REMARKABLE STORIES

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10207, 18 February 1919, Page 8

REMARKABLE STORIES

BY RETURNED PRISONER

FOUR YEARS’ ADVENTURES IN

GERMANY

A story of some remarkable adventures in Germany was told to a “Weekly Dispatch” representative by Mr Dunstan Hall, who has just been repatriated, and who for some time after tho outbreak of war acted as courier for “Tho Times” in Franco and Belgium until he was captured by tho Germans. Mr Hall must have been in more German prisons than any other Englishman in the hands of the Huns, and he was an eye-witness of atrocities committed by the Germans on the British Tommies in the prison camps.

“I was captured on October 13th, 1914,” he said, “and removed to Ghent, where my camera and some pictures I had taken were seized. J was sent in an open lorry to Brussels in the charge of five Uhlans and paraded in the streets as an ‘Englander.’ At my trial I was defended by M. Gaston De Level, the Belgian lawyer, who defended Nurse Cavell. I was sent on to Germany. On the way we stopped at Louvain, and there, when my nationalitiMjms revealed, a German soldier some hot soup over me.

"My first camp was at Gustrov, where there were 10,000 prisoners oi mixed nationalities. It was there I saw a. British soldier bayoneted. Ho was going to a latrine, and did not understand something shouted to him in German by a guard, who at once ran his bayonet through him. The poor fellow died in a few hours. The guard was not punished. All that happened was that an officer came and lectured us and said, ‘You see what happens if you do not obey orders. You must not tread on the corns of the Eandsturm.’ “I saw some of our Tommies who were stood on bricks with their hacks lashed to stakes, the bricks being kicked away from under their feet. They were left there till they lost conscious.ness or died. BURIED TAKE DOGS.

“The inspector of the camp used to thrash the prisoners with a hide whip. Not the slightest respect was shown for the British dead. A Welsh corporal read the burial service, but otherwise they were buried like dogs. “When representatives of Sir Gerard, the American Ambassador, came to the camp to investigate the charges of bayoneting the prisoners, no evidence could bo produced because all the cases were removed from the camp early the same day. “Towards the end of 1914 I managed to get the news through to friends in England about the murder and starvation in this camp by writing inside split postcards, which 1 pasted together again , and Signed ‘D. Splitthis.’

‘Thom Gustrov I was sent to the civilian caiuj) at Hlasscnburg, whor© X personally was treated very well. From there I went to Ruhloben, and after a stay of fifteen days was shifted, owing to my weak health, to the notorious Dr Weiler’s sanatorium, from which I succeeded in paying a visit to Berlin practically every night. 1 made friends with a German flying officer, and was introduced to a certain cafe where I was in no danger of interference, the police having been heavily bribed. There I was spoken to by German women, and, being only able to speak a few words of German, described myself on different occasions as Swedish, Dutch, and Danish, until my many nationalities got known and I was frank enough to confess I was an Englander from Ruhleben. This admission seemed to cause very little surprise, and I was not molested.

“However, one day the German flying officer was detained under suspicion, and, unfortunately, my name and address was in his pocket-book. He had planned my escape through - a captain in a ship in the Baltic, but now this scheme fell through, and he was degraded to the ranks, and later I heard of his death. X was taken to the Berlin prison, where I met German Socialists like Dr Marion. I was treated fairly well, but the treatment of the Russian prisoners there was shocking, and we heard them being whipped. HIDDEN IN AN HOTEL.

“On one occasion I escaped from the sanatorium, and went to Berlin and then to Hamburg. But at that time the transports wore going to Riga, and it was "impossible to get a ship, so I gave myself up. I was sent back to Kuhlobeu to do fourteen days in a dark cell on bread and water. Then I was sent, with fifty others, to a ‘straf’ lager at Havolberg. After two weeks there, I, a Russian, and a naturalised Englishman, escaped by cutting our way through a potato shed and, two wire fences with one knife. After that wo parted, and I got to Berlin alone, and managed to live in an hotel there in hiding for more than a month by bribing the under-manager, who was a Russian. I was ill practically all that time, and, being too weak to make an attempt to reach the frontier, walked back to Ruhleben last New Year’s Eve, and gave myself up. “After lying in the sick barracks there X was again sent to Havelberg and sentenced to sis months’ imprisonment. Agaiast this sentence I appealed in vain. I was lodged in a stinking coll, allowed but ten minutes’ exercise and compelled to make a quart of drawing pins a day. Most of the people in this prison had been convict-' cd of stealing prisoners’ parcels. “My case was specially mentioned at Tho Hague Conference, and my sentence reduced to 31 mouths. I was sent back to Ruhleben to wait for my passage to England. Then tho revolution came, and I jumped the fence and walked to Berlin unmolested. I found a rabble of villainous-looking soldiers in charge of tho city, with motor-cars and red flags. At night I was challenged. When I told them who I was they would say, ‘Englander—good kamerad,’ Subsequently wo wore packed into a filthy train and sent home via the Baltic.”