Three Times and Out | Page 9

social position, but their faces were very pale and sad, and when they
spoke their voices were reedy and broken, and their eyes were black
pools of misery. Some of the boys afterwards told me that their
daughters had been carried off by the Germans, and their husbands shot
before their eyes.
I noticed the absence of children and young girls on the streets. There
were only old men and women, it seemed, and the faces of these were
sad beyond expression. There were no outbursts of grief; they seemed
like people whose eyes were cried dry, but whose spirits were still
unbroken.
Later in the day we were taken to the station, to take the train for the
prison-camp at Giessen. Of course, they did not tell us where we were
going. They did not squander information on us or satisfy our curiosity,
if they could help it.
The station was full of people when we got there, and there seemed to
be a great deal of eating done at the stations. This was more noticeable
still in German stations, as I saw afterwards.
Our mode of travelling was by the regular prisoner train which had
lately--quite lately--been occupied by horses. It had two small, dirty
windows, and the floor was bare of everything but dirt. We were
dumped into it--not like sardines, for they fit comfortably together, but
more like cordwood that is thrown together without being piled. If we
had not had arms or legs or heads, there would have been just room for

our bodies, but as it was, everybody was in everybody's way, and as
many of us were wounded, and all of us were tired and hungry, we
were not very amiable with each other.
I tried to stand up, but the jolting of the car made me dizzy, and so I
doubled up on the floor, and I don't know how many people sat on me.
I remember one of the boys I knew, who was beside me on the floor,
Fairy Strachan. He had a bad wound in his chest, given him by a dog of
a German guard, who prodded him with a bayonet after he was
captured, for no reason at all. Fortunately the bayonet struck a rib, and
so the wound was not deep, but not having been dressed, it was very
painful.
I could not sleep at all that night, for the air was stifling, and
somebody's arm or foot or head was always bumping into me. I wonder
if Robinson Crusoe ever remembered to be thankful for fresh air and
room to stretch himself! We asked the guards for water, for we soon
grew very thirsty, and when we stopped at a station, one of the boys,
looking out, saw the guard coming with a pail of water, and cried out,
"Here's water--boys!" The thought of a drink put new life in us, and we
scrambled to our feet. It was water, all right, and plenty of it, but it was
boiling hot and we could not drink it; and we could not tell from the
look of opaque stupidity on the face of the guard whether he did it
intentionally or not. He may have been a boiling-water-before-meals
advocate. He looked balmy enough for anything!
[Illustration: Officers' Quarters in a German Military Prison]
At some of the stations the civilians standing on the platform filled our
water-bottles for us, but it wasn't enough. We had only two
water-bottles in the whole car. However, at Cologne, a boy came
quickly to the car window at our call, and filled our water-bottles from
a tap, over and over again. He would run as fast as he could from the
tap to the window, and left a bottle filling at the tap while he made the
trip. In this way every man in the car got enough to drink, and this
blue-eyed, shock-headed lad will ever live in grateful memory.
The following night after midnight we reached Giessen, and were

unloaded and marched through dark streets to the prison-camp, which
is on the outskirts of the city. We were put into a dimly lighted hut,
stale and foul-smelling, too, and when we put up the windows, some of
our own Sergeants objected on account of the cold, and shut them
down. Well, at least we had room if we hadn't air, and we huddled
together and slept, trying to forget what we used to believe about the
need of fresh air.
As soon as the morning came, I went outside and watched a dull red,
angry sky flushing toward sunrise. Red in the morning sky denotes
wind, it is said, but we didn't need signs that morning to proclaim a
windy day, for the wind already swept the courtyard, and whipped