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Updated: May 9, 2025
Report made on September 24, 1915, in the morning, by the captain commanding the Third Company of the 135th Regiment of Reserves: "The French are firing on us with great bombs and machine guns. We must have reenforcements at once. Many men are no longer fit for anything. It is not that they are wounded, but they are Landsturmers. Moreover the wastage is greater than the losses announced.
The French could move it on to some other part of the line now where no offensive was expected and some old territorials could use it as the old Landsturmers had used it. Scattered among the Colonial Corps, whether on the march or in billets, were the black men. There is no prejudice against the "chocolates," as they are called, who provide variation and amusement, not to mention color.
The elderly Landsturmers guarding the bridge gathered us in and took us over to their guardroom at the hotel. We judged the incident to be an epoch in the monotony of their soldierly duties. They were very good to us. Two of them moved away from the fire to make room for our wet misery and they gave us a pot of boiling water, two bivouac cocoa tablets and a loaf of black bread.
As, most of the time, the Germans only pay for what they requisition in "bons de guerre" payable after the war, and as, in spite of their sound appetite, we can scarcely believe that the few thousand "landsturmers" who are garrisoning Belgium are eating two million pounds worth a month, the illegal character of the German measure seems evident.
The guarding of the prisoners is effected by plenty of barbed wire and a comparatively small number of oldish Landsturmers. A special cruelty of the Germans towards prisoners is the provision of a lying newspaper in French for the Frenchmen, called the Gazette des Ardennes.
In the large theatre, which would hold, I should think, seven hundred to a thousand people, there was a good acrobatic act and the performing dog, to which I have referred, with an orchestra of twenty-five instruments, almost all prisoners, but a couple of German Landsturmers helped out.
"I think it's going badly for the Germans not by what they tell me here or what I gets in that awful Continental Times paper, but from what I notice in the people round about, and the officers who visit us. The people are not so abusive to the English as they used to be. The superior officers do not treat us like dogs, as they did, and as for the Landsturmers well, look at old Heinrich here."
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