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Title: A Captive at Carlsruhe and Other German Prison Camps

Author: Joseph Lee

Release Date: February 15, 2016 [EBook #51222]

Language: English

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A CAPTIVE AT CARLSRUHE

[2]

A CORNER OF CARLSRUHE CAMP

[3]

A CAPTIVE AT CARLSRUHE
AND OTHER GERMAN PRISON CAMPS

BY JOSEPH LEE

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXX

[4]

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND

[5]

TO

[7]

CONTENTS

[11]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[13]

PART I

CAUDRY—LE CATEAU—CARLSRUHE

[15]

A
CAPTIVE AT CARLSRUHE

Cap improvized from
an aviator’s boot.

A modern Icarus.

Chausseur à pied.

FELLOWS IN MISFORTUNE.

I
The First Day

As we limped and stumbled into Caudry in the dusk we presented a very disturbing spectacle.

Two young French women stood at a cottage door, and, when our doleful procession passed, one of them flung herself into her sister’s arms in a paroxysm of grief.

The good folk of the town would have[16] slipped bread into our hands, but our German guards pressed them back with their rifles. Bayonets and rifle butts could not prevent them, however, from flinging us words of cheer and encouragement. “Courage! Bonne chance! Bonne nuit!”

How illogical is war! This very morning, as we entered the first village in which German troops were billeted, we found them waiting to serve us, with outset tables on which were clean glasses and pitchers of clear water! Earlier, while the enemy attack was still developing, I observed a German—himself at the charge, and with at his elbow Death, the equal foeman of all who fight—wave a reassuring hand to a British soldier prisoner who was showing signs of distress.

So in the dark we came to a grim factory, into which we were shepherded for the night. We had had nothing to eat all day; we were to have nothing to eat now. There was, however, an issuing of bowls of what, for lack of a better name—or of a worse—was designated coffee.

There was now also to be a search, and a giving up of all papers, knives, razors, or[17] other steel instruments—bare bodkins by which we might be disposed to seek redress, relief, or release. Search had already been made at a German headquarters within a few miles of the line. Prior to which, as we marched down heavily flanked by our guards, I had, with surreptitious hand thrust into my tunic pocket, succeeded in tearing up and scattering over the land, sundry military papers, and the proof sheets of a book of mine in which were some very complimentary references to the Kaiser. Here it was also that a wounded fellow-officer, giving up his letters, and asking me to explain that two from his wife he had not yet read, the gnarled old German officer handed them back with a salute.

It was difficult to parade the men for search now. They raised themselves on an elbow or sat up and endeavoured to shake the sleep from their eyes, and then dropped heavily back upon the floor again. Ultimately they were herded to one end of the factory, from which they emerged in file, dropping as they passed their poor, precious epistolatory possessions—letters with crosses[18] and baby kisses—into an outstretched sack. One man approached me and asked that he might retain papers, including a written confession, necessary to divorce proceedings against his wife. I put the case to the German officer; he put it to his military conscience, and decided. Yes, they might be retained.

That first night I slept without dreaming; it was when I awoke that I appeared to be in a dream.

At noon next day I received the first meal of which I had partaken for the last forty-eight hours. It consisted of a mess of beans and potatoes, which I, being then in fit state to sympathize entirely with Esau, found more than palatable. Later, in the afternoon, when a red sword lay across the western sky, we marched to Le Cateau. Here there was a separating of sheep from goats, the senior officers being housed somewhere with more or less of comfort, doubtless, while all below the rank of Captain were packed into another discarded factory, whose only production for some time to come seemed likely to be human misery.

[19]

Followed four melancholy and miserable days, whose passing was not to be measured by figures on a dial or dates upon a calendar, but by the clamour of appetites unappeased; by the entry of our dole of bread and our basin of skilly. In our waking hours we discussed only food; by night we dreamed of monumental menus displayed on table-covers of snowy whiteness. Scenting a possible profit, a German soldier insinuated into the camp and put up for auction some half-dozen tins of sardines, to the provocation almost of a riot.

Our billets were dirty and verminous. Properly organized and harnessed there was a sufficiency of performance and activity in the fleas to have supplied the motive power to the whole factory! We could not shave, because we had no soap nor steel; we could not wash, because the water was frozen in the pump, and icicles hung by the wall.

