Hansi, the Alsatian caricaturist who was arrested by the Germans some
months ago because of his pro-French sentiments, escaped and fled to
France to avoid imprisonment. He is now in a French regiment acting as
an interpreter. The German officer who had caused his arrest was the
first prisoner brought before him. The officer complained of the
treatment he had received and Hansi replied:
“It was certainly better than you gave me at Colmar.”
“GAVE GERMANS WHAT FOR”
Philip Gibbs, the London _Daily Chronicle_ correspondent, describing his
railway journey from Paris to Boulogne, says:
“On the way we fell into many surprising and significant scenes. One of
these was when we suddenly heard a shout of command in English and saw a
body of men in khaki with Red Cross armlets suddenly run along the
platform to an incoming train from the north with stretchers and
drinking bottles. A party of English wounded had arrived from the scene
of action between Mons and Charleroi.
“We were kept back by French soldiers with fixed bayonets, but through
the hedges of steel we had the painful experience of seeing a number of
British soldiers with bandaged heads and limbs descending from the troop
train. They looked spent with fatigue and pain after the journey, but
some of them were sufficiently high spirited to laugh at their
sufferings and give a hearty cheer to the comrades who came to relieve
them with medical care.
“I had a few words with one of them and questioned him about the action,
but like all British soldiers he was very vague in his descriptions, and
the most arresting sentence in his narrative was the reiterated
assertion that ‘we got it in the neck.’
“I understood from him, however, that the British troops had stood
their ground well under terrific fire and that the Germans had been
given ‘what for.’
“I saw the British soldier on this journey in many unexpected places and
adapting himself to his unusual environment with his characteristic
phlegm. I saw him at dawn in small camps, surrounded with haystacks and
farmyard chickens, drinking the fresh milk offered to him by French
peasant women, with whom he seems to have established a perfectly
adequate ‘lingua Française.’
“I saw him scrawling up the words ‘hot water’ and ‘cold water’ above the
taps in French railway stations, carrying the babies of Belgian
refugees, giving cigarettes to German prisoners and rounding up French
cattle which in due time will be turned into French beefsteaks.”