Prisoner-of-war escapes; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
We were given breakfast. It consisted of a bowl of so-called coffee
and a loaf of black bread. The bread was to last us two days. Then we
were marched to our palatial residence, Stable No. 5. We set to work to
remove the plentiful reminders of the former four-legged inhabitants
and installed ourselves as best we might.
The stables contained twenty-four box-stalls and two tiny rooms for
stable personnel on the ground floor, and two large hay-lofts above.
Six men to a box-stall was the rule, and as many as could be packed
into the lofts. I had experience in both quarters, for I slept in the
loft for more than a week, and then moved into “Box No. 6,” where a
space on the floor had become empty. My new quarters were, at first,
much less attractive than the loft. They offered, however greater
possibilities for improvement.
For six weeks we slept on a stone floor covered by an inch or so of
wet straw. We had just room enough to lie side by side. We could turn
over, if we did so together. The “loftites” slept on boards with
straw on top of them. Later we all got ticks into which we could pack
the wet and fouling straw. To start with, there was no heating. Then
steam-radiators were installed, and during this winter and the three
following, the stone barracks were heated in a fitful kind of way. The
locomobile boilers which furnished the steam, one for each three or
four barracks, delivered it into the radiators from 10 A.M. to 12 noon
and from 3 to 5 P.M.
At last the “boxites” received bedsteads. They consisted of a simple
iron framework with three-quarter-inch boards as mattresses. On
these we placed our ticks. The bed uprights had male and female ends
which permitted the building of as many superimposed bunks as seemed
practicable. Two sleeping-structures of three bunks each was the rule
in the boxes.
The food we received from the Germans was insufficient at any time. The
allowance per man for rations was sixty-five pfennigs per day--sixteen
cents at the pre-war rate of exchange. It was contracted for at this
price by a caterer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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