If there was little to eat there was even less to read, the only literature in the whole company consisting of one Testament and one Book of Common Prayer, and these being in continual demand.

[20]

On the fifth day there came a break in the monotony, some sixteen of us being removed to the headquarters, where had been an examination on our arrival. As we waited for admittance a few French folk gathered around, and two girls from a house opposite made efforts at conversation. Our guards menaced them not too seriously with their bayonets, whereupon they scampered for their house and slammed the door. In a few minutes the door was cautiously opened again; there was a ripple of laughter, and two mischievous faces, with a mocking grimace for the Army of Occupation, appeared round the post.

In our new quarters eight of us occupied one room. Report had it that the walls, besides various pieces of pendent paper, had ears, a dictaphone being supposedly secreted on the premises. That being so, the Germans are never likely to have heard much that was good of themselves.

A READING OF THE PICKWICKIANS.

A search disclosed treasure in the shape of sundry parts of the Pickwick Papers, not certainly the famous original parts in their green—shall we say their evergreen covers?—but[21] sections devised for the simultaneous satisfying of a number of readers. These parts we carefully gathered together, when it was discovered that the immortal transactions began with the celebrated bachelor supper given by Mr. Bob Sawyer at his lodgings in Lant Street, in the Borough. Here, indeed, was matter to cause gastronomic agitation in starving men! Yet, need[22] we, then, go supperless to bed? Shall we not also become Pickwickians, and, constituting ourselves members of the Club, drop in upon the party as not entirely unwelcome guests? And so I read until “lights out” sent us perforce to bed.

Recalling that it was my birthday, and by way of a gift to myself, I succeeded in persuading the Unteroffizier to purchase for me a sketch-book and pencils, with which I amused myself and comrades by a series of portrait studies of more or less veracity. One of these my fellows in misfortune was a sculptor who had exhibited at the R.A., and who now exhibited a photograph of one of his works—a statue of Sappho—which he carried in his pocket. We two decided to hang together—unless we were shot separately—as we had heard amazing reports of ateliers to be secured in certain Läger by humble followers of the arts graphic and plastic.

During all the days of our stay here, and precisely at four o’clock of the afternoon, a bell tolled solemnly from the church under whose shadow we lay. It was for the burial of German soldiers killed at Cambrai.

[23]

Early on a Sunday morning, while the stars still shivered in a frosty sky, we set out to entrain for Carlsruhe, very optimistically with one day’s rations in our pouches, and that a day’s rations which would have shown meagre as the hors-d’œuvre of an ordinary meal. We arrived at Carlsruhe on the evening of Tuesday, and in the interim would probably have succumbed to starvation for lack of food, if we had not been in a state of suspended animation owing to the cold.

A SCULPTOR.

Only one incident of that journey do I desire to recall. In the middle of the night I awoke shiveringly from a fitful sleep to find that the train had come to a stop in a large station. I glanced idly from the window, and an arc lamp lit up a great signboard, on which was painted in large ominous letters the one word—SEDAN.

From Carlsruhe Station we passed through streets not uninteresting architecturally, and without exciting undue curiosity or comment, until we came to the Europäisches Hotel.[24] This to famished men seemed to suggest something at least of hopeful hospitalities, but, on entering, the place was obviously as barren of festivity as a Government Board room. We shall have food to eat at five o’clock. At five we wept that it had not come; at six, at seven. We wept even more when at eight it actually arrived.

I observed then, and on subsequent occasions, that after a meal, myself and Marsden (who, as befits a good sculptor, has fashioned for himself a frame of fine proportion) were inclined to emerge from a more or less languorous state and kick up our heels like young colts.

The Vulture

We discovered that by climbing on to the frame of the iron bedstead, and clutching perilously at the ventilating portion of the window in our cell, we could just succeed in gaining a glimpse of the street. To the right we seemed to be in the neighbourhood of a zoological garden or an aviary of some dimension. The only inhabitant of the cages visible to us, however, was a large vulture,[25] which sat there day after day, an unchanging picture of sullenness and stolidity. I wondered if perchance it scented or visioned the red fields which lay not so many miles away.

