This she aired, and asked us several silly questions. She was much taken with S----'s height, comparing him to some Karl or other. It was a kind of private show of the wild beasts at the Zoo in which we acted the parts of the animals. On arrival at Crefeld station a hostile crowd was ready to receive us, and we were hurried as quickly as possible into the trains waiting there, in order to get us away from the attentions of the populace. As it was, two of the eleven officers in my party were hit with sticks, the wielders of which had pushed their way through the escort of German soldiers accompanying us. We were not sorry to reach the barracks and get away from these demonstrations of the unpopularity of England in this town. Crefeld, a great centre of the silk industry, had suffered heavily by the entry of England into the war. Once inside the camp we had time to spare for anything we wished to do, which naturally meant food first, sleep next, and after some time a wash and shave. The barracks of the Crefeld Hussars, now wired in and used as a prison camp, are large and strongly built. The prisoners occupied three large buildings and a fourth smaller one provided mess rooms and canteen, etc. There was a gravel parade square in the middle of the ground between the buildings; this we used as a place for exercise. This square was a hundred and forty yards long by about eighty yards wide. It made an excellent association football ground when cleared of big stones, and in the summer, by dint of hard labour, we turned it into a number of tennis courts. Until he got command of Belgium, Von Bissing--the brute responsible for the death of Nurse Cavell--was the general in charge of the particular army command which included Crefeld in its jurisdiction. On the walls of the prison camp an order signed by Bissing was posted, which informed all the prisoners that they were the inferiors of all Germans, whatever rank they might hold. The order also warned us against trying to "evade our fate by escaping." It continued, "The guards are earnest men, knowing their duty." This caused the nickname "earnest men" to be given to them. I wish Bissing could have known how we laughed at his special order. The Boche has no sense of humour or he could never have put a thing like that on the walls for Englishmen to laugh at and ridicule generally. For the first year or so, only seven officers were allotted to the smaller rooms and fourteen to the larger ones. But these numbers were eventually increased, first to eight and sixteen respectively, and then to nine and eighteen. At first we had a cupboard each, but later four had to do duty for seven officers. The beds were iron with wooden planks supporting a hard mattress, sometimes filled with straw or wood shavings, which was changed on one or two occasions.