It is difficult to describe the sensation.  I walked about with a wolfish startled glance, scanning the ground eagerly, as if expecting Mother Earth to relieve me of my torment.  The pain within my stomach was excruciating.  It was not so much a faint and empty feeling but as if a thousand devils were pulling at my “innards” in as many different ways, and then having stretched the organs to breaking point had suddenly released them to permit them to fly back again like pieces of elastic, to mix up in an inextricable tangle which the imps then proceeded to unravel with more force than method.  My head throbbed and buzzed, precipitating a strange dizziness which seemed determined to force me to my knees.  I chewed away viciously but although the movement of the jaws apparently gave a certain relief from illusion the reaction merely served to accentuate the agony down below.

As I reeled about like a drunken man, my eyes searching the ground diligently for anything in the eating line, no matter what it might be, I found a piece of bread.  As I clutched it in my hands I regarded it with a strange maniacal look of childish delight.  But it was a sorry prize.  It was saturated until it could not hold another drop of water, and I think there was quite as much mud as bread.  I wrung the water out with my hands and then between two of us we devoured it ravenously, swallowing the mud as contentedly as the bread, and not losing a single crumb.  It was a sparse mouthful, but it was something, and it certainly stayed the awful feeling in the stomach to a certain degree for a little while.

No man passed through that awful night without carrying traces of his experiences.  Its memories are burned ineradicably into one’s brain.  Whenever we mentioned the episode it was always whispered as “The Bloody Night of September 11th,” and as such it is known to this day.  As we became distributed among other camps the story became noised far and wide, until at last it became known throughout the length and breadth of Germany.  Whenever one who spent the night upon the field mentions the incident, he does so in hushed and awed tones.

That night was the culminating horror to a long string of systematic brutalities and barbarities which constituted a veritable reign of terror.  It even spurred a section of the German public to action.  An enquiry, the first and only one ever authorised by the Germans upon their own initiative, was held to investigate the treatment of prisoners of war at Sennelager.  The atrocities were such that no German, steeped though he is in brutality, could credit them.  The Commission certainly prosecuted its investigations very diligently, but it is to be feared that it gained little satisfaction.  The British prisoners resolutely agreed to relate their experiences to one quarter only—­the authorities at home.  The result is that very little is known among the British public concerning the treatment we experienced at Sennelager, for the