And so the days passed. After considerable agitation I succeeded in securing a few volumes of the Tauchnitz edition, amongst them Stevenson’s “The Master of Ballantrae.” This possibly, however, induced in me a greater home-sickness for Scotland than ever.

THE UNTEROFFIZIER.

Finding a draught-board to our hand outlined upon the table, and making counters of paper white and blue, we four prisoners on a day played for the championship of the cell and a superadded stake of four thin slices of bread. I won somewhat easily, being a Scotsman, and something of a player as a boy; indeed, heaven forgive me! it was I who suggested the game. As victor, however, I was seized with compassion and compunction, so that, while I retained the title, I returned to each man his share of[26] that staff of life, on which, it has to be confessed, we were having to lean somewhat heavily.

At last came the order that we were to shift from the hotel to the Offizier kriegsgefangenenlager. Whereupon, clapping my steel helmet upon my head, and thrusting my uneaten morsel of bread into one of my tunic pockets, I was ready for the road.

[28]

CHRISTMAS DAY AT CARLSRUHE.

[29]

ARRIVAL OF THE PARCEL CART.

II
Life at Carlsruhe Lager

As we passed a sentry and turned in between high palisades heavily fortified by barbed wire, I had a feeling of disappointment, if not of dismay. I had hoped to live more closely to Nature, whereas Carlsruhe Camp lay in a central part of the town, and was overlooked at almost every point by high buildings, hotels, restaurants, and mansions. The few trees were, of course, meantime bare of leaves, and there[30] were no traces of grass in the long stretches of court between the huts.

In the salon d’appel we were searched. My sketch-book was scrutinized, critically, perhaps, but not uncharitably, and I was permitted to keep it. Of what other poor possessions I now had, only my signalling whistle was taken.

Dinner that night consisted of soup, followed by Sauerkraut. Breakfast next morning, in my case, consisted of a cold shower bath and anticipations of lunch at midday!

There was a little chapel at Carlsruhe used alternately and harmoniously by English Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and Nonconformists. While we awaited service on this first morning of my arrival there was a distribution of biscuits—briquettes of bread really—which were received from their Government by the French officer and orderly prisoners at the rate of seventy per man per week; a plentitude which permitted of the orderlies trading them among the less-favoured British officers at anything from fifty pfennig to a mark each.

[31]

THE CHAPEL AT CARLSRUHE.

On the present occasion, when the baskets[32] had been carried away, a few crumbs and sweepings of the biscuits were left upon the floor, while we stood around with our backs to the wall and our hands in our pockets. Presently one prisoner put forth an apparently accidental foot, which covered probably the largest of the pieces. Then, somewhat shamefacedly, he stooped and picked it up. Upon which signal, with one accord, and with as close a resemblance to a flock of city sparrows as anything I ever saw, we swooped down upon the fragments. For my share I succeeded in securing two pieces of quite half an inch square!

Those were indeed hungry days, when a man’s wealth was not to be calculated by the amount standing to his credit at Messrs. Cox & Co.’s, or even by the abundance of his blankets, but by the number of French biscuits which he had succeeded in securing. Here of all places in the world might one see a Brigadier-General crossing the square carefully balancing a mess of pork and beans upon a plate, or nursing the contents of a tin of sardines upon a saucer!

To be invited to tea by a friendly and[33] more flourishing mess was the greatest beatitude that could befall a man. In these cases of ceremonious call the guest always carried his own crockery and cutlery.

COL. ALBERT TURANO, ARTIGLIERIA ITALIANO.

One such pleasant refection, with Col. Albert Turano, Artiglieria Italiano, lingers very pleasantly in my memory. In view of his rank the Colonel occupied alone a small chamber in one of the huts. On the wall was a crucifix, and a few reproductions of religious paintings and decorations by the Danish artist, Joakim Skovgaard. A shelf of Italian books, a deal table, two stools, and an iron bedstead, with above it a plant, to be unnamed by me, but which looked as if it might develop into a tree, in a flower-pot so tiny that it seemed as if it might have done service as a thimble. The Colonel prepared the coffee with great care, and served it with much courtliness. The entire contents[34] of his larder consisted of a few fragments of hard French biscuits. These we steeped in the coffee, and of this quite delectable sop partook with much contentment.

