The last day, that of February 22nd, rolled around finally. We were taken from our cells at nine o'clock and marched out for an unknown destination which we knew only as a stronger punishment camp than the others we had been in. Ahead of us we saw poor Brumley; but were unable to communicate with him, and I do not know whether he saw us or not. That was all we ever learned directly of his fate. His wife, in Toronto, has since informed me that he is still in Germany and has only lately been recaptured after another attempt at escape.
At eleven that night we arrived at our destination. This was the strong punishment camp of Parniewinkel, in Hanover, on the road over which Napoleon had marched to his doom at Moscow. We wondered if we, too, were going to ours.
We had had no food that day, nor did we get any that night, but were shoved into a hut full of Russians, who did not know what to make of us. We were so long of hair and beard, so ragged, so emaciated and so altogether filthy that they must have thought us anything but British soldiers.
Later we found that there were, in all, between four and five hundred Russian, eighty French and Belgian, and, including ourselves, eleven British prisoners, of whom Simmons and I were the only Canadians, all shoved into two huts in the middle of the usual barbed-wire laager.
As Giessen was the best camp, so this one was the worst of all those we were to know. It was not so wet as the swamp at Vehnmoor, but the drinking water was even worse than the brackish, peat-laden water there. The general sanitary arrangements were terrible and the food was worse than at Giessen, the camp in which that lack had been the worst feature among many bad ones. And on top of it all the treatment was very bad, much worse than any we had previously known.
A soup, made from a handful of pickled fish roe and a few potatoes, was a stock dish, and terrible to taste. On one night a week we received a raw herring fresh from the brine barrel, which we were supposed to eat raw and uncleaned, but could not. On one day in seven there was a weak cabbage soup and of course, a small daily ration of potato-and-rye bread. Fortunately, our parcels were beginning to arrive by this time, so that, in fact, we fared better than at any of the better camps, in the matter of food. With the Russians it was different, and we used to give our soup to them in exchange for their share of boiling water, which we used in conjunction with the contents of our parcels and which they had no use for anyway, especially for washing purposes.