“We mean to thrash these Prussian Pups,We’ll bag their ships, we’ll smash old Krupps,We loathe them all, the dirty swine,We’ll drown the whole lot in the Rhine.”
“We mean to thrash these Prussian Pups,We’ll bag their ships, we’ll smash old Krupps,We loathe them all, the dirty swine,We’ll drown the whole lot in the Rhine.”
“We mean to thrash these Prussian Pups,We’ll bag their ships, we’ll smash old Krupps,We loathe them all, the dirty swine,We’ll drown the whole lot in the Rhine.”
They have found their expression in the deep and sincere emotion of such poems as “Not Dead,” by Robert Graves, J. C.Squire’s “The Bulldog,” Robert Nichols’s “Fulfilment,” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “In the Pink.”
And working from this basis, it is surely more just to judge Germany less by the cheap vehemence of Lissauer than by those quiet poems that, hidden away among pages of opprobrium and rhetoric, enshrine far more truthfully those emotions that have lingered in the heart of the suffering individual from the very beginning of time.
There is a poem on a captured trench that opens with a brief word-picture of the scene, the squalor, the battered parapet, the dead men. “Over this trench,” the poet continues—
“Over this trench will soon be shed a mother’s tears.Pain is pain always,And courage is true wheresoever it may be found.And in the hearts of our enemy were both these things....That we must not forget;Germany must love even with the sword that kills.”
“Over this trench will soon be shed a mother’s tears.Pain is pain always,And courage is true wheresoever it may be found.And in the hearts of our enemy were both these things....That we must not forget;Germany must love even with the sword that kills.”
“Over this trench will soon be shed a mother’s tears.Pain is pain always,And courage is true wheresoever it may be found.And in the hearts of our enemy were both these things....That we must not forget;Germany must love even with the sword that kills.”
That sentiment is universal, it contains the complete tragedy of conquest.
And indeed for the individual soldier war is the same under whatever standard he may fight. German militarism may have been the aggressive factor, but the individual did not know it. Unless a people feels its cause to be just, it will not enter into the lists. If it is the aggressor, then that people must be hoodwinked. The victory lust of 1914 was a collective emotion springing from the German temperament and from their belief that they were in the right. The individual soldier went to battle with feelings not too far removed from our own.
“The war was a crusade to us then,” a German professor said to me; “we felt that France and Russia had been steadily preparing war for years. We felt that they were only awaiting an opportunity. The Russians mobilised long before we did. They drove us to it.”
It was in that spirit, he told me, that the German volunteer armed himself in August 1914.
“But of course,” he said, “it didn’t last long. The glamour went soon enough. Andnow, well, all we want is that the war should cease.”
And in the spring of 1918 the individual outlook in many ways resembled that of France and England. There was the same talk of profiteers, of the men who dreaded the cessation of hostilities, of the ministers who were clinging to office. There was the old talk of those who had not suffered in the war. It was all very well for the rich, they could buy butter, they did not have to starve. They managed to find soft jobs behind the lines. They did not want the war to stop. Indeed, the resentment against the “shirkers” and “profiteers” was more acute than the hatred of the Allies. For after all, emotions like love and hate are not collective. One can only hate the thing one knows.
And from conversations with this German professor emerged the spiritual odyssey of his nation. The change from enthusiasm came apparently very quickly; probably because the Alliance suffered so heavily inloss of life, and because its internal troubles were so great. The war weariness had not taken long to settle; for many months peace had seemed the only desirable end, and victory in the field was regarded as important only in as far as it appeared the safest road to this goal. Victoryquavictory they no longer desired.
This the Imperialists and pan-Germans must have realised, and they had made it their business to persuade their people that without victory peace was impossible. A significant illustration of this is afforded by the change of catchword, as displayed on public notices. Below some of the early photographs of the Crown Prince was printed “Durch Kampf zum Sieg”—“Through battle to victory,” and this represented the early attitude; but by the time that we had arrived in Germany this had been changed. On many of the match-boxes was a picture of a soldier and a munition worker shaking hands, and beneath was written, “Durch Arbeit zum Sieg: Durch Sieg zum Frieden.”
This was what the Imperialists had to keep before the people if they wished to retain their office and their ambitions. The people were no longer prepared to sacrifice themselves for some abstract conception of glory and honour. They wanted peace, and as long as their armies were able to conquer in the field they were prepared to believe that that was the way to peace. But if their hopes proved unfounded, they were in a state of readiness to seek what they wanted by other means.
