NIEMEYER—AND PINPRICKS
What has been told may serve as a prologue. The curtain at Holzminden
did not really go up till Niemeyer came into his own. He became on his
accession even more truculent than hitherto. War was openly declared
between himself and the senior British officer. The cells rapidly filled
up with officers whom he had incarcerated for an innocuous stare, a
failure to salute at 30 paces distance, or more than likely for no
reason at all. We became accustomed to the sight and sound of this
gentle knight outside our Kaserne in the morning about a quarter to
eight, storming up and down in a black gust of bilious passion, harrying
everybody—Germans, British, officers, orderlies—anyone, in short, who
crossed his path. “I give you three days right away,” “I guess you know
I am the Commandant,” and similar phrases floated up to us as we lay in
bed half asleep and warned us that we might expect a visit at any
moment. Sometimes, in the beginning, he came into our rooms in person
and made facetiously offensive remarks to our unresponsive forms. But
later his sense of dignity deprived us of the pleasure of his company at
these early hours, and he preferred to prowl about outside in general
supervision, while sentries and N.C.O.’s, acting to orders, and sheepish
or blatant according to their natures, banged upon our doors, and with a
raucous _Aufstehen_ (“get up”) contrived as a rule to bring back
reality.
We were supposed to be up by 8 o’clock. If we were not, there was always
the risk that one of the sentries might interpret his duties too
literally and pull us out. This insult was of quite frequent occurrence,
and it resulted, as may be supposed, in friction of the most serious
kind. Someone would probably shout down at Niemeyer in the enclosure
“Take your — sentries away,” and Niemeyer would at once storm his way up
to have a personal investigation on the spot. The hate at that
unseasonable time in the morning could be very direct, and usually
resulted in the Commandant bagging a brace or so more for “jug.”
It need not be added that these visits aroused intense resentment. It
was so obvious that they were only intended to annoy. The pretext was
that we were so habitually late on the 9 o’clock _appel_. The answer to
that was that in a crowd of 500 odd a great many would be late at any
_appel_, be it fixed for 9 or 10, or even 12. Let those who were late
take their chance of punishment. Another argument advanced by Niemeyer
was that according to the regulations every room had to be swept and
garnished by 10 a.m. Our reply was that they always were. Our own
orderlies were responsible for that job, and they performed it when they
were not called away from their own task on a German fatigue. And in
their unavoidable absence we cleaned up our rooms and made our beds
ourselves.
This little game was in fact no more than one of a series of pinpricks;
taken by itself we could have made light of it. But the snowball of
pinpricks gathered weight as the camp got under weigh and Niemeyer grew
more and more secure in his position.
Niemeyer succeeded in impregnating the entire camp with an atmosphere of
acute discontent and jumpiness, and no one knew this better than
himself. It was, as a matter of fact, a remarkably fine achievement for
one man, for Holzminden might have been from the start a happy camp. The
air was good, the view was good, the buildings were waterproof, the
water supply was good. Only the Commandant was vile.
The man who controlled the welfare of approximately one-quarter of the
English officers at this time prisoners-of-war in Germany had for 17
years besmirched by his presence the province of Milwaukee, U.S.A. His
twin brother, Heinrich, of Clausthal Camp in the same command, boasted a
similar record—what they had done during the 17 years nobody exactly
knew. The brethren were practically doubles, and rivalled each other in
the calculated arrogance, animosity, and deceit which, for the best part
of a year, busied a thousand souls in devising suitable post-bellum
punishments for the estimable pair. If a comparison had to be made, it
might be said by those in a position to know that Harry was the worse on
occasions, but that Charlie had it for sheer, dogged, day-in day-out
nastiness. In any case there was not much in it.
It was a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances that two watch-dogs
of such a breed and temper happened to be lying idle in the Hanover
kennels when the word went forth for a general British strafe in the Xth
Army Corps. It was always understood that the pair had weathered a
search on the high seas by a British destroyer when crossing over from
America to the service of their beloved Fatherland. As to Charles, it
was reported that he had been given some form of a command on the Somme,
but had lost it again within a brief period. He was certainly fond of
referring in no uncertain way to his dreadful experiences in that
battle—which was, if anything, a pretty sure indication that he had
never been near it.
