[Illustration: THE OLD TOWER, BEESKOW LAGER]
Hot coffee--_Ersatz_--made from acorns, was served at eight o’clock next morning; at nine, to the sound of hammer-blows struck upon the old, red-rusted coulter of a plough swung from a wooden frame, we mustered in the court for roll-call. There were three officers--the Commandant, an elderly gentleman, with an obviously explosive temper, and a decidedly unmilitary stoop; the _Oberleutnant_, portly and complacent-looking; and the Lieutenant, a young man, and the only one of the trio to have seen service in this war. He was here, indeed, because he had been very badly wounded. The orders of the camp were read by the interpreter, who would doubtless have looked rather _distingué_ in evening dress, but whom a private soldier’s uniform rendered stiff and gauche.
He was sufficiently gracious to give me some details as to the history of our new domicile, the _altes Amt_, and the squat old _Turm_. The place was erected in 1252 by Barons or Knights, in whose hands it remained for a couple of centuries. These Barons becoming financially indebted to the Bishops of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and Lebus, the buildings ultimately passed into their possession, and were used as an ecclesiastical residence. About the beginning of last century they reverted to the Crown, and finally to the Corporation of Beeskow. It was looked upon as a punishment camp, and we were the first British prisoners to be held there.
We had a _Kantine_, run by a civilian named Herr Solomon, who, however, because of his dilatoriness, and an easy deferring until to-morrow of what should have been ordered to-day, was always known as “Morgen, Morgen!” The _Kantine_, which was open daily from 11 to 1, and 5 to 7 evening, contained a selection of commodities ranging from a lager beer--which was very essentially a _Lager_ beer--to a solitary example of a variation of Sandow’s chest-expander, for which no purchaser was ever forthcoming. Something to expand a still lower compartment of our anatomy was what we were in continual search of.
[Illustration: HERR SOLOMON, THE KANTINE KEEPER.]
The catering here, however, which was also in Herr “Morgen, Morgen’s” hands, marked a great advance on the Carlsruhe kitchen. The finer hand of femininity was quite apparent in the cooking, a number of women from the country being employed, and we usually were served with a soup which we could eat without loss of self-respect. Being in the centre of an agricultural district, we had a good supply of potatoes and certain vegetables, and when we were able to supplement these with a slice of bully, we did not do too badly.