It was no longer “zum Sieg” but “durch Sieg”; and in view of what has since happened, I think, this is an important thing to grasp.
Towardsthe middle of June parcels began to arrive, and the camp became a very whispering gallery of rumours. It started with a wire from the Red Cross at Copenhagen stating that a consignment of relief parcels had been dispatched. From that moment, there was no incident of the day that was not somehow construed into a veiled reference to Danish bread.
Lieut. Jones would meet Lieut. Brown on the way to the library.
“Any news this morning, Brown?”
“Nothing official.”
“Then what’s the latest rumour?”
“Well, I shouldn’t put too much trust in it, old man,” Brown would answer guardedly,“but I saw Colonel Croft talking to one of the Unter-officers this morning.”
“Did you hear what they were saying?”
“No,” said Lieut. Brown. “You see, I can’t speak German, but by the way they were gesticulating and all that, I feel pretty certain it was about these parcels.”
And within two hours it was common knowledge throughout the camp that the Unter-officer of Block II had told Colonel Croft that there were two hundred parcels within the camp.
As the days passed, and no consignment arrived, conjecture exceeded every bound of possibility. It was asserted on the one hand that the parcels had been commandeered on the way by the German army, and on another that the parcels had actually arrived and were in the camp, but that the Commandant had refused to issue them till he had received instructions from Berlin. During these days there was no epithet with which the word Boche went uncoupled.
At last, however, the parcels did arrive; alarge cart was perceived entering the gate laden with cardboard boxes, and a roseate mist enveloped the outlook of theGefangener. The lean years were at an end, prosperity was in sight, and the flesh-pots of Egypt already steamed within the imagination. “Bread’s in the citadel, all’s well with the world.”
But one thing had been overlooked. A composition of milk and flour is not improved by the delays of a protracted journey through the metallic heats of a German summer. The bread was unbelievably mouldy.
Well, we tried to imagine that we enjoyed it, and it was certainly something to eat; we doctored it and applied every remedy that the ingenuity of the R.A.M.C. could devise; but there are limits beyond which redemption cannot pass. There are stains which only dissolution can annul, and the freshness of white bread once lost is as irrecoverable as virginity. Green it was, and green it remained. The taste of mould was there and baking would not remove it.
Perhaps there was some comfort in the assurances of the doctor that, after it had been soaked and heated, it could do no active harm: but it could not change the nature of the object. Sadly it was agreed that bread was a washout.
However, it served a moral if not a physical purpose. It was the prophet of the sunrise, the false dawn that was the inevitable herald of a readjusted life. If bread could come from Copenhagen, it followed that the grocery parcels from London were not so immeasurably remote.
For weeks they had appeared on the horizon far withdrawn, invested with Utopian glamour. Orderlies who had been captured since Mons had told us what tins each parcel of the cycle would contain. The list of delicacies had been devoured by eager eyes, but their existence had always savoured of the impossible. They were the dreams of some incurable romantic; there could not really be such things, at least not in Germany. But now they actually began to approachwithin mortal gaze; after all, the Citadel Mainz was not so utterly separated from the rational world. The authorities in England had apparently realised that some six hundred officers were beleaguered there upon those ultimate islands. An agreeable reflection; and, once more, conversation centred wholly upon food.
And a more barren topic could hardly be discovered. Perhaps some romance might be woven round the intricacies of a Trimalchio’s banquet, and a distinguished novelist made one of his characters woo triumphantly his beloved with a dazzling succession of Frenchpâtisseries; but bully beef and pork and beans are too solid a matter for anything but a moral discourse. They have no lyric fervour, their very sound is redolent of platitudes, and from the beginning of the day up to the very end to hear nothing but panegyrics on their composition,—it was indeed a trial.
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It was not till the end of June that parcels began to arrive at fixed and regular intervals, and those were days of great excitement. Each morning at 8.30 a.m. the names went up on the notice board, and immediately a cry ran round the barracks, “List up.” Pandemonium broke loose. The laziestGefangenerleapt from his bed, pulled on a pair of trousers, dived into the safety of a trench coat, and rushed for the board. In that space were waged Homeric contests. Some hundred brawny soldiers were all struggling towards a small board, on which fluttered the almost illegible carbon copies of the sacred list. There was much craning of necks, and driving of elbows, much cursing and much apologising. The weak were driven to the wall; and even when a forward surge had borne the eager aspirant to the portals of his inquiry, there remained for him the ardours of retreat. Through a solid square of humanity he had to drive his harassed frame.
