From Prisoner-of-War Camp to London
Censorship.
The Ypres Times.
69
An Echo from the Past.
Few of us lived through the years 1914-1919 without experiencing in some way
or another the excitements and sufferings of the War.
The Ruhlebenites among us certainly had more than their share of both, and my
•experiences are practically the same as those of the majority of Englishmen who were
unfortunate enough to be in Germany when war broke out.
Before being finally interned in Ruhleben camp in November, 1914, I was arrested
and detained no less than six times. Among the places of detention were the Stadt
Vogtei," which the English occupants humorously named The Hotel des Anglais,"
and the menu for the day, with the latest arrivals, was posted up in the American embassy
in Berlin. Also Moabit Criminal Prison, where I was given solitary confinement, and
where the favourite joke of the warder was to inform me in the evening that I was to be
shot at dawn next day. Also the notorious Sennelager, where the prisoners were turned
•out for several days in an open field, exposed to all weathers, and where it was found
necessary to cut our hair short on one side of the head only, and to take off half the beard
or moustache, and to paint a large K.G. (Kriegsgefangener) on our coats and where
such brutal punishments as tying to a tree, exposed to the sun for hours, took place.
Other experiences which have left a lasting impression on my mind were the arrest
with others on a train, and a march through the crowded streets, escorted by armed police,
amid jeers and missiles from a hostile crowd then the transport in the Black Maria,"
crowded to suffocation point with filthy Poles, criminals, beggars, etc., through Berlin to
Moabit prison and on another occasion a mobbing by the crowd, which I escaped only
after* having received several severe blows with sticks and umbrellas on my head and
shoulders.
On the 6th November, 1914, we were all gathered up from the various prisons, hotels,
and private houses, etc., and transported to our long, last resting place at Ruhleben Camp.
There have been too many accounts given of this camp for me to go into details
suffice it to say, that we were crowded together in a really frightful manner in
stables, six men in a horsebox. I was allocated with about 200 others to the loft.
Needless to say, the food given to us was vile, and quite insufficient. The
cracks in the roof and walls let in the cold and damp, the heating being practically nil,
and in the lofts we were in a continual state of semi-darkness, and had usually to grope
about to find anything. The greatest suffering of all, I think, was the eternal monotony
and the uncertainty of our fate and, together with the eternal filth, the lack of proper
sanitary conditions, they became the cause of many a physical and mental breakdown.
Too much has already been written regarding the sports, pastimes, hobbies, studies and
work organised by ourselves in the Camp. These things, however, were brought to a fine
art, and thus made our life more bearable than it otherwise would have been.
We were, of course, very restricted as to correspondence, and we often wondered what
those gentlemen were like who stuck those nice little labels on our letters. We imagined
them sitting in arm chairs, with the obliterating stamp ready at their elbow, and piles and
piles of letters stacked up all round them. We sometimes even mildly cursed them if
remittances were greatly delayed, and often remarked that our expected letter must be
somewhere at the bottom of the pile, and it would eventually turn up if the censor ever
reached the bottom of his pile.
Some of the mysteries of censoring were revealed to us in the very department
we had so often blessed and cursed in turns, for only those who have been there can
^realise how really blessed it was to find an opened by censor with one's name on it.
