The Carlisle independent., 1918-12-12

OHe IHOFHlHS 1 thought TOT Sure |
 was going cafard. I was just fed up
 on the whole business and sick of do- ing nothing but suffer. So I strolled
 along, sticking my head into barracks
 doors, sometimes trying to have talk
 other times trying to pick fight. It
 was all one to me: just wanted some | thing to do. l found what I wanted
 all right
 I had quite a talk with sentry in front of a barracks. It must have lasted three-Quarters of an hour. He i did not know what I was calling him. and l did not know what he was call 1 ing me. I could have handled him all right, but another sentry came up on I my blind side and grabbed me and the | talk was over.
 1 They dragged me to the commander of the camp and he instructed them to | give ne bath. So they took me to the bathhouse, where I was stripped and lashed. All the time they were l whipping me I was thinking what a | joke it was on me, because I had been | looking for excitement and had got more than I wanted, so laughed and the Huns thought was crazy sure. was dumped into vat of hot water and at the same time my clothes were 1 given q boiling, which was good for them
 Then I was forced into my wet clothes and marched back to the bar racks. This bath and the stroll through the snow in wet clothes just about did for me. Nowadays. when sit in a draft for second and catch cold, wonder that I am still alive to catch it. Having gone through Dix nude and the Dardanelles and the sinking of the Georgic and four Ger man prison camps and q few other 1 things-I shall probably trip over a
 hole in a church carpet and break my
 neck. That would be my luck There were all the diseases you can 1 think of in this camp, including | ok cholera and typhus and somebody was
 always dying. We had to make coffins 1 from any wood we could find. So it l was not long before we were using the
 dividing boards from our hunks, pieces
 of flooring and, in fact. the walls of the barracks The officers were quar- tered in corrugated iron barracks so they had to borrow wood from us for their coffins. We would make the box and put the body in it, give it as much service as we could, in the way of prayers and hymns, and put it away in a hole near the barracks. There was so much of it that single death passed unnoticed
 One morning the German Sentries came to our barracks-they never came singly-and told us that an off Ger was going to review the prisoners and ordered us to muster up, which we did. l was the last man out of the bar racks and on account of my wounds I was slower than the rest.
 You understand had had no medical treatment except crepe-paper ban i dages and water, my wounds had been opened by swimming from the Georgic to the Moewe and they had been put in terrible shape in the coal bunkers On account of the poor food and lack
 of treatment they had not even started to heal. Incidentally, the only cloth bandages that any of us had were what
 we would tear from our clothes and l have seen men pick up an old dirty rag that someone else had had around his wound for a long time and bandage his own wounds with it.
 So it was all I could do to drag my
 self along. The officer noticed that ] was out of line and immediately asked ! my name and nationality. When he ] heard American" he could not say 1 enough things about us and called me i all the swine names he could think of. l was pretty thin at this time and 1 getting thinner, so I figured I might 1 just as well have it out before l starved. Besides, I thought, he ought | to know that we are not used to being
 bawled out by German swine in this country.
 So told him so. And I said that he | should not bawl Americans out, be- 1 cause America was neutral. He then
 said that as America supplied food and i munitions to the allies she was no bet | ter than the rest.
 Then I said: Do you remember the
 Deutschland? When she entered Bal l timore and New London she got all the
 cargo she wanted, didn't she?''
 "Yes."
 Well, if you send over your mer-
 chant marine they will get the same"
 For that answer he gave me ten days
 in the guardhouse. He did not like to
 be reminded that their merchant ma
 rine had to dive under to keep away
 from the Limeys.
 I admit l was pretty flip to this of-
 ficer, but who would not be when a 1 slick German swine officer bawled him l out?
 Ii was while I WAS in the guardhouse
 that Mir. Gerard, the American ambas-
 sador, visited the camp. He came to
 this camp about every six months. as . rule. Even in the German prison