These were moments of high excitement and of an equivalent depression. Those to whom the rush for the board had seemed too hazardous an exploit waited impatiently within the room for the tidings of some enterprising herald. Anxiously they would lean out of the window looking for a returning comrade.
“By Jove,” some one would say, “look, here’s Evans coming.”
“Has he signalled anything?”
“No, but he’s coming awful slow. There can’t be anything for him.”
And sadly Evans would re-enter the room from which he had set forth with such gay hopes.
“One for you, Turner; and you’ve clicked, Smith, two for you; and Piggett, you’ve got one. Nothing for the rest.”
“Nothing?” echoed the rest.
“No,” Evans would grunt, and for him, as for the other unfortunates, the remainder of the day had lost all savour and romance.
For the lucky, however, the excitementof the morning had only just begun, and a mere name on the parcel list served but as a preliminary excitant. The real zest of dissipation was still in store. Behind the barred doors of the “Ausgabe” lay all the innumerable varieties of an assignation. There might be cigarettes, clothing perhaps, a cycle parcel from Thurloe Place, or, and this was in parenthesis, a mouldy loaf from Copenhagen.
First of all, there was the queue, the inevitable prelude to every form of punishment and amusement; and in this queue conjecture ran wild on the probable percentage of bread parcels in the camp.
“Well, I was standing by the gate yesterday,” one fellow was saying, “and I saw a load of parcels come in, and damn me if every one wasn’t a Thurloe Place.”
“Ah,” but the pessimist would break in, “that was the second load, you saw. I watched all three come in, and believe me, in the first and last loads there was nothing but bread.”
This, however, no one would believe, andthe imparter of this rumour was told to secrete his information elsewhere.
Slowly the queue moved forward, and at last the claimant passed through the sacred portals that were watched over by guardian angels in the form of whiskered sentries with zigzagged bayonets; within the sacred place there were even more seraphim. Behind a long table stood four slovenly civilians, whose duty it was to open the parcels, and see that no sabres or revolvers were concealed beneath the apparent innocence of a tin of Maconochie’s beef dripping. At a far corner of the table was the high priest, the master of the ceremonies. He sat there “coldly sublime, intolerably just,” with a large book in which he entered every name.
Action proceeded on lines of Teutonic formality. The claimant for a parcel would first of all present himself before the high priest, and murmur the number of his parcel.
“Twenty-one.”
This the high priest would translate into German with a commendable rapidity.
“Ein und zwanzig.”
He would shout this over his shoulder to one of the many satellites whose work it was to produce the required parcel. The next few seconds would be anxious ones for the hungryGefangener. He would watch the sentry move about among a store of boxes, moving one, displacing another. He would lift a parcel so small that it could assuredly contain nothing but boot polish, and a shiver would pass through the leanly expectant. But at last, after many vacillations and counter-marches, he would emerge triumphantly with a cardboard box bearing the large Red Cross of the Central London Committee.
But even then there was more to be done. Each parcel had to be carefully opened and its contents examined. No tins nor paper could be taken away. Packets of tea and cocoa had to be stripped of their covering and emptied into baskets, while the tinned foods were spirited away to the block cellar, where later in the day theywere opened in the presence of a number of sentinels.
The reason for all this palaver we never quite managed to fathom. It was surely enough that the British Red Cross had pledged its word not to include for exportation tracts for the times, pulpit propaganda, or prismatic compasses. With delightful duplicity the German authorities laid the blame of this on to our Allies.
“You see,” they said, “we’re very sorry, but the French get so many things in their tins; poison for our herbs, and knives and files. We must take precautions. Of course many parcels are quite all right, but the French, you see....”
And to our Allies the Germans told the same tale.
“You see,” they said, “your parcels are all right, but the English hide corkscrews in their bully beef. We must take precautions....”
And so another link was added to the immense chain of queues.
At this time, too, letters and books beganto arrive, and over these officialdom wound all the intricacies that it could muster. Letters had to be fumigated first, each page had to be carefully censored, and stamped with a large messy blue circle usually deposited over the least legible portion of the correspondence. And every novel had to be read from beginning to end.
