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].

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.

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.