GERMAN PRISONERS

Evening Star, Issue 16629, 11 January 1918, Page 3

GERMAN PRISONERS

TYPES OF RECENT CAPTURES. BAVARIAN TROOPS’ ILL-FEELING. One machine-gunner of the 200 th Infantry Regiment had lain five davs in the crater where he 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 littlo 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, and the effort resulted in the forward companies being nearly exterminefted. None of them expected that Germany would win the war, and it ivas common talk that peace of some kind would be arrived at by the end of the vear. The Bavarians make the usual 'allegations of unfair treatment. They give the impression that the ill-feeling between Prussian and Bavarian troops ,is much more acute, and there appears to he good foundation for this 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 were immediately thrown into the front line, declared that they were being sacrificed. A battalion commander was told that ho would be shot if he 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 a fresh kit, and the men wore new clothes, and even had new cooking apparatus, some of which wore 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 b\* nearly all the prisoners, and hundreds of them could be picked up on the battlefield. The cumbersome shrapnel helmets - were in some instances neatly covered with khaki, another idea copied from ua. Many of .the officers, particularly from the Guards, were quite smart, trim and gloved. Their uniforms were clean and well kept—some hid been in billets until the day before the battle, and had not time to become /stained and muddy before falling into odP hands.