Numerous were the regulations. Any reference to Germany was taboo, the mere mention of the word Hun or Boche was the signal for confiscation. Of my first consignment of books, two were suppressed. One of them being rather a prolix novel to the tune of khaki kisses, was not much loss; but the other, Ford Madox Hueffer’s volume of poems, I made valiant efforts to save. One evening I caught the censor unprepared, and pointed out to him that the author was a man of complete literary integrity, and that nothing he could write could be looked upon as dangerous.
“Ah, but,” the censor expostulated, “it is all full of Huns and Boche.”
“Ah, well,” I said, “can’t you tear those pages out?”
“But then there would be no pages left,” and against this assertion argument was impossible. “And you see,” he went on, “we are not Huns.”
“No?” I said.
“No, the Huns were beaten at Chalons inA.D.453. You have no right to call us Huns. That is your Northcliffe Press your hate campaign; we are men the same as you.”
And it was quite useless to point out that the average soldier applies the nickname “Hun” or “Boche” or “Jerry” in very much the same way as we call the Scotch “Jocks” and the Frenchmen “Froggies.”
The censor would not see it. “You think we are all barbarians,” he maintained. “It is your hate campaign, and we are not Huns; the Huns were beaten in 453 at Chalons by the Romans.”
East of the Rhine there is not much sense of humour.
And indeed, considering the way in which the Kaiser has compared himself to Attila, our warders were peculiarly sensitive on this point. And they always approached it with that strange Teuton seriousness that is for ever hanging over the crags of the ridiculous.
At Karlsruhe, on the preceding Christmas, a certain officer, who had spent most of the afternoon beside a bottle, in the middle of a camp concert arrogated to himself the right to play a leading part. And leaping on the stage, he had for the space of half an hour regaled the audience with an exhilarating exhibition that contained many good-humoured but forceful references to his “sweet friend the enemy.” Unfortunately a German censor was present, and the next morning the officer was testily buttonholed by the sleuthhound.
“Captain Arnold,” said the censor, “I do not wish to make any trouble between you and us, but you said last night many things that were most offensive.”
Captain Arnold, whose memories of thepreceding evening were shrouded in a mist of cocktails, endeavoured to be jocular.
“Oh, no, surely not? Not offensive; come now, not offensive.”
“Oh, yes, indeed they were; most offensive, Captain Arnold. You called us Huns.”
The gallant officer realised that he had been indiscreet, and saw that only one way lay open to him.
“Hun,” he said. “But why not, that’s what you call yourselves, isn’t it?”
The censor looked astonished, and aggrieved.
“But surely, Captain Arnold, you know what is a Hun?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“Very good. I will show you.”
The next day the censor appeared bearing a history of Germany in three volumes.
“Now, Captain Arnold,” he said, “you will find here all there is to know. It is quite simple; no doubt you will be able to borrow a German dictionary, so that you can look up the words. You will find all about it.”
For three days Captain Arnold kept the books, and then returned them with many thanks and a promise not to repeat his insults.
“I thought you would understand,” said the German censor. “It is only ignorance on your part that makes you call us Huns; and now you will tell your comrades, and they will understand too.”
And the little man trotted off, happy in the thought that his race had emerged from the examination triumphantly vindicated.
A greatdeal has been said and written on the subject of the treatment of British prisoners of war, and the general idea at the present moment is one of a succession of unparalleled brutalities and insults. That much inhumanity has been shown it is neither possible nor desirable to deny, and it is only just that those responsible should have to give an account of their actions. But it must be borne in mind that though all the instances brought forward are perfectly true and authentic, propaganda aims not at thevraie vérité, but at the establishment of an argument; and the individual instances, which have formed the foundations of this conception of inhumanity, do not present a complete picture of captivity, and should not be taken as typical of every prison camp.
Of course one can only write about what one knows. Baden-Hessen is one of the more moderate provinces; and the treatment of officers is infinitely better than that of the men. But, speaking from my own experience, I can say with perfect sincerity that, from the moment when I was captured to the moment of release, I was not subjected to a single insult or a single act of brutality. I was treated with as much courtesy as I should have expected from a battalion orderly-room, and the discomforts and inconveniences of the journey were due in the main to faulty organisation. It sounds bad when one hears that a batch of prisoners were sent on a four days’ journey with rations for one day, but the corollary that the accompanying German sentries were provided with exactly the same amount of food casts a very different aspect on the case.
