The little steamer suddenly began to plunge and roll with the waves washing her decks when I groped my way, hanging to the rail, to the snug cabin where six men sat about the table.  The pallor of their faces made them appear wax-like in the yellow light of the smoking oil lamp which swung suspended overhead.  Three of them were British, two were Belgian, and one was French, but there was a common bond which drew them together in a comradeship which transcends all harriers of nationality, for they had escaped from a common enemy.

They welcomed me to the table.  It is surprising what a degree of intimacy can spring up between seven men, all with histories behind, and all with the same hope of getting to England.  They were only beginning to find themselves, they were indeed still groping to pick up the threads of reality of a world from which they had been snatched two years before.

The Englishman at my right, a corporal, had been taken prisoner with a bullet in his foot at the retreat from Mons. In the summer of 1916 he had been sent to a punishment work camp near Windau in Courland.  I had already heard unsavoury rumours of this camp while I was in Germany, of men forced to toil until they dropped in their tracks, of an Englishman shot simply because his guard was in bad temper.  But the most damning arraignment of Windau came from a young Saxon medical student, who told me that after he had qualified, for a commission as second lieutenant he declined to accept it.  This was such an unusual occurrence in a country where the army officer is a semi-deity that I was naturally curious to know why.

“I am loyal to the Fatherland,” the young Saxon said to me, “and I am not afraid to die.  I was filled with enthusiasm to receive a commission, but all that enthusiasm died when I saw the way Russian prisoners were treated in East Prussia and at Windau.  I saw them stripped to the waist under orders from the camp officers, tied to trees and lashed until the blood flowed.  When I saw one prisoner, weak from underfeeding, cut with switches until he died in the presence of a Berlin captain, my mind was made up.  My country has gone too far in making the army officer supreme.  I now could see the full significance of Zabern, a significance which I could not realise at the time.  During the first part of the war I became angry when outsiders called us barbarians; now I feel sad.  I do not blame them.  But it is our system that is at fault, and we must correct it.  Therefore, although I am an insignificant individual and do not count, I shall, as I love my country, obey the dictates of my conscience.  I will not be an officer in the German system.”

I thought of that sincere young student while the boat staggered under the onslaughts of heavy seas, and the corporal told of how twelve hours’ daily toil on the railway in Courland with rations entirely inadequate for such work, finally put him on the sick list, and he was sent back to Munster in western Germany.