Page:Diary of a Prisoner in World War I by Josef Šrámek.pdf/61

 Italian Captivity

It seems to me that I am in a different world. When I stepped out of the boat yesterday, I felt like leaving wilderness. Everything just seemed to be other, nicer&mdash;the Italian soldiers are kind. We do not understand a single word of theirs but there is one thing we understand very soon: "Mangiare". I threw rags off my boots that I tied onto them to hide them from the spying Serb eyes. In the evening, we reached an Italian army camp and got rice soup from cans with meat and biscuits. Oh how I enjoyed those few spoons of hot, salty and greasy soup! I hadn't eaten salty soup in more than 20 days! We slept on a hill. It was freezing at night so we set out at 5 in the morning not to freeze. We were not allowed to light fires. We are going to Valona. We can see the beautiful Valona bay as early as noon.

The port is beautiful, there are about 7 large steamers. Some 4,000 prisoners are crowded at the port, they push forward, step on one another and fall to the sea. The Italians have fun throwing pieces of biscuits among them and watching the prisoners fight just as dogs fight for bones. Finally, at 10 p. m. I managed to get to a motor boat that took us to a large cargo steamer - "Armenia" from Marseille. It's a cattle ship, there are troughs in it. I sleep in the hold.