The starvation of prisoners has become almost an axiom, and indeed they were miserably underfed; but so was the entireGerman people, and the custom of treating prisoners as well as civilians is confined to England. Among all continental nations it is an understood thing that on the scale of diet the enemy should come last, and in Germany there was only enough food for a bare existence.
In this respect, I believe, officers were much more fortunate than their men, and certainly they had the great advantage of a permanent address. For the men were being continually moved from one camp to another. At one time they would be working in the fields, at another in the salt mines, sometimes stopping for a couple of months, sometimes only for a few days. The result of this was that their parcels were trailing after them right across Germany. At times they would go several months without one at all, and then if they had the luck to make somewhere a prolonged sojourn, they might receive thirteen parcels within three days. Of course the men shared out their parcels as far as possible, but they were nevercertain what was coming next, and they had many very hungry days.
With us there was none of that: we were in a permanent camp, and our parcels when once they had begun to arrive came through regularly. There were delays occasionally, especially when heavy fighting involved congestion of the railways; but eventually we received every parcel dispatched from a central committee. The only ones that did get lost were the home parcels that were sent privately. Everything sent from the Red Cross Committee, or from Harrod’s or Selfridge’s, arrived intact and in perfect condition.
As regards actual treatment, owing to the fact that officers were not made to work, there were very few occasions when physical violence was possible, cases of this sort generally occurring when men proved intractable in the factories. The only opportunities that were presented were when officers tried to get away, and the sentries availed themselves of these chances pretty generously.
There were four or five attempted escapes, and on two of these occasions the officers were badly mauled by the sentries. The second time that this happened the German orderly officer put a stop to this treatment at once; but on the first occasion the officer stood by while the sentries belaboured their captive with the butts of their rifles.
The would-be Monte Cristos turned to the German officer and asked him if he considered such treatment proper for a British officer.
The German shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well,” he said, “you must expect this sort of thing if you try to escape. You ought to stop in your room.”
Before, this particular German had always been especially agreeable to us. The only possible excuse for his behaviour lies in the fact that he was very fond of the bottle, and might have been a little drunk. But however one looks at it, it was a sufficiently discreditable affair.
Of the insults and degradations to which the officers of the camp at Holzminden weresubjected we had no experience. The Germans adopted towards us an invariable attitude of respect that was if anything too suave. They were always profuse with promises, but it was very hard to get anything out of them.
“Oh, yes,” they would say, “we can do that easily. We will go to the General and it will be all right. Don’t worry any more about it. We’ll see to it, it will be quite simple.”
But nothing ever happened. The simplest request always managed to lose itself somewhere between the block office and the Commandant’s study; and gradually we learnt that formal applications were no use whatsoever, and that if any one wished to change from one room to another, the surest way to get there was to collect all his baggage into a heap and move there independently.
The probable cause of this was the General himself, who was one of the most arrogant and pompous little men that militarism could produce. He was the complete Prussian,the Prussian of the music-hall and the Lyceum. Very small and straight, he would strut about the parade-ground clanking his spurs, or else he would stand in a pose, his cloak pulled back to reveal his Iron Cross. And he was utterly vindictive. One does not wish to misjudge any human being, but I feel sure he must have derived an acute pleasure from sitting at his window and looking down on the court, his eyes hungry for some misdemeanour on our parts, in which he might possibly find an excuse for some punishment.
He was certainly given opportunities, and I think that considering the man he was, it would have been judicious to have approached him in a slightly different way. But it always happens that the majority have to suffer for the faults of a few thoughtless people, and several restrictions were placed on the camp that could have been easily avoided. In every community there is the rowdy section, and this rowdiness was accentuated by the lack of freedom. Therewas no outlet for energy, except a walk round the square, or a very occasional game of hockey. And the spirits of the swashbucklers found expression in “rags” organised on an extensive scale.
But it was unfortunate for those who, having realised that they were prisoners, wished to make the best of their conditions. And really the rags were extraordinarily futile. One sportsman conceived the idea of lowering from the top-story windows dummies which the sentries would mistake for escaping Britishers and fire at. Luckily this scheme was suppressed, but there was nevertheless one night a very large and organised jollification, which was of course exactly what the General wanted.
For three weeks he closed the camp theatre, and put a stop to music and concerts of any description, which meant the removal of the only form of amusement that we had.
