JOYFUL PRISONERS

Taihape Daily Times, 11 March 1919, Page 5

JOYFUL PRISONERS

RELEASE FROM PRUSSIA

FIRST TRAIN I OADS ARtiIVE

' By a feat Xj'i oiganijatioa and diplomacy, which ralw Js to the credit tf our Army Railway Department we have sent our firs: trains into the l\<-art of PruoS'.i and brought them b-.ck with n-i-irV -Oo'J prisoners a«<' wounded many of whom were so desperately enfeebled and exhausted by suffering that survival could have only a question of hours, wrote the special correspondent of the London Morning Post, under date December 13. 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 as 70 a day. Ths mortuary is described as Having been "three thick'' with dead, a terrible toll in armistice time, when these unfortunate victims had come i to believe that their miseries were at an end. All the more honour, therei fore, to the colonel and his staff of railway experts who have ■ 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.

There steams in a long Red Cross train filled with some five or six hundred patients. They coveF five nationalities in the following proportions: British officers and men 180; French, 160; Italians, 190 odd; Belgian, two; and Portuguese, one. All other nationalities, including Russians, Roumanians 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 Mingcr, 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 cominranding 'he first! train, when he found it impossible to collect the worst cases, had to requisition neutral inmates to act as the stretcher bearers and help him in his work of mercy. Finding that the German doctors had left the cases badly damaged, 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 them again after learning by bitter experience what they were equal to. The medical officers simply tramped across the fields. They found some or our soldiers in the open air, huddled over a scanty fire which they had 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 tlje 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 they were trying to cook, until he told them that he had better stuff aboard in plenty. This seemed so encouraging to them that they cheered him wildly. The men themselves spoke with more fervour than usual of what they had suffered, and a non-commissioned officer showed me a penknife which three men had sought to borrow in orcler to cut their throats and so end their miseries. They also said that their food, like so much else, had come from the British Red Cross, without whose help hardly one of them could have survived. Some of them forced upon me 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.