In talk we turned over the art treasures of Venice and Florence, and when I referred to Dante, and particularly to the episode of Paolo and Francesca, the Colonel produced from his breast pocket a little marked copy of the “Divina Commedia,” in a chamois-leather case, which he had carried through the campaign, and read me the passage in Italian. Followed cigarettes, and a joint vow that if we foregathered in London our dinner at the Trocadero would be completed by just such a cup of coffee—à la Carlsruhe! Some time later, while he was being changed to another camp, the gallant Colonel succeeded in effecting his escape.

In retrospect the menu at Carlsruhe seems to have consisted of interminable plates of soup, followed by sauerkraut and anæmic potatoes. No effort was made—nor was there any need—to stimulate our appetites by surprise dishes or kickshaws; although on St. Patrick’s Day a wild rumour went[35] round the camp that we were to have boiled shamrock for dinner! Some officers could achieve five plates of soup at a meal; one could rarely venture to brave the day on less than three. On Thursdays and Sundays there was a morsel of meat—the veriest opening and immediate closing of the lid of the flesh pot, as it were. On certain days, apples—for which we lined up in a queue—were to be bought at the Kantine at one mark per pound. Sardines cost five to six marks a tin; other prices were in proportion.

First Letters and Parcels

The coming of one’s first letter was a memorable event in camp life. The immediate impulse was to retire with it to the remotest corner of the court—as a dog with a bone, or a lover with a billet-doux—and there devour it, and for days after one was continually impelled to a re-perusal. A Portuguese officer who had made a vow, Nazarite-wise, not to shave or cut his hair until such time as news would come from the far country, was three and a half months[36] in camp before he received his first letter. Then, amid loud laughter and cries of “Barbier! Barbier!” he departed with the precious epistle in his hand, and later in the day made his appearance, looking not unlike a shorn lamb!

The arrival of the first parcel was an event of even more general interest and import. If it were a clothing parcel it would contain a change of raiment, as grateful and as welcome as the wedding garment. If it were a food parcel it enabled you to extend pleasant hospitalities in more necessitous directions—one of the privileges and compensations of camp life.

You pass your bread ration to the recently arrived officer who is your neighbour at dinner. “Do you care to have this bread, old chap? I have plenty.” He is an Australian, and there is considerably over six foot of him to be fed. He gives a gulp and a gasp now. “My God,” he says, “I thought I wasn’t to be able to say ‘Yes’ quick enough!”

I received my first parcel after two months of captivity. One officer, after the[37] lapse of many barren moons, received twenty-six packets—an entire waggon load—at one time! Give me neither poverty nor riches!

Christmas at Carlsruhe

On Christmas Day, the Germans, if they could not give us peace on earth, probably made effort at an expression of goodwill even to Gefangenen! Dinner, at all events, consisted of soup, potatoes, an ounce or two of meat, one pound of eating apples, and a quarter of a litre of red wine—decidedly a red litre day! Christmas trees were raised and decorated in the salon d’appel; the Camp Commandant gave gifts to all the orderlies; a raffle, organized by the French officers, took place, when I was so fortunate as to secure a bar of chocolate, and there was a further distribution of apples at night, the gifts of La Croix Rouge, Geneva. I have probably not eaten on one day so many apples of uncertain ripeness since last I robbed an orchard as a boy.

In the chapel the Lieutenant—a layman—who customarily took the Anglican services,[38] read the hymn from Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” and several carols were sung. I may say that all such services concluded with the lusty singing of a verse of “God Save the King.”

THE CAMP COMMANDANT.

[39]

Roll-call in the morning was at ten; in the evening at 8.45; lights out at nine o’clock. I shared a hut with seven other officers, three of them aviators, who had all, like Lucifer, son of the morning, fallen to earth violently and from varying altitudes. On New Year’s Eve we blanketed our windows, kept lights burning, and at midnight drank a modest glass of port to the coming year.

Our scale of dietary not conducing to exuberance of spirits, or urging to violent exercises, most of the officers spent a considerable part of these short winter days in reading or in card-playing. As unofficial limner to the very cosmopolitan camp, my pencil was kept continually sharpened in effort to capture the varying characteristics of some seventeen different nationalities.

