CHAPTER III
Beggars
A prisoner of war camp had many characteristics in common with other communities of human beings. It had its social classes, its great and its humble citizens, its rich and its poor. In arriving in camp I was fortunate enough to meet a friend, a Frenchman, with three years service in captivity and an ample stock of provisions. He “adopted” me. The fate of my eight hundred comrades, however, was pitiful. Finding practically nothing in the Help Committee’s stores and being as yet without help from England, they were forced to subsist on the German ration which was scarcely enough to keep a man on his feet. The usual results of hunger set in, and I saw these poor fellows sink into shabby, hungry, begging wanderers about the camp.
My friend M—— was one of the most important men in the camp. He was intimate with all the bureau clerks, Unteroffiziere, interpreters, “good” sentries, and other persons worth knowing. He lived with three French sous-officers in a comfortably furnished or “fixed up” Kleines Zimmer. They had everything that friends could send them in parcels, and wanted for nothing but liberty and—happiness.
I had just finished a good breakfast of bacon and toast and cocoa, prepared by the Italian “batman” and was standing before the windows enjoying a cigar with M——. The door was bolted against beggars who knocked incessantly from early morning till late at night.
I heard a shuffling outside and a timid tapping on the door; a pause and another tap; a longer pause, and then a shuffling away.
“Un italien,” observed M——, still gazing out the window. Another visitor walked up, thumped once on the door, and walked away again, almost without pausing.
“Un anglais. You can always tell.”
“Rotten cigars,” he continued, dismissing the subject of the poor fellows who had gone away from the door, “but you’ll have a chance to try a real one when Louis comes in. He has a box of Perfectos stuck away somewhere. What? Still worrying about our unadmitted visitors?”
I was. I was wondering if that last chap was one of my battalion. How could M—— take it so coolly?
“If you stay long in the camps,” he went on sagely, “you’ll learn that you can’t afford to weep everytime you see a hungry man. We wept for ourselves in 1914, and afterwards we wept a lot for other chaps, but when one’s been in the midst of suffering men for three years, one learns to keep from thinking about it—or else one would go mad. We give them what we can spare and then try to think of something else.”