The reason for the high favour in which the Niemeyers were held at
Hanover was always something of an enigma. It was supposed by some that
they could trace their patronage to even Higher Quarters than the Army
Corps Commander. The appointments of Camp Commandants, we were once told
by a friendly Dutchman from the Berlin Legation, were in the giving of
the Emperor. He alone could make and unmake. There was no reason to
suppose this particular Dutchman was lying to us, and he had come
straight from the Hague, where Lord Newton was at the time endeavouring
to thrash out an acceptable exchange agreement with the German
representatives. Certain it is that, despite the strongest
representations ever since the departure of the first party for exchange
to Holland—from British officers to the British General commanding in
that country, from the General to the War Office, from the War Office
back again to the British Legation in Holland, from the Legation to the
Dutch Government, and from the Dutch Government to Berlin—the pair stuck
like leeches, and retired, by the back door, only at such an advanced
period in the war that it had become evident that not even the patronage
of the All Highest was likely to avail them much any longer. If true, it
is an index of the system.
But most of us were sceptical of this explanation. It appeared more
reasonable to suppose that the Niemeyers were helping Hänisch in butter
from our parcels and getting carte blanche as a _quid pro quo_. There is
no doubt at all that Charles used to steal, although he took good care
to cover his tracks[4].
[Footnote 4: When the parcel room at Holzminden was cleared out after
the armistice, a trap-door was found in the floor, thus allowing access
from under the guard-room. Niemeyer expressed the greatest
astonishment.]
In appearance they were typically Hunnish, but of the commercial rather
than the military brand. Bullet heads with close-cropped grey hair;
florid complexion; grey moustachios with the usual Kaiser twirl; heavy
jowl and thick neck. Charles Niemeyer used to wear his cap at a rakish
angle on the back of his head. He was never seen out of his Prussian
military greatcoat except during a severe heat wave, or without his
spurs. Like most of his countrymen he carried a swelling paunch, which
protruded as he walked or stood even more prominently than its
circumference warranted. Sometimes he carried a stick, but more usually
he thrust both hands deep into his greatcoat pockets, from which they
were only occasionally withdrawn to return a salute. He smoked large
numbers of cigars. All these outward characteristics gave him a most
plebeian appearance singularly at variance with that of the usual dapper
and punctilious regimental officer.
[Illustration:
Karl Niemeyer.
]
His voice was the most astounding thing about him. It was really a most
delicately modulated instrument capable of the softest and most
sycophantic coo or the most guttural bellow, as occasion demanded.
Niemeyer used to speak his native tongue extremely fast, babbling along
without any of the harsh scraping dissonances that one usually
associated with it, and quite unintelligibly to the ordinary English
ear. His English was simply bar-tender Yank, extremely fluent within
certain stock limits and every now and then including a ludicrous error;
also, when he wished it, suitably foul. He sometimes made absurd
mistakes. Thus he would say “I will have you arrested right now—in five
minutes,” or (his best) “You think I do not understand the English, but
I do. I know dam all about you.”
“Right away,” “cost price,” the enclitic “Yes-no” at the end of a
sentence, and other absurdities abounded in his speech. “Cost price” was
a particular favourite. You could get “cost price” jug for any period:
or you could be “told something straight, yes cost price, I guess.” He
cherished the idea that “cost price” represented what was plain and
unequivocal, an index to the straight-dealing methods of alien saloon
managers in far Milwaukee. Sometimes, when a grievance involved the use
of technical English beyond his range, he would blind at us in German,
which we infinitely preferred, as it gave the comedians an opportunity
for looking uncomprehendingly asinine and shouting in chorus _nichts
verstehen_ (“don’t understand”), which infuriated him.
With Niemeyer first impressions were not actually unpleasing, as he had
clear blue eyes and a voice which, as I have said, when under control
was not unmusical. New arrivals at the camp, unless they had been
forewarned or had had previous dealings with him, were inclined to size
him up as a friendly, if over-familiar, old bounder.
He used to walk about with a retriever puppy, which was a source of
considerable annoyance to its owner, as it was invariably on better
terms with the prisoners-of-war, who used sometimes to feed it, than
with himself. The only occasions on which he was ever seen to stoop was
when bending down to coax the puppy to follow its rightful master.
He treated his dependants as beings of another world—“like dogs” would
be too mild a term, for Niemeyer was quite restrained in his dealings
with the puppy. He was never seen to return his men’s salutes; he only
returned ours as the result of frequent protests. His conduct towards
the British orderlies was just the same, except that his vituperation
had to be done in English and with therefore more limited scope. To the
British officers, except in his moods of Berserker fury, he would be
either coldly polite or else offensively hail-fellow-well-met, as the
mood took him. If he had any hobbies we did not hear of them. He neither
walked nor rode nor indulged in any sport. Once in a blue moon he went
for a drive. He was a bachelor, and was understood to loathe the sight
of women. Whether he drank or drugged or gambled his many spare hours
away at Holzminden is not known. We did not certainly identify him with
literary tasks. The knowledge of his power was his main solace, and
there is no doubt that he often stirred up trouble in the camp for the
sake of trouble. To some such motive only could be ascribed his
relentlessly literal interpretation of the Corps regulations. Under a
reasonable régime these would never have been pressed. Even so, things
at Holzminden would have gone smoothly enough if he had been a
gentleman. It was the fact that even this modest provision had not been
made on their account that goaded the British to an intense intolerance
of the man and all his works; and he, in his turn, looked for moral
support to the authority which, with full knowledge, had placed him
where he was. Such was Captain of the Reserve Karl Niemeyer.
