From the News

Dated: August 19, 1916

WHATEVER miseries and hardships are still being endured by British prisoners in German camps, it is becoming more and more clear that they are comparatively nothing to those which some Canadian soldiers endured in the earlier months of the war. Among the batch of exchanged prisoners who arrived last week were the following Canadians:
Sgt. D'Arcy Latimer, 2nd Batt., from Giessen; Marcus Heagle, 2nd Batt., from Paderborn; Fred Higgins, 29th Batt., from Giessen ; Vernon Hughes, 29th Batt., from Sennelager, Paderborn ; John McKay, 29th Batt., from Giessen; Arthur Ward, 5th Batt., from Magdeburg; Alexander Clark, 10th Batt., from Sennelager, Paderborn ; Henry James, 13th Batt., from Sennelager, Paderborn.

One of them, who was permanently maimed in the battle around Ypres in April, 1915, in which the 13th and other Canadian battalions gained so much honour at so great a cost, said to the writer : "So hungry were we that we were glad to seek scraps from the swill tubs of our German guards. We had no money, and for smokes were thankful to hunt for the discarded stubs of their cigars and cigarettes." To obtain some cooling drinks and fruit for a dying English soldier in the next bed to him, this man, a resident of Verdun, near Montreal, bartered away his only treasure, a plain gold ring, the equivalent obtained being 5 marks. This was at the Paderborn Camp.

At Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) is the examination depot where prisoners from all the hospitals and internment camps spend some days in anguish of doubt as to whether they will be released. A Moose Jaw man, wounded at the same time, who was in the Minden Camp, got as far as Aachen last December, but had the misery of being sent back, and tells of other harrowing instances of the same kind, though in every case the men sent back were totally unfit for war work of any kind.

It is characteristic of the men that they are less eager to tell their own stories than to learn how their beloved battalions faring and to hear about their own officers and companions in their last fight. "Ah! there is a man to follow," said a Montrealer, alluding to Major Clark Kennedy. Captain Guy Drummond and Major Norsworthy, who were victims of the Hun gas attack on that April day, were others affectionately spoken of.

One of the men still bore traces of 15 wounds; another is perhaps permanently mentally affected.

Gratitude to the Canadian Red Cross.
It is only fair to say that from the time the Canadian Red Cross Society's Prisoners' Department (of which Mrs. Rivers Bulkeley is in charge) got to work the troubles of the prisoners were mitigated. The weekly parcels of food and comforts were not apparently tampered with, a fact which lends doubt to the current rumour of the German army going short of food. It would do every subscriber to the Canadian Red Cross Society good to hear what these men's opinions of its work are, while words fail them in expressing gratitude for what has been done for them since the hour they again passed into British care. But they say, "We would rather go back, maimed though we be, and fall in the trenches than endure another experience of imprisonment in Germany.”

One man had had the good fortune to be in a hospital in Belgium which, though under German control, was staffed by Belgians, and of their loving ministrations he cannot say enough. A doctor there has a sister who is married to the Belgian Consul in an Ontario city; another sister, whom he had lost sight of since the early horrible days of the war, has been located as serving as a nurse in one of our hospitals, as a result of the information which this recent tenant of the Belgian hospital was able to impart to one of his lady Red Cross visitors in the splendid London hospital where he now lies cheerful and contented, though sadly maimed.