A HAPPY RELEASE

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 142, 11 March 1919, Page 6

A HAPPY RELEASE

BRITISH RED CROSS TRAINS IN GERMANY PRISONERS RESCUED FROM MISERY ("Morning Post's" Special Correspon- ' dent,) Cologne, December 13. By a feat of organisation and diplomacy, which redounds to the credit of our Army Railway Department, we have sent our first trains into the heart of Prussia and 'brought them hack with nearly 2000 prisoners and wounded, many of whom were so desperately enfeebled and exhausted by suffering that survival could have bjjen only a question of hours; The day before these two .trains arrived, this particular camp, Meschede, east of Arnberg, sent 28 Frenchmen to their death, and the rate of burials had risen to as many ns 70 a day. The mortuary is described as having been "three thick" with dead, a terrible toll in armistice time, when these unfortunate victims had come to believe that their miseries were at an end. All the more honour, therefore, to the colonel and his staff of rai'ft/.y, esfJvts'wTio'-riave started these trains from Calais to travel across France, Belgium, and the zone of occupation into the inner wilds of Germany, and rescued many souls from a veritable hell of torment and privation. The main station .at Cologne is a triumph of-spaciousness and administration, of which the Boche was justly proud before the war, and we know from the amazing mobility of the German Arm? how their railway system has worked wonders since. The Rhine is in itself a serious barrier in war-time far railway systems to negotiate, and we have madeit effectual by allowing only one train a day, which links up the outer world with the International Commission sitting at Spa. It is only by a ceaseless vigil that our authorities have managed to control the railway traffic with the area outside our zone, and I have myself seen the way in which, after midnight, and until our officers intervened, Germans cajoled the railway staffs into selling them railway tickets for all parts..

Brutal Camp Commandant, It was in the midst of all the apparatus of a big railway station that the labours of our staff department Lave yielded fruit. There 6teanis in a long Red Cross train filled with some five or six hundred- _ patients. They cover, five nationalities in the following proportions :—British officers and men, 180 French, 160; Italian, 190 odd; Belgian, two; and Portuguese, one. All other nationalities, including Russians, Rumanians, and others, had been left behind, being regarded as outside our radius for the time being, and better qualified to wait till they were rescued by their own people in good time. The Camp Commandant, Captain Min6'ar, showed himself to be a callous brute as long as Germany was on top. He changed his tone, however, to one of lavish servility as soon as we arrived upon the scene. The officer commanding the first train, when he found it impossibla/to collect the worst cases, had to requisition neutral inmates toact as stretcher-bearers and help him in his work of mercy. Finding that the German doctors had left the cases badly bandaged, our representatives and nurses on the train forced a camp physician to do this, work again. This was nothing but an act of justice, but it is no wonder that the men with damaged and tormented limbs shrank from allowing enemy practitioners to handle thera again after learning by bitter experience what they were equal to. /

Prisoners' Surprise, \i took many days of patient organisation and dogged energy to obtain these trains, to fit them up, and to carry them - across three countries to their destination. All the pains that had been taken, however, to notify the camp authorities at Meschede to have things in readiness were in vain. There was nobody to meet the trains, nobody to indicate the way to the camp, nobody showing the slight-' est interest in these unfortunate men. The medical officers on board simply trampect across the fields. They found some of our soldiers in the'open air, huddled over a scanty, fire which they hnd built in order to cook some dish, of evil-looking meat. The doctor called out a friendly greeting, and he says that their faces were a study. One of them said afterwards that the* voices of the doctor and his friends, to ears that had grown unused to English speech, sounded like music. Even when the doctor had declared his mission they were reluctant to leave the filthy ration which they were trying to cook, until he told them that he had better 6tuff aboard in plenty. This seemed so encouraging to them that they cheered him wildly. Then ensued what one of the Red Cross nurses calls "a funeral procession" of men who were next door to death—cases of neglected wounds, dysentery, and soptio poisoning, and nearly all serious. The best of all beginnings for a cure lay, in tho simple announcement, that the men were free to return home by a train then waiting for them. Here their exultation was unbounded, and it lasted until I met the trains well on their journey west in the small hours of the morning. Tho first carried two nurses, one of whoni was . proud to say that she had been with the train ever sine* it entered. Mons a fortnight ago. A Significant Statement.

The men themselves spoke with mors fervour than usual of what they had suffered, and a non-commissioned officer showed mc a penknifo which three men had sought to borrow in order to cut their throats and so end their miseries. jThev also said that their food, like so I much else, had come from the British ! Bed Gross, without, whose help hardly I one of them could have survived.. Some had endured a three'years' captivity. At ! the dead of night the majority of tlm men were dazed for want of sleep, and tho prospect of returniiij? . home was enough to make most of them reticent, even if there had been time for the train to halt a littlo longer. Some, of them forced upon mo as a souvenir a solid loaf of sinister-looking concrete, which they called camp bread, and others begged me to sample it; but I got no further than a very moderate mouthful. There was a similar scene when the second train came in soon afterwards. It was loaded with 110 Omen, all in intolerable state of health, but complaining of brutal treatment.