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[Page 8]
After a week in the Citadel, at Cambrai, converted into a hospital, I was moved off into Germany in a hospital train.
My travelling companions consisted of three other Englishmen and four Russian prisoners who had been sent from Germany to work-removing the forests in the captured part of Prance,
Two of the Russians were suffering from venereal disease, one had been worked to a shadow and was consumptive, the other had received a wound in the head in one of the allied air raids. The consumptive died in the first night of our fifty hour train journey into Germany - he passed out in the early hours of the morning untendered, the car orderly was asleep and a Russian's life - as I was afterwards to learn - was of no importance to the German Government. Our comfort was the same as the German wounded, though the food was anything but tasty or sufficient, the attendant wasn't at all bad-hearted for I managed to bribe him to shave me at a cost of five francs (my first shave for five weeks), also I was able to buy some condensed milk for a price equivalent to 2/- per tin.
The interior of the hospital car was much the same as the English red cross cars- but the attention and the food, as might be expected, was anything but decent.
I was lying in a top stretcher and was able to enjoy the quaint Belgium scenery- the ruins around Mons - and, but for the numerous german sentries with black and white sentry boxes with the german eagle very conspicuous - one would never have known that the rest of Europe were at one anothers throats.
Arriving at Aachen (the border town of Germany, touching on Belgium and Holland) we were visited by lady workers of the German Red Cross who walked through our carriage, carrying biscuits and cigarettes, which, as we found, were not for wounded prisoners. Continuing on our Journey through Rhineland (which I was afterwards to tour on foot) we crossed the Rhine at Dusseldorf, entered into Westphalia (the great industrial centre of Germany) up through Duisburg, through Essen (where all the industries seemed to be going in full swing) then on to Dortmund where we disentrained and were taken through the city in open motor cars to the local "Krankenhaus"
From what I learnt afterwards- all the big German cities possess a Catholic hospital subsidised in peace time by the German Government, controlled in most cases by Monks