FOOTNOTE

FOOTNOTE[1]All numerals throughout this volume relate to the stories herein told—not to chapters in the original sources.

[1]All numerals throughout this volume relate to the stories herein told—not to chapters in the original sources.

Where the British Civilian Prisoners Are Held in Detention Camp

Told by Geoffrey Pyke, an English Prisoner

This is a picturesque and thrilling story of a real adventure. The author, a young Englishman, entered Germany at the outbreak of the War, was discovered, imprisoned, and transferred to the great detention camp at Ruhleben. Here he made one of the most marvelous escapes on record, and after undreamed-of dangers and hardships arrived in safety at the Dutch front. Mr. Pyke in relating his experience says: "I was caught up in a vast mechanism ... that bounds the German Empire and tossed from one part to another, was beaten, crushed, and hammered ... the machine took me and threw me in jail, and then in another jail, and then in another, and then back into the first. Finally vomiting me, in a fit of either weariness, mercy or disgust, into a concentration camp for untrained civilians." Finally escaping from Ruhleben on July 9th, 1915. "Had only the 4,500 other inhabitants of Ruhleben escaped at the same time, in a species of general stampede, and one or two other people in Berlin or elsewhere died or been called off, matters might have arranged themselves very satisfactorily." The escaped prisoner has collected his experiences into a volume entitled: "To Ruhleben—And Back," from which we present a single chapter by permission of his publishers,Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

[2]I—HERR DIREKTOR OF THE PRISON

I forget now how many times I saw the Direktor of the prison, though at the time, the days on which I did were as distinct to me as wounds, which a man cannot see, but which he knows individually and intimately. In order to obtain audience of this gentleman, it was necessary, when the warder unlocked the door at 6.30 and the pitchers were put out, to ask to see the Herr Direktor. At half-past nine you were taken out of the cell, let through the door at the end down one flight and through to the floor which you could see over the railings of the balcony. Here again you were put into a cell, and the door was locked, and time passed by. Nothing else happened. In half an hour, or an hour, you were lined up in the passage with any others who also had requests. One by one you would go into that little office. You would bow at the entrance. "Ja?" would remark the bald-headed old gray-beard, with an Iron Cross of '70 hanging from his coat. "Ja?" And you would state your request. A vast ledger opposite him, the old bird, for he looked exactly like the Jackdaw of Rheims, would enter and sign and countersign in it. His decision was given in a curt "Ja" or "Nein," or "Das geht nicht,"[3]and you would be standing in the line outside, among those whose chance had not yet come. You had succeeded; you had failed—who knows what luck would attend you on these expeditions. Every request to write a letter had to be made in this manner. The shiny-headed old bird, with the head jailer in attendance his hand stiffly at his sword, would enter your name, the name of the addressee, and the reason for writing it, in his vast ledger. "Ja? Nein. Das geht nicht," and it is all over. Time after time I craved permission to write to His Excellency the American Ambassador, to request him to tell my people at home that I was alive. It was granted at the third request. What agony were those mornings, pacingup and down in the cell downstairs, waiting to be put into line. What could I say to the old boy to persuade him? Hundreds of passionate words rose in my mind, as I paced up and down that cell, waiting for the moment. "Bitte, Herr Direktor, kann ich ein brief schreiben?"[4]was all that I could stammer out, almost before I had reached the threshold of his office. "Ja? Nein. Das geht nicht," and I, after staring at him with eyes like a rabbit's fastened on a snake, unable to find words to say more, aching with the dull misery of refusal, have passed away, giving place to someone else who, in his turn, also succeeds or fails.

I used to try once a fortnight, and though I have since discovered that even the letters I wrote were never sent, yet nevertheless I always had a hope of their getting through. Regularly as clockwork every other Monday, after the Hell of Sunday, I would request to see the Direktor. For the first ten weeks, I persevered in this. Then suddenly I began to go to pieces. I missed one Monday, and put off asking the old bald-pate until Tuesday. When the moment came round on the Tuesday morning, I funked again. Wednesday came, and again I funked. On Thursday, I managed to push the words asking to see the Direktor from between my lips. Then with a rush, realising there was no going back, I felt all courage return to me. My head became as clear as a bell, and arguments to meet every objection of the Direktor's came to my mind. He had let me write several times previously, and I had not troubled him now for seventeen days. I was confident. Again I repeated my request gently to myself.... Suddenly I realised I was standing before him, and that I must speak. I must say something. I had come there to say something. Unless I asked him something, he would say I was not to be brought before him again. My eyes fixed on the large pimple on the top of his head. I could not take them away. The pimple was not quite in the centre of the cranium, but occupied, so to speak, the position halfway betwixt centre-forward and right outside. He wore it where a comedian wears a top hat the size of a five-shilling bit in attempts to be funny. My thoughts followed it. It was unique, and magnificent. "Have YOU any superfluous hair?" I thought. I should love to breathe very gently on the shiny surface, just to see if it becomes misty, or whether it still shines through everything. I wondered if it was very sensitive, so sensitive that he could feel what was reflected in it, or whether it was pachydermatous, and safe to dig pins into. He was going to move. He was just finishing off the entry he was making in the ledger. He was going to look up at me and say, "Ja wohl?"—Speak, say something—speak—speak....

It was evening. I was in my cell. The light was fading fast. I was thinking how on the morrow I would try again, how it only needed careful preparation, and I should be as able as anybody to say what I wanted to,—to speak.

II—SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AT THE POLIZEIGEFANGNIS

After you have been in solitary for some time, it becomes increasing difficult to retain your judgment. I know that first I would make up my mind that I was going to be in prison for two years, and then a great and irresistible hope would arise within me, that I should be sent to a concentration camp called Ruhleben, that I had had a whisper of from my friends. I had hoped for some sort of a trial to know how long I was going to remain where I was. Every day that passed at teno'clock, when I imagined that anyone, before whom I might be brought, had come down to his office, I would put on the one collar I had. Every day at six I would take it off again, preserving it for the next day. At times I became convinced that, because I was not yet of age, I was to be kept for a few months more, and that the day after my twenty-first birthday, I was to be sentenced to some ghastly sort of punishment, like solitary for two years, or for life. (There seemed absolutely no difference between these two, and I dreaded the one as much as the other. Both appeared interminable, and I had no hopes of coming out sane, even after the shorter period. I pictured myself moaning about the London Law Courts in a celluloid collar, picking up a little copying work here, and a little there, until I finally sank into a mumbling old age at twenty-five, and died in delirium tremens at thirty.)

