After waiting in the bureau for some time we were told we were bound for Fort 9, but could elicit no information as to what sort of place it was. We were told that we should have to sleep the night at the men's camp, as the fort was about 7 kilometres out of the town, and it was either too late or inconvenient to send us out that night.
Ingolstadt is a town of some 30,000 or 40,000 inhabitants and is built on both banks of the Danube. The prisoners-of-war camp consists of half a dozen or more old forts, some of which lie on the north and some on the south bank. Fort 9 has the date 1870 above the gateway and as the others are on an almost identical plan, I expect they are much the same date. Besides these forts, which form a ring around Ingolstadt with a radius of about 7 kilometres, there is a camp for men on the outskirts of the town itself. As far as I know, all the forts except one, which is a _strafe_ camp for N.C.O.'s who have attempted to escape, are used for officer prisoners-of-war. Fort 9, as we soon learnt, is the fort where the black sheep go. On our way to the men's camp we passed several working parties, mostly of French soldiers. As far as I could see, they showed no signs of ill-treatment, though I thought some of the Russians looked rather hungry and ill-kept. All we could see of the men's camp was a palisade with several strands of barbed wire on top. An extremely dirty, unsoldierly Bavarian sentry was sloping about outside, apparently having a beat of 200 or 300 yards long. He was merely typical of all Bavarian sentries. They are all, with rare exceptions, filthy and slovenly, and an incredibly large proportion have most unpleasant faces. Before I went to Bavaria as a prisoner, I had always looked on the South German as a kindly man--"gemütlich" is the word they like to use about themselves--but it did not take long to completely change these ideas. I had no longer any difficulty in believing that the Bavarians are justly accused of a very large share in the Belgian atrocities.
While I am on the subject I might mention here Kicq's story of how the sack of Louvain was started. The account is supported by what Major Whitton says in his book _The Marne Campaign_, and makes some excuses for the Germans, though it by no means frees them from blame. The Germans entered and occupied Louvain with little or no opposition, and pushed a fairly strong advance guard through the town in the direction of Antwerp. This advance guard was heavily attacked by a portion of the Belgian army, was defeated, and fled in panic and complete disorder back towards Louvain. The Germans in Louvain took these fugitives for a Belgian attack and fired on them, and they fired back. Very soon there was a general mix-up on a large scale. The defeated advance guard was being fired into by the Belgians on one side and by their own comrades on the other. The civilians in the town also thought that Louvain was being attacked and was about to be retaken by the Belgians. They were determined to do their bit, so they added to the general confusion by firing off all the guns they had left, and, if they had none, throwing furniture, hot water, and anything else handy on the heads of the Germans in the streets. A certain number of Germans were killed and injured in this way, and the German soldiers, furious not only at this but, when they found out their mistake, at having massacred their own comrades, got completely out of control and sacked and burnt the greater part of the town. Kicq, at the time when this happened, was in a hospital at Antwerp, so that his is only a second-hand account, but I think that most intelligent Belgian officers believe this to be a fairly true explanation.