The journey to our camp in Germany will be remembered by most of my comrades only as a hungry nightmare, interrupted at long intervals by bowls of unsatisfying German soup. Those of us who had enough biscuits to keep from suffering found it an interesting opportunity to see the Germans behind their lines and the life of the French under German rule.
The latter were splendid to us. In every town or village through which we passed, they turned out in crowds to do us honor. Girls smiled sympathetically and old women cried. Cheering was, of course,verboten.
In one small village an old French gentleman came out into the street and raised his tall silk hat to us. Instinctively the boys in the front of our column responded with a salute, and their example was followed by each section of fours in its turn, as they marched past. Three or four German officers came up, cursing and shaking their fists to drive the old man away, but he remained defiantly bare-headed and motionless until the last of his country’s allies had filed past.
The French would gladly have relieved our hunger, too, from their own slim stores, had it been possible. As it was they smuggled food to us at every opportunity. The front files often found loaves of bread and sandwiches on the sidewalks, placed there hurriedly by the French women on seeing us coming. Bits of food as well as warm caps and sometimes jackets were thrown down to us from the second story windows. French girls ran out of their houses to bring us food and drink, in laughing defiance of cursingLandsturmers—and dashed away again.
It was everywhere evident that, for all our unwashed faces and muddy and ragged uniforms we were, after all, their friends, and those other flashy soldiers who swaggered about their streets and into their shops and homes, were their eternal enemies.
One of the pictures from that journey which remains clearest in my memory is that of the second night of captivity, standing before the Cathedral of Le Quesnoy. The edifice loomed beautiful before us in the mellow moonlight and reflected a feeling of peace and reverence in us warriors fresh from the trenches. Three women, dressed in black, came out of the door just as the front of our column marched into the yard. They stopped, horror-struck, when they saw us there. Would they quarter us in the Cathedral? One of them hurried away to find the curé. The other two approached the officer in charge of us and protested in French. Barking out words of brutal German and pushing the ladies aside, the officer walked on toward the door.
The first lady had now returned with the reverend father. Very calmly he attempted to prevent this desecration, but the only result was to exhaust the patience of the vandal officer. Finally he seized thecuré by the shoulders and pushed him down the steps. Then, turning to the prisoners:
“Marsch!” he rasped.
The curé bowed his head and walked away, followed by the three weeping ladies and the hordes of prisoners and guards crowded slowly into the Cathedral.