Another fact made me terribly despondent, and, fight how I would, was gradually making me utterly hopeless. About fourteen days after my companions of the British Relief Committee had gone, a new-comer had arrived. He spoke German absolutely perfectly, but with an Austrian accent. I had heard him say something to the warder. I will not tell his story, for he is at the present moment in another prison in Berlin, though not in solitary, and is, I know, writing his reminiscences in readiness for when the war shall come to an end. Let it suffice, however, to say that he had been discovered, soon after war broke out, writing articles for a London paper. He was arrested at the flat he happened to be living in, and, after a large amount of palaver, was given twenty-four hours to leave the country in. He was accompanied to the frontier. Within a fortnight he was back again. He had gone to London, had seen his paper, had come back to Holland, and at the frontier had pretendedto be an Austrian waiter who had been expelled from England. He so exasperated his interrogators at the frontier by his eternal repetition of his ill treatment at the hands of his dastardly English employers, that they finally let him pass. However, in the end he was caught—as we all are—and recognised. He had been told that he was to be sent to this place Ruhleben, and, when one day he disappeared, I naturally surmised that he had been taken there. He was very good to me, for he had managed to get permission to buy fruit; I had been refused it. So he used to buy double the quantity, and daily, on going down the stairs, smuggle me an apple. "If he," I argued, "who has done this thingtwice, and who is hoary with old age (he was about thirty-five), gets sent to this camp Ruhleben, after being here for three weeks, and I, who have only done it once, and am not yet of age, and have been here nine weeks, and have not been sent there, then there is no hope of my ever getting there. They would have sent me there by now, were they going to do so at all." Afterwards, I found, of course, that he had never been sent anywhere near Ruhleben, but simply to another prison. I heard the most wonderful stories about his doings there, from a friend who was sent to prison for a time. He would appear for exercise dressed in flamboyant pink running shorts, a vest and socks to match—and a top hat. What on earth for? Well, if the walls of prison don't supply you with humour or whimsicality, you must undertake the task yourself.

The best of luck to him. He probably thinks I am still in that Polizeigefängnis.

For some time I had been the oldest inhabitant of the prison. The usual denizen of the place came for a day or two, and then went on his way through that process called Law and Justice. My position gradually came togive me tiny privileges. For instance, they became quite convinced that I was going mad, for, apart from my habit of walking round and round the exercise yard at nearly five miles per hour, every night I would repeat the Jabberwocky. It had taken me a whole week with my broken-down memory to piece together the odd bits of lines and verses that I still carried in my head; and another week to evolve Mr. Kipling's "If." I would suddenly shout loudly into the solid blackness that "All mimsey were the borrow-groves and the moamwraths outgrabe," I knew quite well that borrogoves was the correct litany, but I preferred borrow-groves; so borrow-groves it was. "One two, one two and through and through the vorpel blade went snicker snack. He left it dead and with its head he went galumphing back," and I would make that "snicker snack" all slow and creepy, like Captain Hook; and would rise to a triumphant roar as I announced the fact that he "galumphed" back, in preference to any other form of locomotion that might have been available, glorying at his ability to resist temptations such as taxi-cabbing, taking the tube, or walking, and, above all, the insidious run.

"Ifyou can make one heap of all your winnings,And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,And lose; and start again at your beginnings,And never breathe a word about your loss."If(and I shouted as if I was praying for life itself)"Ifyou can force your heart, and nerve, and sinewTo serve their turn, long after they are gone,And so hold on, when there is nothing in you,Except the will, which says to them, 'hold on.'"

And I would repeat it softly to myself, until loudly again, pacing madly up and down the cell, I would argue, "Yes,that's all very well, you know, but your will is the very thing that suffers before your heart and nerve and sinew are anywhere near gone. Why, it's the very base, the very foundation of all things, that it attacked, and then what are you going to do, Mr. Rudyard?" Nevertheless, I found an odd sort of comfort, and they were nearly always my prayer to the setting sun as the darkness stole in.

I also used to hum, whistle, and sing. This was strictly forbidden by one of the thirty-three regulations pasted on the back of the door. One night in December, when the darkness had been extra oppressive,—I was in darkness for eighteen out of the twenty-four hours—and I had been singing loud enough for the warders to hear, one came up and, rapping on the door, said that such behaviour was forbidden, nevertheless, he would ask the Herr Direktor as an especial favour, if I might be permitted to whistle occasionally. This is what comes of being the oldest inhabitant of a jail. The next day there was solemnly filled into the ledger by the chief warder, and countersigned by the Direktor, "Erlaubnis zu nummer acht und fünfzig zu singen und zu pfeifen."[5]

III—IN A CELL AT THE STADT VOGTEI

I shall never forget the day on which, after thirteen weeks, in January, 1915, I left prison—to go to another. Nothing, I was convinced, could be more of a living Hell than those thirteen weeks at the Polizeigefängnis. I was escorted out into the street. There was snow upon the pavements: it had been summer when I saw them last. Our route lay round the corner. Here, after passing through a low door in an immensely thick wall, once again I found myself in an atmosphere, not merely of red tape, but of the very essence from which tape, and redness, are made. Those innumerable bureaux: those ticketings, docketings, searching of clothes, etc., occupied a couple of hours, until I found myself in a bright and beautiful cell thirteen feet by six. This was the famous Stadt Vogtei prison. "Vogtei," literally translated, means a bailiff's office, but why a prison should be called "The City Bailiff's Office," or why the city bailiff's office should be a prison, I am at a loss to say.

Notwithstanding the bailiff, it was quite a good prison. Large numbers of English people—five to six hundred in all—had been here before they were sent to Ruhleben "for purposes of quarantine" as the official report says. It was a gentleman's prison; it was intended for those who had sentences for minor offences to serve, e.g. two to three months. But this did not frighten me, as I knew of its character as a depot for Ruhleben. I was full of hope. We had two meals of skilly a day instead of one. I was allowed to talk to the others during the two hours' exercise they were good enough to allow, and I could buy almost anything I wanted—bar newspapers.