On another occasion when bombs were being dropped on Mainz, a few officers began to cheer and shout. It was again playingstraight into the General’s hands. He immediately stopped for a period of two months all walks outside the camp, and any one who has been a prisoner will know what the curtailing of that privilege meant. It was a great pity, and our prison life would have been much more easy, if only the turbulent few had realised that it was in their own interests to keep quiet, considering the man with whom they had to deal.
Though as a matter of fact I have little doubt that, however well we had behaved, the General would have found some excuse for inflicting reprisals. For he was quite capable of inventing regulations off his own bat. He was a sort of self-elected dictator, and drew up his own code and Army Act. His most scandalous infliction was an order that the covers should be removed from all books before being issued to the camp. The old excuse was brought forward; the French used to hide maps and poison between the cardboard and the cloth.
For this order the General had apparentlyno authority whatsoever, and it was particularly unjust, because we had been precisely told at Karlsruhe that all books must come direct from a publisher, so as to prevent any danger of their being tampered with. The result was that we had all sent home for new copies of books of which we already had soiled duplicates, and then when the books arrived, we found that they had to be practically cut to pieces.
They told us that the books could be kept for us if we liked, but naturally we did want to read them, now that they had come, and we had no other alternative but to authorise their execution; and surely for the true book-lover there can be no fate more awful than to have to stand in silence and watch book after book being barbarously mutilated.
Occasionally we would try and save a volume. The Bible was the centre of much controversy. There was no reason why it should be regarded as any more innocent than a Swinburne as a possible receptacle for propaganda, but the censor did certainlyhesitate over it for a moment. But eventually he did not relent.
“No, I’m afraid it must go,” he said; “after all that God has put up with during the last four years, He ought to be able to survive this.”
It was the one flash of wit he showed, but it did little to save our covers. To all intents and purposes the books were ruined. The leaves began to turn up at the edges. After a book had been read three times, the glue at the back had cracked, and the pages gradually loosened. It was a sorry business; at least two hundred pounds’ worth of books must have been cut up within three months, and there was absolutely no authority for the order. This we discovered later on, when we managed to lodge a complaint before the Central Command at Frankfort. They told us there that they had no objection at all to the issue of books with covers, and the restriction was instantly removed; but in the meantime no small part of a library had been destroyed.
But our chief grievance was a medical one. The organisation of the camp was quite inadequate to meet the demands of any sudden epidemic. In ordinary times it certainly worked well enough. Personally I never went to hospital, but a friend of mine who spent a week in the isolation hospital brought back a very favourable account of his treatment. The food was excellent, and the sister was particularly kind, going out of her way to do everything that lay within her power. But it was very different towards the end of the autumn, when the grippe was raging in the camp to such an extent that in the average room of eleven officers, there was hardly a day when less than four officers were in bed, and the arrangements were very poor. Of course every allowance must be made for the fact that there was hardly any medicine in Germany, and that when a disease had once started there, it was almost impossible to stop it. But the medical attendance was both ignorant and desultory. Those casesthat were removed to the hospital were given, it is true, attendance as careful as they would have received in England. But in the camp the doctor appeared to take no interest in his work at all. Very often he only visited the patients once every three days, and when he came he did not take much trouble with them. He used to ask a few casual questions and then say, “Aspirin and tea.” The sick had to rely entirely on the other occupants of their room, and the help they received was willing but naturally ignorant. The result was that many officers became very seriously ill, and several of them died. The German organisation was in this case criminally inadequate.
Withina few weeks, however, the arrival of a parcel had ceased to be an affair of momentous import. We could look on bully beef and Maconochies with comparative unconcern. The contents of each parcel varied only in such incidentals as sugar, chocolate, and packets of whole rice. The framework was the same, a solid enough construction, but one that as a continuous diet proved ineffably tedious. To begin with, we tried to make our meals more interesting with improvised puddings. We mixed a certain number of different ingredients into a bowl of water, beat them up into a paste, and then baked them in a tepid oven. The result was usually stodgy and quitetasteless. Personal vanity prevented us from confessing this, and night after night we struggled through these lukewarm, unpalatable dishes. How long this would have gone on I do not know; when the end came it came very suddenly.
One evening there was a lecture in connection with the Pitt League, and it was rumoured that Colonel Westcott was going to speak. And Colonel Westcott’s speeches were such that no one would willingly miss. He had always ready some new panacea, some fresh catchword. As long as he remained passive he was infinitely entertaining.
