than of the pig, and that he has if possible a stiffer job in prospect than ever heretofore, and one which he would gladly delegate.

It is no sinecure being senior officer in a bad German prison camp. “The stiffest job I ever took on in my life,” a veteran of both the Boer and the European war was heard to say once. “I have never known a position where one weak link in one’s own argument, one single individual who is beyond control, will so completely crack one’s line of defence.”

But of that anon. For the present we will follow Major Wyndham at his uphill task, as the interview begins. He trusts to his own moderate German rather than to an interpreter and speaks direct to the Fox, who listens with eyes askance and a sneer on his face.

The first complaint is the building accommodation. It is at present quite inadequate. There are no public rooms, no library, one solitary cook-house, and no bathroom. When are these going to be allowed, please?

The General confers. The extra cook-house and the bathroom will be put up as soon as possible. As to the public rooms and the library, there is nothing in the Regulations which prescribes for these. They have been permitted in other camps, but that was a luxury.

“But every German officers’ camp in England has at least one public room. It is well known.”

“That may be. But England is not Germany. It is war-time, and the English officers must learn to do without luxuries.”

“Is it to be understood that this is a ‘strafe’ camp?”

“It may please the English officers to understand that. It is deservedallerdings. Next please.” The General glances at his watch.

The next complaint is the size of the exercise ground. It is too small to admit of games being properly played. There is plenty of room if the General will permit the barbed wire fence on the southern side to be moved back 15 yards. It will not encroach on the allotments. And a corner at the south-east end of the camp might also with advantage be put inside the wire.

This is a reasonable proposition. As things are, we can play a half-sized game of hockey on the available ground. One half-sized game of hockey will not go far amongst 550. And there is no necessity for the curtailment. Along the southern side of the ground the inner wire runs parallel to the outer wall, but full 40 yards away from it; immediately under the wall are the allotments of the camp staff. There is a space 20 yards in breadth between the wire and the allotments. Why should we not have this? One can do a lot with 20 yards on a hundred yards’ stretch in a prison camp.

But Foxy-face knows only too well where he can hit us on the raw, and is obdurate. “Later, perhaps, we will see, but now impossible. Neither can the gymnasium at the south-eastern end, or any of the ground round it, be included.”

Next on the programme comes the conduct of the Camp Officer. Why has Hauptmann Niemeyer, whose behaviour at Ströhen Camp has been already reported to and strongly condemned by theKriegsministerium(War Office), been again placed in a position of responsibility in so large a camp? Has the General been made aware of his previous record?

The senior British officer regrets that he cannot command greater fluency as he makes this point-blank attack. If he succeeds, Niemeyer will have to go. If he fails, it will be war to the knife between the two of them, and he knows it.

But the General has already prejudged the issue and our Major might just as well have saved his powder. Niemeyer has been standing with his hand at the peak of his cap for three minutes gabbling all the time. A clever man can get quite a lot of self-justification into three minutes. He will stay. We can trust him for that ... the General beams on his faithful henchman.

The Major sees that it is hopeless, but keeps his temper and carries on. There is one more complaint, and a big one, for it touches honour rather than comfort. It is on the delicate subject of parole.

Now it should be explained that in the Great War captivity meant confinement in the strictest sense of the term, and the roystering days at Verdun in the Napoleonic Wars were not repeated. In those days prisoners on parole kept their private apartments, their carriages, and their mistresses, and racketed, if they wished to—so long as they kept within a reasonable and elastic law—to their heart’s content. In the Great War it was the wish, rightly and clearly expressed by Lord Grey, that officers should use the privileges of parole to take walks outside the camp only when they could not get sufficient exercise within it to keep themselves fit. When, therefore, in previous camps the British had availed themselves of this privilege, they had been in the habit, before starting on the walk, of handing in a signed card to the Germans on which it was stated that they undertook not to do two things:—to escape or in any way to facilitate future escape, or to damage German property. The arrangement had proved perfectly satisfactory.

But at Holzminden, when the cards were produced for us to sign, there was a whole charter of other things that we must or might not do when we went out for walks. We were required, for instance, to sign to the effect that we would unhesitatingly obey the orders of the German officer or N.C.O. accompanying us; this hit at the whole basis of the parole idea. We were asked to append our names underneath a clause which stated that weknewthat the breaking of our parole was punishable with the death penalty; this merely insulted our intelligence. We were determined that we would either take walks on parole on the terms of heretofore or not take them at all. This spirit of dogged conservatism when there was so clearly everything to lose and nothing much to gain might seem petty and unreasonable, were it not remembered, firstly, that any attempt to interfere with our parole was in honour bound to be furiously contested, and secondly, that if in the course of business you conceded the German an inch, he was pretty certain shortly to make overtures for a mile.

Such, at any rate, is the opinion of the senior British officer, as he now bluntly demands thestatus quo antein the matter of parole.

The General laughs and turns to his escort. Who are these British after all who should set themselves up on so high a pedestal? It is known that their parole was broken at Schwarmstedt, in the spirit, if not actually in the letter. The Major asks for corroborative detail. It is given and denied roundly.

The high and mightyStellvertreter Kommandierende Generaldoes not lightly brook flat contradiction in his own domain, and begins to lose his temper. In other words, he begins to shout. The word “Baralong,” spat out so that all can hear, floats up to our upper window. He is presumably making some general allegation against the lost British sense of honour. Neither is our Major quite so cool as he was; “Lusitania” counters “Baralong.”

There is no further any attempt at concealment and the Fox bares his teeth in a snarl.

“If every Englishman in this command,” he storms, “got his deserts he would be shot.” And he stalks away with his staff in a white heat of passion.

The senior British officer sends for his Adjutant and an order goes round the camp that all parole cards will be torn up and no walks will take place until an apology is forthcoming.

View from Kaserne B, showing skating rink made in January 1918.

The apology took months to come. It took weeks only to report the full circumstances of the case to the British Legation in Holland, thence to the Dutch Minister in Berlin, and finally to the Kriegsministerium itself. And in the meanwhile 500 odd British officers took their sole exercise in the slushy compound, pounding round and round the eternal triangle, forbidden to play games, and longing for the frost which would at least enable them to build a slide.

And on the evening after the General’s departure a groan went up from the entireappelas the Interpreter announced the fact that the aged Commandant had taken his expected departure and that Hauptmann Niemeyer reigned in his stead.

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