I had another experience here that nearly killed me. There was the usual shelf for bowl, spoon, etc., and from the side hung a fat little book with one hundred and thirty-three rules. It contained all the punishments for all the various main crimes, worked out in permutations and combinations. Things such as "for not cleaning out of the cell for the first time the prisoner is to be punished by the three days' withdrawal of the midday hot meal, or instead one day withdrawal of the hot meal, and a second day withdrawal of the cold meal (breakfast), or, in lieu thereof.... In addition to which ... or as an alternative ... in substitute thereof.... But for the second offence, or dirtiness of a second degree, or unpunctuality of the third degree, or noise of the twentieth degree, theprisoner shall be punished by withdrawal of ... whereof ... in lieu of this can be subtituted ..." etc. etc.

On the outside of this little fat book with its one hundred and thirty-three rules was a diagram of the shelf from which it hung, showing exactly in what order the washing bowl, the eating bowl, the spoon, the fork, the soap were to be placed. And not merely was there a front view, but also two side views were given: one showing the side of the shelf with one towel hanging somnolently from a nail, and the other side view showing the other end of the shelf with the booklet itself hanging even more somnolently from another nail. But yes, there was something more: for not merely was there a picture of the booklet, but the picture of the booklet had the picture of the booklet pasted on the booklet's cover, and, what is more, the side which bore this diagram faced outwards, and the right-hand top corner was against the wall. Thus was it according to the picture. But it so happened that this was impossible, for the two were incompatible. Either the picture had to face inwards, or the left-hand top corner must touch the wall. But both together was contrary to the nature of the book. Feeling rather jolly at my new environment, I pointed this out to the jailer, who wasn't a bad sort of fellow, when he came in. At first he didn't grasp it, but when he did, he took serious note of it with pen and ink. Next day, in came the prison governor, a military-looking fellow, and he went straight to the booklet at the side of the cupboard, and examining the diagram on the cover, studied the incompatibility carefully for a long time. He turned round, and after looking whimsically at me, and then at the warder for some time, as if trying to make up his mind as to who was the biggest fool, said, "H'm," very definitely, and went away.

Alas, I only remained here five days. I had hardlyfinished breakfast when the warder came round with a list and said I was to "pack up," though, since I had nothing to pack, his orders were rather superfluous. Again weary hours of waiting in the bureau, and then, for the first time in my life, I saw the inside of Black Maria.

I had imagined it to have cells all the way down the side, but there were only two. There were seven of us, including a woman and a policeman. Heaven knows what the woman was "in" for, and though I several times formulated the question mentally, I could never manage to get it out. The policeman was quite a nice fellow, and let us talk, and joined in himself with an air of a busy man sparing a moment to play with some children. It soon became plain that one of the men was the woman's husband, or ought to have been if he wasn't. The others were gentlemen, sentenced for petty offences, who were being taken to the town hall to be enlisted in the army. They did not seem to relish the prospect, but "at any rate," they said, "it would be a change." I looked through the grille to see what I could of Berlin streets. There were not many people on them, and the greater number were women and in black, but the quietness of the place was nothing to what I was to see later. There were a few luxury-selling shops, such as flower sellers, that were closed, but the majority seemed able to get along. That Teutonic spectacle, extraordinary but obviously sensible, of women going about without hats could be seen everywhere. And then we suddenly drove into the inevitable yard. Two gates unbarred and locked themselves automatically as one passed.

IV—"MY THIRD PRISON—MOABIT: CELL 1603"

It was the great prison—Moabit. A huge central hall surmounted by a dome, with wings going in all directionsand the end of each wing connected by another great building, each with six storeys of cells, and each of these with its iron balcony with glass flooring. There was noise, and clanging of doors everywhere. I was told to stand at the commencement of one of the wings, just off the dome. There was a huge clock, and I noticed it had a bell attached to it. At any rate, I thought, I shall hear the hour strike. The number of my cell, I can remember it now, was 1603, "the year Queen Elizabeth died," I remarked to myself, as it was unlocked, and I went in. It was a larger cell than I had hitherto had—about fourteen feet by six. There was electric light and a table and seat that folded down from the wall. The window was, as usual, above my head, but this time it was made of frosted glass. There was a horrid suggestion of permanency about the place that made me feel rather bad. I asked the warder who gave me my prison underclothing—I was allowed to keep my own suit—whether one was always in solitary here, and for how long one came. "Immer im einzelhaft"—always in solitary,—and for three to four months and upward, he said. "Never less?" I asked. "No, never," he replied. "Come with me," he continued, and I was taken down into the very bowels of this terrible edifice, till, finally, I joined a vast squad of criminals. He left me. We then filed down devious passages once more, and finally were led into a vast room with about two hundred and seventy showers in it. When bathed, I was locked into a large, bare cellar just opposite, and here I was soon joined by two others, one an elderly middle-aged man of about fifty-six, and the other an evil-looking devil of about thirty-four. They sat down on the bench. I was walking up and down. They were an interesting couple. They were about to be examined by an Untersuchungsrichter, or examining magistrate, and the younger onewas coaching the other in what to say. The elder seemed too numbed to agree or disagree, though he seemed to have a tendency towards the truth, which the other promptly suppressed, but just sat there, his hands on his knees, seemingly deaf. Once the younger strode up to him threateningly as if to hit him. He ground his teeth and swore that by God, if the old man were to say that he'd ——. Then he tried a different tack; he argued, he elucidated, he showed the simplicity of his ideas, and how, above all, it would help themselves.

When the young one became bellicose I had felt no inclination to help the old man. Why, I knew not. I think I felt that nothing, least of all truth, should stand in the way of man's salvation from that place, and that if the old man hadn't got enough gumption to tell what seemed to be a few well-concocted lies, well, he ought to be made to, since it involved the fate of the younger man, who was not yet reduced to the state of an incapacitated jelly. It was the same old story: Fate had beaten the old man, but had not succeeded in persuading the young one that he also was beaten; the young one refused to acknowledge it. It was blind instinct that told him to lie, though he knew with clever lawyers against him, and, worst of all opponents, the law, the chances of his getting through to freedom were remote. I had noticed hitherto that it was always the young men who felt the strain most, seemed most conscious of the inhuman cruelty of prison, and I was to find out later that it was generally the young ones who recovered easiest. Sometimes the older ones don't recover. A man I was to meet later was afflicted with sudden decay of the optic nerve, and is now gradually going blind, purely as a result of solitary.