“We must go to this,” said Evans, and with some alarm I noticed that of the five other members of our mess, four were preparing to move seating accommodation.
“That’s all very jolly,” I said, “but who’s going to cook the dinner?”
The answer came back with a startling unanimity.
“You.”
“But look here,” I began to protest,“you know what I am at these things. I’ve never cooked a dinner before.”
“Time you began then.”
And I was left standing before an empty stove. There remained only one other member of our mess, my friend Barron, who spent the greater part of his day asleep. I woke him up.
“Barron,” I said, “we’ve got to cook the dinner.”
He blinked up through sleep-laden eyes.
“But, my dear Alec....”
“It’s no good,” I said sternly. “If we want anything to eat, and I most certainly do, we’ve got to cook it ourselves.”
Slowly Barron rose from his seat.
“Well,” he said, “what have you got?”
“There’s a tin of bully, some beans, half a Maconochie, we can make a stew of that.”
The stew was the work of a second. We mixed it all up with water, scattered some salt on the top, and left it to boil.
“And now the pudding,” I said.
This proved a more difficult matter. Therewas no rice left, and we had used the last of the Turban packets.
“Archie,” I said, “we’ll have to invent one.”
For five minutes we argued about the ingredients. Hodges wanted to give it a fish-flavour by adding a tin of salmon and shrimp paste.
“There’s been no taste to the beastly thing for the last six days,” he protested. “It might just as well taste of that as nothing.”
Finally, however, we decided on what we euphemistically dubbed a chocolatesoufflé. First of all we spread a handkerchief flat on the table, and sprinkled over it a little cornflour. We then took a packet of cocoa.
“How much shall I upset?” I asked.
We read the directions on the outside, but on the subject of chocolatesoufflésthe manufacturers were sadly reticent. So as there was no clear guide, we used the entire packet.
The mixture now seemed to demand somemoisture, so we poured a little warm water on it, and tried to knead it into a dough. But it did not work: a brown paste adhered to our fingers; nothing more.
“It won’t bind,” said Barron. “We must put some butter with it.”
“We’ve got no butter.”
“Oh, well, then, try some beef-dripping.”
So the next ingredient was half a tin of dripping, and as regards appearances it certainly had excellent results. A few minutes’ hard kneading produced an admirable dough. But when we sucked our fingers afterwards, the flavour was anything but that of chocolate. It had a thick and greasy taste.
“Alec,” said Hodges, “this dripping’s ruined it.”
“Your idea,” I said cheerfully.
For a moment he looked fierce, then returned to the matter in hand.
“Something’s got to be done,” he said; “we’ve got to swamp that dripping somehow.”
“What about some treacle?” I hazarded. “We drew some this afternoon.”
And within a minute the bulk of our pudding was further increased by an entire tin of treacle, and whatever its taste after that, it was certainly not of dripping.
“That’s about enough, isn’t it?” I said.
“Well, you know,” said Archie thoughtfully, “I don’t really think it would be harmed by some salmon and shrimp. After all, it would help to counterbalance the dripping.”
But already I had begun to wrap the handkerchief round the brown sticky ball. When it was firmly incased and knotted, we lowered it into a small saucepan, put it on the oven, and waited for the wanderers’ return.
They came back as usual with a great clatter of feet, expressing their hunger in the most forcible terms.
“Hellish hungry,” shouted Evans, “and the dinner’s bound to be awful if Waugh’s cooked it.”
“You wait,” I said, and plumped the stew down before him. This dish, probably because it had cooked itself, was quite eatable; and there was so much of it that in the earlier days it would have formed a meal of generous proportions. And by the time we had finished it, none of us felt in the mood for any more solid fare. Something delicate and appetising would have been delightful, apêche melbaperhaps, but suet ... no. And of course this rather militated against the success of the chocolatesoufflé.
And to begin with, it was a little burnt. There was a large hole in the encircling handkerchief, and the bottom of the pudding was black. Considering the bulk of the pudding, this had really very little effect; but it prejudiced the others, and the artist has to be so tactful with his public.
And then the pudding itself. Well, if we had not had the stew first, I am sure we should have all enjoyed it; but coming as it did on the top of a heavy dinner, even Barron and myself were hard driven to finish it.And it was only self-respect that made us. The others took a spoonful or two and desisted. Barron and I struggled manfully to the end, and were then conscious of four steely pairs of eyes. Evans, who acted as a sort of mess president, was the first to speak.
