To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of Choques,
on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners were brought;
and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a Sunday morning,
when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky overhead and good
visibility for German guns and ours.
There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment,
a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of
misery, while a few of our fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with
fixed bayonets. They were the men who had surrendered from deep dugouts
in the trenches between us and Loos and from the cellars of Loos
itself. They had seen many of their comrades bayoneted. Some of them had
shrieked for mercy. Others had not shrieked, having no power of sound
in their throats, but had shrunk back at the sight of glinting bayonets,
with an animal fear of death. Now, all that was a nightmare memory, and
they were out of it all until the war should end, next year, the year
after, the year after that--who could tell?
They had been soaked to the skin in the night and their gray uniforms
were still soddened. Many of them were sleeping, in huddled, grotesque
postures, like dead men, some lying on their stomachs, face downward.
Others were awake, sitting hunched up, with drooping heads and a beaten,
exhausted look. Others paced up and down, up and down, like caged
animals, as they were, famished and parched, until we could distribute
the rations. Many of them were dying, and a German ambulanceman went
among them, injecting them with morphine to ease the agony which
made them writhe and groan. Two men held their stomachs, moaning and
whimpering with a pain that gnawed their bowels, caused by cold and
damp. They cried out to me, asking for a doctor. A friend of mine
carried a water jar to some of the wounded and held it to their lips.
One of them refused. He was a tall, evil-looking fellow, with a bloody
rag round his head--a typical “Hun,” I thought. But he pointed to a
comrade who lay gasping beside him and said, in German, “He needs it
first.” This man had never heard of Sir Philip Sidney, who at Zutphen,
when thirsty and near death, said, “His need is greater than mine,” but
he had the same chivalry in his soul.
The officer in charge of their escort could not speak German and had no
means of explaining to the prisoners that they were to take their turn
to get rations and water at a dump nearby. It was a war correspondent,
young Valentine Williams, afterward a very gallant officer in the Irish
Guards who gave the orders in fluent and incisive German. He began
with a hoarse shout of “Achtung!” and that old word of command had an
electrical effect on many of the men. Even those who had seemed asleep
staggered to their feet and stood at attention. The habit of discipline
was part of their very life, and men almost dead strove to obey.
The non-commissioned officers formed parties to draw and distribute the
rations, and then those prisoners clutched at hunks of bread and ate
in a famished way, like starved beasts. Some of them had been four days
hungry, cut off from their supplies by our barrage fire, and intense
hunger gave them a kind of vitality when food appeared. The sight of
that mass of men reduced to such depths of human misery was horrible.
One had no hate in one's heart for them then.
“Poor devils!” said an officer with me. “Poor beasts! Here we see the
`glory' of war! the `romance' of war!”