I was on the square only about three weeks before being sent off on detachment duty to Lancaster to a newly-formed internment camp for enemy aliens. The camp was a disused wagon-works near the river, a dirty, draughty place, littered with old scrap-metal and guarded with high barbed-wire fences. There were about three thousand prisoners already there and more and more piled in every day; seamen arrested on German vessels in Liverpool harbour, waiters from big hotels in the north, an odd German band or two, harmless German commercial travellers and shopkeepers. The prisoners were resentful at being interned, particularly those who were married and had families and had lived peaceably in England for years. The only comfort that we could give was that they were safer inside than out; anti-German feeling was running high, shops with German names were continually being raided and even German women were made to feel that they were personally responsible for the Belgian atrocities. Besides, we said, if they were in Germany they would be forced into the army. At this time we made a boast of our voluntary system. We did not know that there would come a time when these internees would be bitterly envied by forcibly-enlisted Englishmen because they were safe until the war ended. In the summer of 1915 _The Times_ reprinted in the daily column, _Through German Eyes_, a German newspaper account by Herr Wolff, an exchanged prisoner, of his experiences at Lancaster in 1914. _The Times_ found very amusing Herr Wolff’s allegations that he and forty other waiters from the Midland Hotel, Manchester, had been arrested and taken, handcuffed _and fettered_, in special railway carriages to Lancaster under the escort of fifty Manchester policemen armed with carbines. But it was true, because I was the officer who took them over from the chief inspector. He was a fine figure in frogged uniform and gave me a splendid salute. I signed him a receipt for his prisoners and he gave me another salute. He had done his job well and was proud of it. The only mishap was the accidental breaking of two carriage windows by the slung carbines. Wolff also said that even children were interned in the camp. This was true. There were a dozen or so little boys from the German bands who had been interned because it seemed more humane to keep them with their friends than to send them to a workhouse. Their safety in the camp caused the commandant great concern.