He adopted the policy of alleviating our numerous discomforts only by
slow degrees or on the principle of two steps backward for each one
forward. A long string of complaints was presented to him on the average
about twice a week. The bath-house was at length completed, and the camp
watch-dog was promptly lodged in it. When remonstrated with, Niemeyer
explained that there was at present no room for the dog’s accommodation
in the Kommandantur. So we continued bath-less for another month—those
of us, at least, who could not face an icy plunge in the horse-troughs
on the _Spielplatz_. When at length the bath-house was vacated and
purged, it was found that only two of the showers were effective.
Somebody broke one of the electric lamps in the compound: all games were
promptly stopped. This left us literally with no outlet for exercise
except the monotonous “pound” in shorts and jersey round the camp
enclosure, or a furtive game of fives at the end of one of the long
corridors, for which it was not always easy to “book a court”!
The distribution of parcels was kept in the hands of the German
personnel, and as a result hopeless chaos and congestion reigned. In all
previous camps the British had efficiently organised the distribution of
their own parcels, no light task in the days when supplies from home
were unrationed and one recipient might claim as many as twenty parcels
in a week. When the consignments diverted from other camps began to
reach Holzminden, the German parcel room was packed from floor to
ceiling with the accumulations. The most that Niemeyer would at first
allow in the nature of English control in the parcel room was the
services of two orderlies. The presence of a British officer in the
parcel room, even on parole and for the express purpose of supervising
and facilitating delivery, was only permitted when all other attempts to
cope with the situation had failed.
It was the same with the tin rooms, and here a word of explanation is
required. When a prisoner-of-war in Germany drew his parcel from home he
might not, strictly speaking, merely walk off with it under his arm.
This practice was winked at in many easy camps, but at Holzminden it was
rigidly taboo. The regulations stipulated that every article should be
strictly censored before issue. It was not enough to shake a tin to
ascertain its non-contraband nature. It had to be opened by a German and
its contents taken delivery of in a plate or bowl. And if the contents
were solid, such as, for instance, a tinned ham, then that ham had to be
cut, bisected, quartered, or “Crippened” into just so many fragments as
would leave no room for doubt that a compass or a map or a file did not
remain concealed. A ham or tongue, of course, was thus ruined. The
German employees in the tin room loathed this desecration almost as much
as we did; it gave them additional work and seemed to them to be an act
of unreasoning vandalism. Poor devils! Some of them were honest,
although undoubtedly some stole. But it must have been refined torture
for them daily to sniff Elysium and lack its joy, daily to mutilate
_delicatessen_ such as they had not tasted for months and months, daily
to handle forbidden delights. But they had to do it, for they never knew
when the Commandant would not spring a surprise visit on them. I have
seen him take out a penknife on such occasions and hack practically into
mincemeat a tongue which had been left comparatively whole, full of zest
for the service of the Fatherland and threatening dire things to his
staff if ever such an object was let off so lightly again.
But even the destruction of our food would have been tolerable if we
could have got at it with reasonable ease; unfortunately the inadequacy
of the arrangements extended to the cellars where the tin rooms were
located. At the beginning of things there was one tin room for the
requirements of the whole camp. The tins were brought down from the
parcel room in wheelbarrows and piled on racks in the tin room; there
was no British supervision; there were no lockers or partitions, and the
German staff could not read or understand English. It was hardly to be
wondered at, therefore, that before a week was out the room was in
complete confusion, accentuated each day as the intake exceeded the
offtake.
To get your tins opened you had to take your turn in a queue. To be the
first man in this queue it was necessary, as a rule, to put in an
appearance about half-past seven in the morning. The last applicant was
usually served just before evening roll-call. All day the queue crawled.