The door opened suddenly, and they were taken out, and as they passed me I saw the younger and villainousone look at the old man, in a manner in which threats, prayers, and above all, the desire to instil the wish to live were all inexpressibly mixed. They passed. I never saw them again. I often wonder where they are. There are lots like them.

I was taken back to my cell. I was now sinking fast. I saw little hopes of recovery. I was quickly becoming a broken-down creature, and though physically I should have lasted out for years, mentally I saw there was a crash not far ahead. I had seen it happen with other men before. As it was, mentally I was fast becoming a species of cow. I would stand for hours at a time, leaning my head into the corner, my hands in my pockets, staring at the floor. I would find that for hours I had been saying to myself "My dear sir"—I always called myself "my dear sir" when talking out loud,—"you really must make an effort to get out. I mean it's simply too stupid to spend the best years of your life in a box like this. Use your wits. Do something. Go on, you juggins, get out somewhere. Think!" and so on, from twelve till three. I became absolutely impersonal, and found it difficult to have likes and dislikes about anything. I absolutely forgot what flowers smelt like. Milk I could not imagine. Fruit, tobacco, fish, were mere names to me. I had forgotten what they were. I could not understand the meaning of the term "red."

Though I longed to be free, I felt that human beings would be perfectly unbearable. I no longer considered myself as one. I felt perfectly decorporealised: I was merely a mind contemplative and a poor one at that. And yet I longed for their company. I still kept up my nightly habit of repeating a few verses from any poem I could remember, and after the light had gone out—for here there was electric light—I would rise solemnly in the dark, and make the most fiery speeches to the CambridgeUnion—poor Cambridge Union. I would then proceed to oppose my own motion, pick holes in it, show up the proposer as an impostor and a charlatan. A seconder would then arise, who with all the sarcasm of a Voltaire would rend the immediate speaker adjective from substantive, verb from adverb, until quivering with the laceration received, the latter would be thrown, a bleeding proposition, into the waste deserts of verbosity.

V—GHASTLY HOURS UNDER GERMAN BRUTALITY

It was just about this time that I nearly got myself shot for attempted murder. I was so used to the darkness that I found electric light rather trying to the eyes, and therefore turned the racket upwards toward the ceiling in order to have but reflected light. A little later in came the warder. He saw the upturned bracket, and lifting the hilt of his sword, hit me sharply over the head. In a flash I was on him. I had raised my fists on each side for a smashing blow on his temples. He was unable to get away, for he was so short that my arms could have nailed him as he tried. He saw there was no escape, and the sight of my face blazing with fury and wretchedness made him drop his sword. I relished that moment, I gloated over it. I kept my fists going backwards and forwards nearly touching his temples, but never quite. I tried to imagine the agony in his rabbit-like mind, waiting for the crushing blow to fall upon him, and wondering what it would feel like. Suddenly he turned a sickly green. His hat was knocked all on one side. I saw beneath his uniform a fat little vulgar bourgeois, incapable of a thought outside the satisfying of his own senses. He turned from green to a pasty yellow. He glanced piteously up into my distorted face. I drove him back towards the door, growling and hissing at him, myfists going like a steam hammer on each side of his head. His agony became worse. His eyes flew from one side to the other, like a rabbit looking for escape. His little pointed flaxen beard wobbled and, such was his panic, so did his stomach. Suddenly my mind changed, and taking him by the shoulders, and putting my knee, as far as it was possible, into his belly, I pushed him backwards, and he sat down violently and disconsolately in the passage outside, his sword underneath him, and his hat rolling away into the darkness. I slammed the door, and after a time he got up and locked it. I knew nothing would happen to me, for he was not permitted to hit me, but had I hit him back, I gasp to think of the number of years I should now be doing.

This, the third prison I had been in, was the worst. Physically it was slightly better: there was more space, light, two good meals a day, but the very last drop of individuality was taken away from you. It was not permitted even to arrange the bowls on the shelf as you liked. I never saw daylight, for our exercise took place at half-past six in the dark. It was now the 20th of January. I had been arrested in the early days of October. Since then I had been residing in a lavatory. I found it dull.

Despite the warder's announcement that nobody ever came there for less than three or four months, I was suddenly taken away again after five days, and Black Maria drove me back once more to the Polizeigefängnis of the Alexanderplatz. I was too miserable by now to care where I was sent or what they did to me. I was beginning to lose the power of appreciating anything—whatever its nature. I found some new arrivals at Alexanderplatz. The place was full as usual with neutrals who were under suspicion: Dutch, Swedes and Danes. One Dutchman had been there for seven weeksin solitary. I was just reaching the final depths of despair when, one night, just as I had got my first foot into bed, the door was flung open, and into the gloom a voice shouted "'raus."[6]I "raused" timidly and in my nightshirt, and was told to dress quickly. I did so, surmising I was to go to another prison. I began to feel quite numb, and I no longer hoped for anything. Downstairs in the bureau a very pleasant policeman took charge of me, and after having signed the receipts for the acceptance of my carcase, he made the usual remark, "Kommen Sie mit," and off we went. I thought it odd that we should go alone: they usually fetch the criminals in batches. "Where are we going to?" I asked. "Ruhleben," he said.

VI—ON THE ROAD TO RUHLEBEN PRISON

For a moment I could hardly feel. I hardly dared feel. I just breathed quietly to myself, and thought how nice the air tasted. I was going to see human beings again. For a time the words were rather meaningless, and then I gradually began to revive under their warmth. We went out into the street to the Alexanderplatz station. I had a fine opportunity to run away here, though I should have been a fool to have done so, and to have invited prison again. In any case, I had no glasses with me, and I was very short-sighted. We had gone up on to the platform, and I was chuckling and giggling like a schoolgirl at seeing life once again, when the policeman discovered it was the wrong one. "Run," he said, "there's our train over there." I ran like a leopard. In ten bounds I had slipped through the crowd and had lost him. I ran on down the stairs, and into the street. How glorious it all seemed, and I roared aloud with laughter, at which a sallow-faced woman in black seemed offended and turned round to stare. I rushed on, up the other set of stairs and in time my captor appeared. The idea of bolting had just entered my head and flown, but "no," I said, "wait till we get to Ruhleben, and have got tired of that, then we'll see what can be done."

