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Updated: June 3, 2025
But the Germans, too, have been smashed for a while, and therefore, while they rest, let us work and prepare other shelters. But wait! Yes, I have a message from the Commander. The Sergeant who was wounded has made a report. Tell me, then, where are those two men, Henri and Jules, who came from Ruhleben to bear their part in this fighting?"
Doubtless it was the successful prosecution of these tactics which persuaded the Embassy to believe that the majority of our complaints were imaginary and arose from the circumstance that the inhabitants of Ruhleben would persist in ignoring the fact that they were the victims of war and not pampered pets.
These wretched civilians, until they were removed to Ruhleben, were not in much better case; but they might, at least, sleep together on indescribable straw palliasses. Then they were together; there was comfort in that at least.
But my pupils proved apt and industrious, and by the time I left they had mastered our tongue very effectively, as the many letters they sent me, before leaving Ruhleben, striving to thank me for what I had done, testify. Camp life was not without its humour. Around the boiler-house stretched a large wooden hoarding which served as a notice-board.
"Just fancy sitting down to a five- or six-course meal, as a fellow was accustomed to do in the days before this war commenced. A five-course meal, Jules! Fancy what we'd have said to such a thing in Ruhleben, where the meals were hardly recognizable."
At one time an American woman instructor in Roberts' College was arrested at Warnemuende and kept for weeks from communicating with the Ambassador. When he heard of it he went to the Foreign Office daily, demanding her release, which he finally secured. Mr. Gerard's work in bettering conditions in prison camps, especially at Ruhleben, will be long remembered.
We were consigned "British Prisoners of War for internment at Ruhleben!" Home was now farther from me than ever! It was 4.30 in the morning of November 12 when the blare of the bugle echoed through the long, dreary passages of Klingelputz Prison. To the British prisoners in fact to all the aliens that crash was of fearful import.
Prisoners in Ruhleben received bread from outside, as I have explained in the chapter on prisoners of war. This bread is white, something unknown in Germany since the war. The escaped prisoner took with him some sandwiches made of the bread he had received in Ruhleben and most incautiously ate one of these sandwiches in a railway station.
And there they were, interned in Ruhleben, impounded, corralled if you like, separated from their countrymen by ghastly fences of barbed wire, and by a nation composed of men and women who, almost without exception, would, if they were to discover them outside their prison, most eagerly tear them to pieces. "But it's got to be done!"
But the means which somewhat combated the onslaughts of the draughts also shut out the heat, so that, in our case, and it was typical of others, we really did not benefit one iota from the "complete heating system" with which, so the German press asserted, Ruhleben Camp was lavishly equipped. Christmas Day, 1914, was an unholy nightmare.
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