As at the hospital so at the cook-house at meal times.  We were never given our rations until all the others had been satisfied.  The consequence was that we generally went short of food.  The first to be treated received liberal quantities of the cabbage soup.  What was left had to be eked out amongst us.

“The damned English swine can wait!” This was the dictum of those in authority and the underlings were only too eager to fulfil it to the letter.  If there were the slightest opportunity to deprive us of our food, on the flimsy pretext that we had not answered the summons with sufficient alacrity, it was eagerly grasped.  Under these conditions we had to go supperless to bed, unless we could procure something at the canteen or our more fortunate comrades came to our assistance by sharing with us the comestibles they had purchased.

Some ten days after the appearance of Major Bach a new target for his savagery and venom appeared.  This was a party of Belgian priests.  I shall never forget their entrance to the camp.  We were performing necessary daily duties outside our barracks when our attention was drawn to an approaching party surrounded by an abnormally imposing force of soldiers.  Such a military display was decidedly unusual and we naturally concluded that a prisoner of extreme significance, and possibly rank, had been secured and was to be interned at Sennelager.

When the procession drew nearer and we saw that the prisoners were priests our curiosity gave way to feelings of intense disgust.  They were twenty-two in number and were garbed just as they had been torn from prayer by the ruthless soldiers.  Some were venerable men bordering on seventy.  Subsequently I discovered that the youngest among them was fifty-four years of age, but the average was between sixty and seventy.

The reverend fathers with clasped hands moved precisely as if they were conducting some religious ceremonial among their flocks in their beloved churches.  But the pace was too funereal for the advocates of the goose-step.  They hustled the priests into quicker movement, not in the rough manner usually practised with us, but by clubbing the unfortunate religionists across the shoulders with the stocks of their rifles, lowering their bayonets to them and giving vent to blood-freezing curses, fierce oaths, coarse jeers, and rewarding the desperate endeavours of the priests to fulfil the desires of their captors with mocking laughter and ribaldry.

The brutal manner in which they were driven into the camp as if they were sheep going to the slaughter, made our blood boil.  More than one of us clenched our fists and made a half-movement forward as if to interfere.  But we could do nothing and so had to control our furious indignation.