Meanwhile, I stared out into the darkness from the brightly-lit carriage as we steamed through the suburbs of Berlin. I got a glimpse of a tiny room, in which numbers of steaming dishevelled women were crowded together bending over machines and needlework. They were being sweated. That was their daily life. They too, lived in what was really a prison, though no law stopped them roaming whence they would. I was in the world once more....

(The prisoner relates numerous stories of his experiences, of which the above is but a single instance. He describes the prison; how it feels waiting to be shot; the impressions of a lunatic on release from solitary confinement and his daring escape with Mr. Edward Falk, District Commissioner in the Political Service of Nigeria.)

FOOTNOTES[2]All numerals relate to stories herein told—not to chapters from original sources.[3]"That is impossible."[4]"Please, Herr Direktor, may I write a letter?"[5]"Permit to Number 58 to sing and to whistle."[6]"Out!"

[2]All numerals relate to stories herein told—not to chapters from original sources.

[3]"That is impossible."

[4]"Please, Herr Direktor, may I write a letter?"

[5]"Permit to Number 58 to sing and to whistle."

[6]"Out!"

Army Life With the Soldiers Along the Somme

Told by Frederick Palmer, American War Correspondent

Mr. Palmer was the only accredited correspondent who had freedom of the field in the Battles of the Somme. At the time of this writing he has been officially appointed as a member of the staff of General Pershing, with the American Armies in France. This American has become a world figure. His life has been spent on the battlefields of the modern wars: The Greek War, the Philippine War, the Macedonian Insurrection, the Central American Wars, the Russian-Japanese War, the Turkish Revolution, the Balkan Wars. At the beginning of the Great War, he was with the British army and fleet. His descriptions of the fighting are unsurpassed in the war's literature—it is "the epic touch of great events." He has made a notable historical record in his book entitled "My Second Year of the War," in which he presents graphic pictures of the grim fighting along the Somme, with admirable descriptions of the heroism of the Canadians, the Australians and the fighters from all parts of the Earth, who are giving their lives "to make the world safe for Democracy." A single chapter from Mr. Palmer's book is here reproduced by permission of his publishers,Dodd, Mead and Company: Copyright 1917.

[7]I—STORY OF THE BATTLE RIDGE ON THE SOMME

Sometimes it occurred to one to consider what history might say about the Ridge and also to wonder how much history, which pretends to know all, would really know.Thus, one sought perspective of the colossal significance of the uninterrupted battle whose processes numbed the mind and to distinguish the meaning of different stages of the struggle. Nothing had so well reflected the character of the war or of its protagonists, French, British and German, as this grinding of resources, of courage, and of will of three powerful races.

... It is historically accepted, I think, that the first decisive phase was the battle of the Marne when Paris was saved. The second was Verdun, when the Germans again sought a decision on the Western front by an offensive of sledge-hammer blows against frontal positions; and, perhaps, the third came when on the Ridge the British and the French kept up their grim, insistent, piece-meal attacks, holding the enemy week in and week out on the defensive, aiming at mastery as the scales trembled in the new turn of the balance and initiative passed from one side to the other in the beginning of that new era.

This scarred slope with its gentle ascent, this section of farming land with its woods growing more ragged every day from shell fire, with its daily and nightly thunders, its trickling procession of wounded and prisoners down the communication trenches speaking the last word in human bravery, industry, determination and endurance—this might one day be not only the monument to the positions of all the battalions that had fought, its copses, its villages, its knolls famous to future generations as in Little Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who fought, of a commander's iron will and foresight in gaining that supremacy in arms, men and material which was the genesis of the great decision.

The German began drawing away divisions from the Verdun sector, bringing guns to answer the British andFrench fire and men whose prodigal use alone could enforce his determination to maintainmoraleand prevent any further bold strokes such as that of July (1916).

His sausage balloons began to reappear in the sky as the summer wore on; he increased the number of his aeroplanes; more of his five-point-nine howitzers were sending their compliments; he stretched out his shell fire over communication trenches and strong points; mustered great quantities of lachrymatory shells and for the first time used gas shells with a generosity which spoke his faith in their efficacy. The lachrymatory shell makes your eyes smart, and the Germans apparently considered this a great auxiliary to high explosives and shrapnel. Was it because of the success of the first gas attack at Ypres that they now placed such reliance in gas shells? The shell when it lands seems a "dud," which is a shell that has failed to explode; then it blows out a volume of gas.

"If one hit right under your nose," said a soldier, "and you hadn't your gas mask on, it might kill you. But when you see one fall you don't run to get a sniff in order to accommodate the Boche by asphyxiating yourself."

Another soldier suggested that the Germans had a big supply on hand and were working off the stock for want of other kinds. The British who by this time were settled in the offensive joked about the deluge of gas shells with a gallant, amazing humor. Going up to the Ridge was going to their regular duty. They did not shirk it or hail it with delight. They simply went, that was all, when it was a battalion's turn to go.

II—GUNNERS IN THE FURNACE OF WAR

July heat became August heat as the grinding proceeded. The gunners worked in their shirts or strippedto the waist. Sweat streaks mapped the faces of the men who came out of the trenches. Stifling clouds of dust hung over the roads, with the trucks phantom-like as they emerged from the gritty mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain comes as a blessing to Briton and German alike. German prisoners worn with exhaustion had complexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British seemed weary sometimes, one had only to see the prisoners to realize that the defensive was suffering more than the offensive. The fatigue of some of the men was of the kind that one week's sleep or a month's rest will not cure; something fixed in their beings.

