We have digressed somewhat: but those first few days at Holzminden were days of digressions, of alarums and excursions, of administration too chaotic even for a serious strafe. The best organisation in the world will not get 500 more or less passive resisters satisfactorily transplanted from one place to another without considerable difficulty, and the German arrangements at Holzminden were ludicrously insufficient for their task. The buildings were there, and that was about all. The crockery had not arrived; there were three large boilers in the German cook-house to cater for the bodily wants of 500 English officers and 100 Germans; there were two or three wretched cooking-stoves for our private use; there were about half a dozen British orderlies—the rest, we were told, were on their way; the bathroom had not even been begun; the parcel room was not yet open, nor was the canteen; the German staff were incomplete, new to the ropes, and totally inefficient. The Commandant was a kindly old dodderer of about seventy who left everything in the hands of the Camp Officer; and the Camp Officer, as we were to know before very long and as a good many knew quite well already, was the most plausible villain and the biggest liar in Germany. Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer will figure perforce largely in these pages. Let him be introduced to the reader as he introduced himself to us on our arrival in the camp. It was one of his stock ‘turns.’ Twenty-five of us had arrived at midnight from Heidelberg, dead tired and hungry, and had been greeted in fluent Yank beneath the flaring electric lamp at the door of the Kommandantur by someone whom at first sight and sound we took to be rather a genial and sympathetic person. He told us that he was glad to see us, that he was always glad to see any Englishman, that he had been great friends with the English himself before the war, and that he hoped to be so again. But that in the meanwhile war was war. That we had better, y’know, write straight away to our friends for our thickest clothes, y’know. It was very cold here in winter, y’know—(he did not then add that there was also very little fuel and that wood was going to cost us 18 marks a pailful). He concluded his speech of welcome on a note of old-world hospitality which made us think of bedroom candles and a comforting ‘night-cap’:— “So now, yentlemen, I expect you will be glad to go to your bedrooms. I will wish you good-night. You will be searched in the morning.” We crawled upstairs full of hope and were sorted out into three of the upper rooms reserved for newcomers. There was nothing to eat and no night lingerie to slip into; and we were locked in because we had not been searched.