Three Times and Out: Told by Private Simmons, Written by Nellie L. McClungMcClung, Nellie L.
History
Three Times and Out: Told by Private Simmons, Written by Nellie L. McClung
McClung, Nellie L.
Prisoner-of-war escapes; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, Canadian; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
I tried to stand up, but the jolting of the car made me dizzy, and
so I doubled up on the floor, and I don't know how many people sat
on me. I remember one of the boys I knew, who was beside me on the
floor, Fairy Strachan. He had a bad wound in his chest, given him by
a dog of a German guard, who prodded him with a bayonet after he was
captured, for no reason at all. Fortunately the bayonet struck a rib,
and so the wound was not deep, but not having been dressed, it was
very painful.
I could not sleep at all that night, for the air was stifling, and
somebody's arm or foot or head was always bumping into me. I wonder
if Robinson Crusoe ever remembered to be thankful for fresh air and
room to stretch himself! We asked the guards for water, for we soon
grew very thirsty, and when we stopped at a station, one of the boys,
looking out, saw the guard coming with a pail of water, and cried
out, "Here's water--boys!" The thought of a drink put new life in us,
and we scrambled to our feet. It was water, all right, and plenty
of it, but it was boiling hot and we could not drink it; and we
could not tell from the look of opaque stupidity on the face of the
guard whether he did it intentionally or not. He may have been a
boiling-water-before-meals advocate. He looked balmy enough for
anything!
[Illustration: Officers' Quarters in a German Military Prison]
At some of the stations the civilians standing on the platform filled
our water-bottles for us, but it wasn't enough. We had only two
water-bottles in the whole car. However, at Cologne, a boy came
quickly to the car window at our call, and filled our water-bottles
from a tap, over and over again. He would run as fast as he could
from the tap to the window, and left a bottle filling at the tap
while he made the trip. In this way every man in the car got enough
to drink, and this blue-eyed, shock-headed lad will ever live in
grateful memory.
The following night after midnight we reached Giessen, and were
unloaded and marched through dark streets to the prison-camp, which
is on the outskirts of the city. We were put into a dimly lighted
hut, stale and foul-smelling, too, and when we put up the windows,
some of our own Sergeants objected on account of the cold, and shut
them down. Well, at least we had room if we hadn't air, and we
huddled together and slept, trying to forget what we used to believe
about the need of fresh air.
As soon as the morning came, I went outside and watched a dull red,
angry sky flushing toward sunrise. Red in the morning sky denotes
wind, it is said, but we didn't need signs that morning to proclaim a
windy day, for the wind already swept the courtyard, and whipped the
green branches of the handsome trees which marked the driveway. My
spirits rose at once when I filled my lungs with air and looked up at
the scudding clouds which were being dogged across the sky by the wind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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