It was a case of queue-crawling or missing a day, English tins or German
rations, and the inner man won. The head of the queue was at the tin
room door. The rest of it coiled along the damp passage which traversed
the cellar floor, it sat and read on the steps of the staircase that led
down to the passage, often it overflowed right into and out of the
doorway of the Kaserne. It was a mournful dispirited queue in those
days. The Germans took five or ten minutes to serve each man and it was
even odds that your tins wouldn’t be there. And if you were very unlucky
you might have an accident with your tray on the return journey, upset
your plates, and have to begin all over again.
So much for tins; but even so, the toil was not complete. Supposing that
you had emerged, weary but victorious, from the cellars, you had still
only the cold and raw material for your meal; the urgent corollary was
to get this cooked, and to do so it was necessary to fight for a place
on the stoves. Holzminden at that time boasted three cooking stoves with
surface space for thirty pots (including kettles) and a purely wood fuel
supply. It was hardly to be wondered at—so great was the demand, and so
slow the fire—that a great many did not get on the stoves more than once
in the day. It is true that new and better stoves were being built
opposite to B Kaserne, but they were not yet ready. For the moment it
was a case of opportunism, watchfulness, forcefulness if necessary, and
devil take the hindmost.
Sometimes the old German cook would take part of the overflow on to his
own capacious stoves in the German cook-house and so ease the
congestion. But he was in deadly terror all the time that he would be
seen helping us from the Kommandantur, and he expected a substantial
consideration (in kind) for the risk he took on our behalf. Such
consideration it was not in the power of some of us to bestow.
We from the sorting camps were feeling the pinch about now, and were
living, most of us, and apart from the German ration, on precarious
charity. At Karlsruhe we had blown ourselves out on tomatoes and bread:
at Heidelberg we had added relish to the bread, with an occasional pot
of honey from their well-stocked canteen. But in the canteen at
Holzminden there was nothing to eat beyond a very nauseous paste. Some
of us were lucky and fell in with a well-stocked mess; the rest of us
waited blankly for our relief parcels, eking out with a tin here and a
tin there, frying bread in dripping, lucky if we could see a meal ahead.
For the first time in our lives we knew hunger; not so fiercely as our
successors in 1918 were to know it, but more fiercely perhaps than the
veterans of 1914 and 1915, who, whatever their other tortures, had at
least come as prisoners into a country where food was to be had for the
purchasing.
Finally there was the question of fuel. It was October now, and the days
in Brunswick were no longer balmy. Each of our rooms—scheduled to hold
twelve—possessed a stove, but there was nothing to put in the stove. We
saw woods on the horizon to three sides of us. The regulations, we
understood, permitted us the daily ration of a German soldier in the
field. But no wood was forthcoming, except what was brought for the
consumption of our three cooking stoves. A dangerous minority
endeavoured, as usual, to destroy the comfort of the community by
stealing this cooking supply. The practice was sternly stopped. Then
recourse was had to the stools in the dining rooms. These blazed well
for a night or two, but were naturally not replaced, and we had all the
fewer stools to sit upon. Finally those who preferred a blaze to a
night’s rest sacrificed their bed boards. It was reckless jettison, but
excusable. The Camp Commandant had broken faith with us over the fuel
question if possible more flagrantly than over others, and the camp was
justly incensed. One day a representative of the Dutch Legation in
Berlin had been down to visit us. On the morning of his arrival the
Commandant, scenting the trouble which might be expected on this as on
other issues, had caused it to be proclaimed at morning _appel_ that
from that day fuel would be issued free (loud cheers!). We might have
known. We never got a faggot free. The representative carried out his
colourless inspection, and that evening we were as cold as before. The
end of this particular campaign was that ultimately, and under the
extreme pressure of the increasing cold, we paid for wood at the rate of
40 marks a cubic metre. The only people who got fuel free were those
under detention in the cells.
Every now and again a waggon-load of briquettes used to come in under
escort for discharge in the coal cellars of Kaserne B. On these
occasions we used to help unloading the waggon—but not into the coal
cellars. A crowd of officers with British warms and trench coats with
capacious pockets suddenly appeared from nowhere, swarmed round the
waggon and its disconcerted sentinel, and contrived to get a bit of
their own back.
For rank exploitation, however, the food supply was _facile princeps_.
We might forgive the Germans for the food they offered us; we could not
forgive them either for the way they served it or for the price they
made us pay for it.
