“Now then, old sport!  Don’t get so down in the mouth about it!”

The prisoner would venture some snappy retort.

“All right, Cocky!  Crikey, you’d look mighty fine stuck up against a wall with half a dozen bloomin’ Prussian rifles looking at yer.  Blime if I don’t believe you’d dodge the bullets by caving-in at the knees!”

A fierce look would be the response to such torment.

“Gawd’s trewth!  My fretful bumble-bee, I’d write to old Tight-Whiskers about it if I was you.  Get ‘im to come an’ bail yer out!”

At first we wondered who the personality so irreverently described as “Tight-Whiskers” was, but subsequently we were enlightened.  He was referring to Von Tirpitz, “Th’ bloke wot looks arter th’ Germin Navy!”

When the Cockney, who appeared to be downright proud of his ability to keep his “pecker up,” found banter to be unproductive, he would assume a tone of extreme sympathetic feeling, but this was so obviously unreal as to be more productive of laughter than his outspoken sallies.

Once a week there was a sight from which, after my first experience, I was always glad to escape.  On this day the prisoners were taken into the exercise yard to meet their wives and children.  On these occasions when supplies of food were brought in, some very heart-rending scenes were witnessed, the little toddlers clinging to their fathers’ coat-tails and childishly urging them to come home, while the women’s eyes were wet and red.

The sanitary arrangements in Klingelputz were on a level with those of other prisons.  Two commodes, with ill-fitting lids, sufficed for ten men, and in the underground apartment to which we were condemned, and of which the ventilation was very indifferent, the conditions became nauseating.  To make matters worse the vile prison food precipitated an epidemic of acute diarrhoea and sickness, so that the atmosphere within the limited space became so unbearable as to provoke the facetious Cockney to declare that “’e could cut it with a knife,” while he expressed his resolve “to ask th’ gaoler for a nail to drive into it” to serve as a peg for his clothes!  But it was no laughing matter, and we all grew apprehensive of being stricken down with some fearful malady brought on simply and purely by the primitive sanitary arrangements.  Only once a day were the utensils subjected to a perfunctory cleansing, a job which was carried out by the criminals incarcerated in the prison.

These criminals would do anything for us.  The first night they tapped at the door to our cellar, and, peeping through the cracks, we saw a number of these degraded specimens of German humanity in their night attire.  They had heard who we were and begged for a cigarette.  We passed two or three through the key-hole.  The moment a cigarette got through there was a fearful din in the fight for its possession, culminating in a terrific crashing.  The gaoler had appeared upon the scene!  Quietness reigned for a few minutes, when they would stealthily return and whisper all sorts of yarns concerning the reasons for their imprisonment in order to wheedle further cigarettes from us.