It was a new kind of fighting for the Germans. They smarted under it, they who had been used to the upper hand. In the early stages of the war their artillery had covered their well-ordered charges; they had been killing the enemy with gunfire. Now the Allies were returning the compliment; the shoe was on the other foot. A striking change, indeed, from "On to Paris!" the old battle-cry of leaders who had now come to urge these men to the utmost of endurance and sacrifice by telling them that if they did not hold against the relentless hammering of British and French guns what had been done to French villages would be done to their own.

Prisoners spoke of peace as having been promised as close at hand by their officers. In July the date had been set as Sept. 1st. Later, it was set as Nov. 1st. The German was as a swimmer trying to reach shore, in this case peace, with the assurance of those who urged him on that a few more strokes would bring him there. Thus have armies been urged on for years.

Those fighting did not have, as had the prisoners, their eyes opened to the vast preparations behind the Britishlines to carry on the offensive. Mostly the prisoners were amiable, peculiarly unlike the proud men taken in the early days of the war when confidence in their "system" as infallible was at its height. Yet there were exceptions. I saw an officer marching at the head of the survivors of his battalion along the road from Montauban one day with his head up, a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth at an aggressive angle, his unshaven chin and dusty clothes heightening his attitude of "You go to ——, you English!"

The hatred of the British was a strengthening factor in the defense. Should they, the Prussians, be beaten by New Army men? No! Die first! said Prussian officers. The German staff might be as good as ever, but among the mixed troops—the old and the young, the hollow-chested and the square-shouldered, mouth-breathers with spectacles and bent fathers of families, vigorous boys in their late 'teens with the down still on their cheeks and hardened veterans survivors of many battles east and west—they were reverting appreciably to natural human tendencies despite the iron discipline.

It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said that out of every hundred men twenty were natural fighters, sixty were average men who would fight under impulse or when well led, and twenty were timid; and armies were organized on the basis of the sixty average to make them into a whole of even efficiency in action. The German staff had supplied supreme finesse to this end. They had an army that was a machine; yet its units were flesh and blood and the pounding of shell fire and the dogged fighting on the Ridge must have an effect.

It became apparent through those two months of piece-meal advance that the sixty average men were not as good as they had been. The twenty "funk-sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding themselves if theywere without an officer, but the twenty natural fighters—well, human psychology does not change. They were the type that made the professional armies of other days, the brigands, too, and also those of every class of society to whom patriotic duty had become an exaltation approaching fanaticism. More fighting made them fight harder.

III—DEAD BODIES STRAPPED TO GUNS

Such became members of the machine-gun corps, which took an oath never to surrender, and led bombing parties and posted themselves in shell-craters to face the charges while shells fell thick around them, or remained up in the trench taking their chances against curtains of fire that covered an infantry charge, in the hope of being able to turn on their own bullet spray for a moment before being killed. Sometimes their dead bodies were found strapped to their guns, more often probably by their own request, as an insurance against deserting their posts, than by command.

Shell fire was the theatricalism of the struggle, the roar of guns its thunder; but night or day the sound of the staccato of that little arch devil of killing, the machine gun, coming from the Ridge seemed as true an expression of what was always going on there as a rattlesnake's rattle is of its character. Delville and High Woods and Guillemont and Longueval and the Switch Trench—these are symbolic names of that attrition, of the heroism of British persistence which would not take No for answer.

You might think that you had seen ruins until you saw those of Guillemont after it was taken. They were the granulation of bricks and mortar and earth mixed by the blasts of shell fire which crushed solids into dustand splintered splinters. Guillemont lay beyond Trônes Wood across an open space where the German guns had full play. There was a stone quarry on the outskirts, and a quarry no less than a farm like Waterlot, which was to the northward, and Falfemont, to the southward and flanking the village, formed shelter. It was not much of a quarry, but it was a hole which would be refuge for reserves and machine guns. The two farms, clear targets for British guns, had their deep dugouts whose roofs were reinforced by the ruins that fell upon them against penetration even by shells of large caliber. How the Germans fought to keep Falfemont! Once they sent out a charge with the bayonet to meet a British charge between walls of shell fire and there through the mist the steel was seen flashing and vague figures wrestling.

Guillemont and the farms won and Ginchy which lay beyond won and the British had their flank of high ground. Twice they were in Guillemont but could not remain, though as usual they kept some of their gains. It was a battle from dugout to dugout, from shelter to shelter of any kind burrowed in the débris or in fields, with the British never ceasing here or elsewhere to continue their pressure. And the débris of a village had particular appeal; it yielded to the spade; its piles gave natural cover.

IV—THE ARTILLERYMEN IN THE WOODS

A British soldier returning from one of the attacks as he hobbled through Trônes Wood expressed to me the essential generalship of the battle. He was outwardly as unemotional as if he were coming home from his day's work, respectful and good-humored, though he had a hole in both arms from machine-gun fire, a shrapnel woundin the heel, and seemed a trifle resentful of the added tribute of another shrapnel wound in his shoulder after he had left the firing-line and was on his way to the casualty clearing station. Insisting that he could lift the cigarette I offered him to his lips and light it, too, he said:

"We've only to keep at them, sir. They'll go."

So the British kept at them and so did the French at every point. Was Delville Wood worse than High Wood? This is too nice a distinction in torments to be drawn. Possess either of them completely and command of the Ridge in that section was won. The edge of a wood on the side away from your enemy was the easiest part to hold. It is difficult to range artillery on it because of restricted vision, and the enemy's shells aimed at it strike the trees and burst prematurely among his own men. Other easy, relatively easy, places to hold are the dead spaces of gullies and ravines. There you were out of fire and there you were not; there you could hold and there you could not. Machine-gun fire and shell fire were the arbiters of topography more dependable than maps.

Why all the trees were not cut down by the continual bombardments of both sides was past understanding. There was one lone tree on the skyline near Longueval which I had watched for weeks. It still had a limb, yes, the luxury of a limb, the last time I saw it, pointing with a kind of defiance in its immunity. Of course it had been struck many times. Bits of steel were imbedded in its trunk; but only a direct hit on the trunk will bring down a tree. Trees may be slashed and whittled and nicked and gashed and still stand; and when villages have been pulverized except for the timbering of the houses, a scarred shade tree will remain.