In one of the cellars aforementioned our year’s potato supply was
stored. This came in in October. Three English orderlies were on
permanent fatigue in this cellar, peeling the daily potato ration for
the camp. When the peeling was complete the potatoes were thrown into
one of the two large coppers in the German cook-house (the other
contained hot water) and were boiled up in relentless conjunction with
the other ingredients billed for that particular day. It did not matter
what they were; everything went into the hotch-potch, and, so long as it
eventually boiled and was ladled out into big pails for despatch to the
dining rooms, all was well. On Sundays there was an occasional lump of
horse-flesh floating in the stew and some green vegetable which might
fairly be classified as “a not too French French bean”; on one Sunday,
as a variation, the skull of a cow complete except for skin and ears was
found floating in the pot. On other days plain _sauerkraut_, or its
equivalent nastiness. Occasionally there was some barley grain which,
with many of us, did duty as porridge for our next morning’s breakfast.
Such was our bill of fare for the mid-day meal. Our breakfast was
_ersatz_ coffee: our supper was an attenuated version of our lunch. And
for this we were mulcted monthly to the tune of 60 marks a head. No
doubt this charge would have been exceeded, if it had been possible; but
an agreement between the British and German Governments had fixed the
sum of 60 marks as the limit which a subaltern prisoner-of-war might
receive as pay whilst in captivity, and the Germans could not therefore
legally charge any more. As it was, there was nothing left on which a
subaltern might come and go for ordinary out-of-pocket expenses in the
canteen or in camp subscriptions; and to meet these requirements he had
to draw a cheque on his bankers which was discounted with a neutral
agent by the Germans at a ruinous rate of exchange for himself and with
a very comfortable margin of profit for everybody else concerned.
No one, of course, who could live on his own supply of tins thought of
looking at the German food. It was too impossibly served. Messes would
sometimes depute one of their members to make a dive into the soup tub
and rescue some of the better looking potatoes wherewith to supplement
the evening stew.
The poor quality of the diet was accepted as directly attributable to
the beleaguered state of Germany. We knew that the sentries and the
staff personnel were getting the same, and that probably the people in
the town were faring little better. What we did resent was that we were
not allowed to take over our ration in bulk and exercise control as to
the manner of its cooking, and also that we were not allowed a rebate
for what we did not require.
There was only one visible means of retaliation—scrupulously “drawing”
the whole of the weekly ration of Boche bread and as scrupulously
wasting it or burning it. That never failed to create a commotion, and
it was made, before very long, a punishable offence.
Almost weekly the messing question figured prominently on the agenda for
the senior officer’s conference with the Commandant. Weekly the same
privileges were demanded—control of the raw supply, supervision in the
kitchen, an equivalent return in money for what we did not require.
Weekly the Commandant returned evasive and unsatisfactory replies, and
shifted the onus of responsibility on to convenient and distant Hanover.
To the end we were not quite sure that he might not, in this one
instance, be really telling the truth. The messing system in the Hanover
command might really conceivably be directed from a centralised control;
but if so, how to reconcile our system with that at Clausthal in the
same command, where rebate was allowed as a matter of course?
Later on, damning evidence was collected to prove that we were not
getting more than two-thirds of our scheduled weight. As a sop we
received the unheard-of concession of getting our potatoes in their
jackets on two days in the week.
There is little doubt, in the retrospect, that our messing at Holzminden
probably afforded the easiest field for exploitation, so little interest
was taken, during most of the period, in the garbage which was offered
us, and so regular and secure was the payment, a credit from our own
unsuspecting Government debited automatically against us in our account
before we had even the opportunity to turn it into _Lager Geld_, as the
paper currency of the camp used to be called. It was hardly to be
wondered at that the Supply branch of the German army should have been
so venal; the opportunities for profiteering must have been unlimited.
Sometimes a Quartermaster-General used to come round on inspection and
sniff the mess in the coppers and admire the stoves. With him in close
attendance one probably saw the people who were really getting at us,
the _Verwaltung Leute_ (“Q” people) of the place. They were seedy,
suspicious-looking folk, thin enough in spite of their obvious battening
at our expense. The General himself was a fairly poor specimen of his
class. He drove up to the camp from the station even in the finest
weather in a closed carriage and behind one feeble nag. He was obviously
zealously misinformed about everything, and our quarrel lay not with
him, any more than we should have visited the sins of an over-astute
quartermaster on the shoulders of some old dug-out at Corps H.Q.
Later on, in 1918, we heard how things had been done at Rastatt in
Baden, where hundreds of British officers lay all day on their beds too
weak to move for weeks on end. There too, where the stuff that we
spurned would have been a banquet, the fault could be brought home to
the criminal maladministration, venality, and neglect of the ghouls on
the lower rungs of the _verwaltung_ staff. We have seen the diaries—
“Thursday half ration, complained but no explanation. Friday a General
came over to inspect. We were given a double ration for dinner. Saturday
half ration again”: and so on.
But in their case it was deliberate cruelty as well as exploitation.
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