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[Page 10]
without anaesthetic, a cheerful enough sight to make a Russian, who was waiting his turn to go under the knife, faint.
The majority of the Frenchmen were receiving their parcels from home, so that occasionally - when their larder was stocked- I used to come in for the unwanted german bread, soup, or whatever was going and while my scanty roll of marks lasted I was able to buy chocolate and the hard french army biscuit at an exorbitant price, paying two marks for a sixpenny slab of chocolate and twopence for a single biscuit the size of the halfpenny scone.
Christmas 1916 came and passed the ward was made to look very nice with a gorgeous Xmas tree with its many candles, but alas no presents. All I had to remember the day by was an extra basin of soup for my Xmas dinner - needless to say I've not forgotten it yet.
It was a noticeable feature that the majority of the casualities received in working for the "Fatherland" were due not to the prisoners carelessness, but more so (particularly in respect to those working in the coal mines "cokeries" and iron foundries) to the deterioration of the working plant through the skilled labour being away at the war. There have been quite a few cases where amputations have been necessary and many where men have died with internal strains, to say nothing of lung troubles.
Personally I had something to be thankful for, a certain Englishman had died while we were inmates of this hospital,
I succeeded in "bluffing" the orderly and obtained some of the clothes belonging to him, a shirt and a warm English overcoat, which when I left the hospital, was a Godsend to me.
I received my "walking ticket" from this Hospital in anything but healthy condition - clad in a pair of "Tommy" trousers or rather what was left of them for the previous owner had received an issue of "iron ration" in the vicinity of his seat, a pair of boots four sizes too big for me, (they had belonged to a "Tommy" whose feet had been amputated due to trench feet).(I might mention that my own trousers and boots had disappeared or rather been stolen while I was lying on my back in hospital) my mud and blood-stained tunic, a night shirt I had been wearing for a month previously, and the "heaven sent" overcoat beforementioned. In company with the other Englishman who was in the same state of convalescence as myself,! was escorted off to Dulmen, one of the main