Thus, trees in Delville Wood survived, naked sticksamong fallen and splintered trunks and upturned roots. How any man could have survived was the puzzling thing. None could if he had remained there continuously and exposed himself; but man is the most cunning of animals. With gas mask and eye-protectors ready, steel helmet on his head and his faithful spade to make himself a new hole whenever he moved, he managed the incredible in self-protection. Earth piled back of a tree-trunk would stop bullets and protect his body from shrapnel. There he lay and there a German lay opposite him, except when attacks were being made.

Not getting the northern edge of the woods the British began sapping out in trenches to the east toward Ginchy, where the many contours showed the highest ground in that neighborhood. New lines of trenches kept appearing on the map, often with group names such as Coffee Alley, Tea Lane and Beer Street, perhaps. Out in the open along the irregular plateau the shells were no more kindly, the bombing and the sapping no less diligent all the way to the windmill, where the Australians were playing the same kind of a game. With the actual summit gained at certain points, these had to be held pending the taking of the whole, or of enough to permit a wave of men to move forward in a general attack without its line being broken by the resistance of strong points, which meant confusion.

V—STALKING A MACHINE GUN IN ITS LAIR

Before any charge the machine guns must be "killed." No initiative of pioneer or Indian scout surpassed that exhibited in conquering machine-gun positions. When a big game hunter tells you about having stalked tigers, ask him if he has ever stalked a machine gun to its lair.

As for the nature of the lair, here is one where a Briton"dug himself in" to be ready to repulse any counter-attack to recover ground that the British had just won. Some layers of sandbags are sunk level with the earth with an excavation back of them large enough for a machine-gun standard and to give the barrel swing and for the gunner, who back of this had dug himself a well four or five feet deep of sufficient diameter to enable him to huddle at the bottom in "stormy weather." He was general and army, too, of this little establishment. In the midst of shells and trench mortars, with bullets whizzing around his head, he had to keep a cool aim and make every pellet which he poured out of his muzzle count against the wave of men coming toward him who were at his mercy if he could remain alive for a few minutes and keep his head.

He must not reveal his position before his opportunity came. All around where this Briton had held the fort there were shell-craters like the dots of close shooting around a bull's-eye; no tell-tale blood spots this time, but a pile of two or three hundred cartridge cases lying where they had fallen as they were emptied of their cones of lead. Luck was with the occupant, but not with another man playing the same game not far away. Broken bits of gun and fragments of cloth mixed with earth explained the fate of a German machine gunner who had emplaced his piece in the same manner.

Before a charge, crawl up at night from shell-crater to shell-crater and locate the enemy's machine guns. Then, if your own guns and the trench mortars do not get them, go stalking with supplies of bombs and remember to throw yours before the machine gunner, who also has a stock for such emergencies, throws his. When a machine gun begins rattling into a company front in a charge the men drop for cover, while officers consider how to draw the devil's tusks. Arnold von Winkelried, whogathered the spears to his breast to make a path for his comrades, won his glory because the fighting forces were small in his day. But with such enormous forces as are now engaged and with heroism so common, we make only an incident of the officer who went out to silence a machine gun and was found lying dead across the gun with the gunner dead beside him.

VI—TALKS WITH THE MEN IN THE REAR

The advance on the map at our quarters extended as the brief army reports were read into the squares every morning by the key of figures and numerals with a detail that included every little trench, every copse, every landmark, and then we chose where we would go that day. At corps headquarters there were maps with still more details and officers would explain the previous day's work to us. Every wood and village, every viewpoint, we knew, and every casualty clearing station and prisoners' inclosure. At battalion camps within sight of the Ridge and within range of the guns, where their blankets helped to make shelter from the sun, you might talk with the men out of the fight and lunch and chat with the officers who awaited the word to go in again or perhaps to hear that their tour was over and they could go to rest in Ypres sector, which had become relatively quiet.

They had their letters and packages from home before they slept and had written letters in return after waking; and there was nothing to do now except to relax and breathe, to renew the vitality that had been expended in the fierce work where shells were still threshing the earth, which rose in clouds of dust to settle back again in enduring passive resistance.

There was much talk early in the war about British cheerfulness; so much that officers and men began toresent it as expressing the idea that they took such a war as this as a kind of holiday, when it was the last thing outside of Hades that any sane man would choose. It was a question in my own mind at times if Hades would not have been a pleasant change. Yet the characterization is true, peculiarly true, even in the midst of the fighting on the Ridge. Cheerfulness takes the place of emotionalism as the armor against hardship and death; a good-humored balance between exhilaration and depression which meets smile with smile and creates an atmosphere superior to all vicissitudes. Why should we be downhearted? Why, indeed, when it does no good. Not "Merrie England!" War is not a merry business; but an Englishman may be cheerful for the sake of self and comrades.

Of course, these battalions, officers and men, would talk about when the war would be over. Even the Esquimaux must have an opinion on the subject by this time. That of the men who make the war, whose lives are the lives risked, was worth more, perhaps, than that of people living thousands of miles away; for it is they who are doing the fighting, who will stop fighting. To them it would be over when it was won. The time this would require varied with different men—one year, two years; and again they would turn satirical and argue whether the sixth or the seventh year would be the worst. And they talked shop about the latest wrinkles in fighting; how best to avoid having men buried by shell-bursts; the value of gas and lachrymatory shells; the ratio of high explosives to shrapnel; methods of "cleaning out" dugouts or "doing in" machine guns, all in a routine that had become an accepted part of life like the details of the stock carried and methods of selling in a department store.

Indelible the memories of these talks, which oftenbrought out illustrations of racial temperament. One company was more horrified over having found a German tied to a trenchparadosto be killed by British shell fire as a field punishment than by the horrors of other men equally mashed and torn, or at having crawled over the moist bodies of the dead, or slept among them, or been covered with spatters of blood and flesh—for that incident struck home with a sense of brutal militarism which was the thing in their minds against which they were fighting.