“What did you two use to make this pudding?”
“Oh, nothing much,” I said, in an offhand way; “a little cocoa, a little treacle, a little cornflour.” Somehow I felt I could not confess to the dripping.
“But how much did you use?”
Barron must be a braver man than I am, or it may have been he was still feeling a little sore because the salmon paste had not been included; at any rate he went straight to the point.
“A tin of each.”
There was a general consternation. That a whole tin of treacle, half a tin of dripping, a complete packet of cocoa, had all gone to a puddingthat only a third of the mess had been able to eat at all ... it was unbelievable, a gross case of misplaced trust, perfidy could go no further.
Barron and myself were not popular that evening. But our peccadilloes bore fruit later. That chocolatesouffléserved the purpose of a climax. From that day onward it was implicitly understood that no cook should invent recipes for puddings.
With the regular arrival of parcels, and the consequent immunity from hunger, our life settled down into that ordered calm which would have been the constant level of our routine as long as the war lasted. And it was here that captivity weighed most heavily.
Before, our routine had always been to a certain extent progressive. We had been a new camp, we had had to form societies and committees. We had a library to build up, and there was always the parcel list to add its daily incentive to enthusiasm. But there came a time, when all these wisheseither for books or food were satisfied, and when the individual had to depend for amusement solely on his own resources. Here was the real trial of captivity.
Since my return several people have said to me, “It must have been beastly living among the Huns.” But that was an infliction that it required little fortitude to bear. The Huns never worried us, unless we worried them. We could have exactly as much intercourse with them as we wanted, and there was no need to have anything to do with them at all. But there was no escape from the continual presence of five hundred British officers, and the continual conversation of the ten other members of the room. For not one moment was it possible to be alone. And as the evenings grew darker, the doors of the blocks were closed earlier; and by October we found ourselves shut in at six o’clock, with the prospect of a long evening in the room.
Those evenings were simply appalling. We all got on each other’s nerves horribly;as individuals we liked each other well enough; but it was no joke to be in the constant company of the same people, to hear the same anecdotes, the same opinions; and, owing to the limited area of common interests, talk always centred on the war. And there is no subject more wearisomely distasteful. By the end of six months’ imprisonment nearly every one had got utterly fed up with his room and the inmates of it. Smith would meet Brown outside theKantine, and a conversation of this sort would take place.
“My Lord, Brown, but my room is the absolute limit, it drives me nearly wild.”
“But, my dear man, you’ve got some topping fellows in there, there’s Jones and Hawkins and May.”
“I dare say, but you try living with them for a bit. You wouldn’t talk like that then.”
“Oh, well,” Brown would say, “you haven’t got much to grumble at; if you were in my room, now....”
“But your room, Brown; why, there are some tophole men there....”
And so the world went round. For indeed, however patient one is, it is impossible to live in the same room as ten other men, to eat there and sleep there, to spend half the day in their company, and not get nervy. Before long we had reached that state when we quarrelled over the most trifling things—about the dinner, whether we should have bully beef or a veal loaf. The slightest inconvenience awoke resentment. All the domestic details that cause friction in the married home were with us intensified a hundredfold, because there was with us none of the real and selfless affection which alone can bridge over these difficulties. Things had reached a sorry state by the time we had left; there was hardly a single officer who had a good word to say about his room. What we should have been like after another year I dread to imagine.
As it was, it was bad enough. For myself I never stayed in the room one moment morethan I could help. And often in the evenings after the doors had been shut, I used to walk up and down the cold stone corridor with Barron; we would do anything to get away from the room. It was the only way to preserve our balance.
And here in its psychological aspect lies, I think, the true meaning of captivity; for in the bare recital of incidents there must be always a savour of the soulless. The conditions of life are only really important in as far as they form a framework for personality. It is the individual that counts, and the real meaning of eight months’ imprisonment does not lie in their political or sociological aspect, but in the effect that they have on character. For each person they had a different message, each person was touched in a different way. Probably through the mind of each individual flitted the same recurring moods, modified and altered by the demands of each particular temperament, but still the moods were the same fingers playing upon different strings.
And for me, at any rate, the mood that recurred most frequently was one of a grey depression, mixed with a profound sense of the futility of human effort. Confinement inspires morbidity very quickly, and some of us used to take an almost savage delight in wrenching down the few frail bulwarks of an ultimate belief. From certain quotations we derived an exultant satisfaction.