GERMAN PRISONERS

Evening Star, Issue 16625, 7 January 1918, Page 4

GERMAN PRISONERS

TYPES OE RECENT CAPTURES.

One machine-gunner of the 2Coth Infantry Regiment had lain five days in the crater where ho was captured (writes a correspondent on the western front in describing the types of prisoners captured during the Passchendaele Ridge battle. He was a thin, pale youth of 21, still a little bewildered by his arrival in the British lines. He said that his battalion had had orders to hold its machine-gun posts at all costs, andthe effort resulted in tho forward companies being nearly exterminated. None of them expected that Germany would win the war, and it was common talk that peace of some land would be arrived at by the end" of the year. The Bavarians make the usual allegations of unfair treatment. Thoy give the impression that the ill-feeling betweon Prussian and Bavarian troops is much more acute, and «here appears to be good foundation for thi3 belief. Some of these Bavarian troops, who had arrived only a few days before from another part of the front after a long period of rest, and who wore immediately thrown into the front line, declared that they were being sacrificed. A battalion commander was told that he would be shot if ho came into the front line. During the march from their billets the men kept straggling, and the officers who rounded them up and ordered the column to keep formation were jeered at without any attempt being made to punish the offenders.

As regards the condition of the prisoners the average physique is good. Many weedy, unfit-looking youths were in the little procession of captives. Some regiments had recently been issued ;i fresh kit, and the men wore new clothes, and even had new cooking apparatus, some of which -were still sealed as they were received from the depot. A new'leather gas mask, folded compactly in a cylindrical metal tin slung across the shoulder, was. worn by nearly all the prisoners, and hundreds of them could be picked up on the battlefield. The cumbersomo shrapnel helmets were in some instances neatly covered with khaki, another idea copied from us. Many of the officers, particularly the Guards, were quite smart, trim, and gloved. Their uniforms were clean and well-kept—some had been in billets until the day before the battle, and had not time to becomo stained and muddy beforo falling into our hands.