VII—WITH STEEL HELMETS AND GAS MASKS

With steel helmets on and gas masks over our shoulders, we would leave our car at the dead line and set off to "see something," when now the fighting was all hidden in the folds of the ground, or in the woods, or lost on the horizon where the front line of either of these two great armies, with their immense concentration of men and material and roads gorged with transport and thousands of belching guns, was held by a few men with machine guns in shell-craters, their positions sometimes interwoven. Old hands in the Somme battle become shell-wise. They are the ones whom the French call "varnished," which is a way of saying that projectiles glance off their anatomy. They keep away from points where the enemy will direct his fire as a matter of habit or scientific gunnery, and always recollect that the German has not enough shells to sow them broadcast over the whole battle area.

It is not an uncommon thing for one to feel quite safe within a couple of hundred yards of an artillery concentration. That corner of a village, that edge of a shattered grove, that turn in the highway, that sunken road—keep away from them! Any kind of trench for shrapnel; lie down flat unless a satisfactory dugout is near for protectionfrom high explosives which burst in the earth. If you are at the front and a curtain of fire is put behind you, wait until it is over or go around it. If there is one ahead, wait until another day—provided that you are a spectator. Always bear in mind how unimportant you are, how small a figure on the great field, and that if every shell fired had killed one soldier there would not be an able-bodied man in uniform left alive on the continent of Europe. By observing these simple rules you may see a surprising amount with a chance of surviving.

One day I wanted to go into the old German dugouts under a formless pile of ruins which a British colonel had made his battalion headquarters; but I did not want to go enough to persist when I understood the situation. Formerly, my idea of a good dugout—and I always like to be within striking distance of one—was a cave twenty feet deep with a roof of four or five layers of granite, rubble and timber; but now I feel more safe if the fragments of a town hall are piled on top of this.

The Germans were putting a shell every minute with clockwork regularity into the colonel's "happy home" and at intervals four shells in a salvo. You had to make a run for it between the shells, and if you did not know the exact location of the dugout you might have been hunting for it some time. Runners bearing messages took their chances both going and coming and two men were hit. The colonel was quite safe twenty feet underground with the matting of débris including that of a fallen chimney overhead, but he was a most unpopular host. The next day he moved his headquarters and not having been considerate enough to inform the Germans of the fact they kept on methodically pounding the roof of the untenanted premises.

After every battle "promenade" I was glad to step intothe car waiting at the "dead line," where the chauffeurs frequently had had harder luck in being shelled than we had farther forward. Yet I know of no worse place to be in than a car when you hear the first growing scream which indicates that yours is the neighborhood selected by a German battery or two for expending some of its ammunition. When you are in danger you like to be on your feet and to possess every one of your faculties. I used to put cotton in my ears when I walked through the area of the gun positions as some protection to the eardrums from the blasts, but always took it out once I was beyond the big calibers, as an acute hearing after some experience gave you instant warning of any "krump" or five-point-nine coming in your direction, advising you which way to dodge and also saving you from unnecessarily running for a dugout if the shell were passing well overhead or short.

I was glad, too, when the car left the field quite behind and was over the hills in peaceful country. But one never knew. Fifteen miles from the front line was not always safe. Once when a sudden outburst of fifteen-inch naval shells sent the people of a town to cover and scattered fragments over the square, one cut open the back of the chauffeur's head just as we were getting into our car.

"Are you going out to be strafed at?" became an inquiry in the mess on the order of "Are you going to take an afternoon off for golf to-day?" The only time I felt that I could claim any advantage in phlegm over my comrades was when I slept through two hours of aerial bombing with anti-aircraft guns busy in the neighborhood, which, as I explained, was no more remarkable than sleeping in a hotel at home with flat-wheeled surface cars and motor horns screeching under your window. A subway employee or a traffic policeman in NewYork ought never to suffer from shell-shock if he goes to war.

The account of personal risk which in other wars might make a magazine article or a book chapter, once you sat down to write it, melted away as your ego was reduced to its proper place in the cosmos. Individuals had never been so obscurely atomic. With hundreds of thousands fighting, personal experience was valuable only as it expressed that of the whole. Each story brought back to the mess was much like others, thrilling for the narrator and repetition for the polite listener, except it was some officer fresh from the communication trench who brought news of what was going on in that day's work.

Thus, the battle had become static; its incidents of a kind like the product of some mighty mill. The public, falsely expecting that the line would be broken, wanted symbols of victory in fronts changing on the map and began to weary of the accounts. It was the late Charles A. Dana who is credited with saying: "If a dog bites a man it is not news, but if a man bites a dog it is."

Let the men attack with hatchets and in evening dress and this would win all the headlines in the land because people at their breakfast tables would say: "Here is something new in the war!" Men killing men was not news, but a battalion of trained bloodhounds sent out to bite the Germans would have been. I used to try to hunt down some of the "novelties" which received the favor of publication, but though they were well known abroad the man in the trenches had heard nothing about them.

Bullets, shells, bayonets and bombs remained the tried and practical methods there on the Ridge with its overpowering drama, any act of which almost any day was greater than Spionkop or Magersfontein which thrilled a world that was not then war-stale; and ever its supreme feature was that determination which was like akind fate in its progress of chipping, chipping at a stone foundation that must yield.

VIII—VICTORY!—"THE RIDGE IS TAKEN"

The Ridge seeped in one's very existence. You could see it as clearly in imagination as in reality, with its horizon under shell-bursts and the slope with its maze of burrows and its battered trenches. Into those calm army reports association could read many indications: the telling fact that the German losses in being pressed off the Ridge were as great if not greater than the British, their sufferings worse under a heavier deluge of shell fire, the increased skill of the offensive and the failure of German counter-attacks after each advance.

No one doubted that the Ridge would be taken and taken it was, or all of it that was needed for the drive that was to clean up any outstanding points, with its sweep down into the valley. A victory this, not to be measured by territory; for in one day's rush more ground was gained than in two months of siege. A victory of position, of will, ofmorale! Sharpening its steel and wits on enemy steel and wits in every kind of fighting, the New Army had proved itself in the supreme test of all qualities.

(This American correspondent relates thirty-one remarkable narratives of adventure, all of which equal in human interest and historical importance, the single narrative given above. He tells about his experiences "Forward with the Guns;" "The Brigade that Went Through;" "The Storming of Contalmaison;" "The Mastery of the Air;" "The Tanks in Action;" "The Harvest of Villages;" "Five Generals and Verdun"—all of which are notable historical records.)

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