The duties being so varied, operations often took us a little way from the camp.  The chance to get away even for a brief period from our depressing and monotonous surroundings was seized with avidity.  Unfortunately, we feared that this system of forced labour would culminate in our being assigned to the work of tending the crops.  But we made up our minds irrevocably to do no such thing no matter how we might be punished.  The Germans had failed to nourish us in an adequate manner, and we were certainly not going to enable them to secure a sufficiency of food at our expense.  Indeed, the one or two attempts which were made to impress us to toil on the land, proved highly disastrous because considerable damage was inflicted from our ignorance of agriculture and gardening.

Some of us were given the garden which belonged to the old General who had been in charge at Sennelager when we first arrived, to keep in condition.  This official was an enthusiastic amateur gardener and cherished a great love for flowers.  Seeing that during his regime we had received considerate treatment within limitations, we cherished no grudge against him.  Again, the fact that his garden was to be kept going led us to hope that the duration of Major Bach’s reign over us was merely temporary and that our former guardian would soon be returning.  We knew that in such an event our lot would be rendered far easier, so we nursed his little plot of ground with every care and displayed just as much interest in its welfare as if it had been our own.  But the old General never came back to Sennelager, at least not during my period of imprisonment there.

There was one party of British prisoners whom Major Bach singled out for especially harsh and brutal treatment.  The invincible High Seas Fleet upon one of its sporadic ventures into salt water during the very earliest days of the war, stumbled across a fleet of Grimsby trawlers unconcernedly pursuing their usual peaceful occupation.  The whole of the fishermen were made prisoners and were dispatched to Sennelager.

But Major Bach stedfastly refused to believe that they were simple fishermen pursuing their ordinary tasks.  To his narrow and distorted mind a man on a trawler was only toiling in the sea for one or both of two purposes.  The one was laying mines; the other was mine-sweeping.  Consequently he decided to mark these unfortunate hardened sea-salts in a distinguishing manner which was peculiarly his own, thereby rendering them conspicuous and possible of instant recognition, while in the event of an escape being attempted, no difficulty would be experienced in identifying and catching the runaways.  Each man was submitted to the indignity of having one half of his head shaved clean, one half of his moustache removed, or one half of his beard cut away.  The men branded in this manner presented a strange spectacle, and one which afforded Major Bach endless amusement.  In addition a flaming big “Z” was printed