One day I found the Commandant looking over my shoulder. He was keenly interested, suggested that he might give me a sitting, and reverted several times to the question of price. Finally I hinted that while I could not dream of accepting monetary recompense, he could, if he cared to be[40] so complaisant, connive at my escape by way of part payment!

No one, I believe, ever escaped from Carlsruhe Camp, though various efforts were made by tunnelling. To make exit by a more direct method three high palisades and barbed wire fences had to be scaled, and that in almost certain view of numerous sentries without and within. Sitting by the barbed wire in a remote part of the court, a Posten outside would open a little slit in the paling and turn upon me an eye which was alone visible, rolling round watchfully, and with much of the effect of the Eye Omnipotent with which we were awed in boyish days.

We saw and heard little of the life of the surrounding town. Now and then a housemaid would shake a cover or a cushion from a window in one of the overlooking houses, or the Hausfrau herself might gaze gloomily forth. One night after we had retired to bed, and certainly at an hour not far from midnight, we heard what appeared to be a quartette of girls singing outside in the street. We flung open the windows and listened with[41] vast pleasure to a very beautiful rendering of what may have been an Easter hymn; possibly a more pagan chant to the Goddess of Love.

A GAME OF CARDS.

Sometimes, of an afternoon, one would hear from the other side of the palisade the sound of marching men—a sound as seemingly resolute and relentless as the progression of Fate. Sometimes came the playful and laughing cry of a little child. One day as I read and mused in “Rotten Row,” two schoolboys, doubtless home for the week-end, and at all events perched holiday-wise upon the roof of an hotel, made their presence known to me in pleasant and friendly fashion[42] by a cheerful whistle. Having attracted my attention, they proceeded with true boyish humour and with eloquent turnings of the head, to invite me to a companionship upon the roof!

On a June evening, walking with a French Commandant, and endeavouring to recount to him in French one of the fables of La Fontaine, we were brought to a pause by what was a wistful picture to us at one of the overlooking windows—a father, a mother, and sweet little girl, enjoying the quiet twilight hour together. The Commandant, when we had resumed our walk—which we did whenever we were discovered—confided to me that he had three boys, of ages gently graduated, and that the youngest, Michael, was very sad because he had not seen his father for so long a time.

[44]

FUNERAL OF A PRISONER OF WAR

[45]

A SERBIAN COLONEL.

III
Funeral of a Prisoner of War

One morning at roll-call the German N.C.O. all unwittingly called, “Captain H——!” Then more insistently, “Captain H——!” And still again.

There was no reply. Captain H—— had died in hospital the night before of pneumonia, contracted through exposure when his ship was torpedoed.

[46]

I was appointed to represent our hut at the funeral. That morning, immediately after breakfast, something of a stir was to be observed about the camp, and presently the officers who had been elected to attend the funeral began to assemble in front of the Commandant’s hut.

Many of the uniforms presented considerable compromise; several of us, myself included, who had been taken in shrapnel helmets and trench equipment, having borrowed Sam Browne belts and aviators’ caps. The Serbian Colonels, however, were decidedly brave, if slightly bizarre, in their brand-new brown greatcoats, with crimson facings, lapels and linings, their horned caps and general appearance conveying to my mind a somewhat whimsical impression of armed, aggressive, and mail-sheathed beetles. The Italian Major of mountain artillery was there with a slanting feather in his cap, while the Commandant himself was resplendently martial in his spiked helmet, with, for decoration, the Iron Cross and, I think, l’Aigle Noir.

Three or four great wreaths, sombre with fir branches and bay, and bearing coloured[47] streamers, are allocated among the various nationalities represented, and forming up more or less in processional order, the party, followed by the somewhat envious gaze of those who remain behind, moves towards the gateway. Some of our number have not been outside these gates for well-nigh a year; one officer, indeed, has preferred to forego this opportunity of liberty for an hour or two in order that he may achieve a complete year of incarceration in the Kriegsgefangenenlager, his anniversary falling due in a few days.

I myself have been captive in this camp for less than two months, yet I feel a panting and palpitating as we wait for the guard to turn the key in the gate; I seem to breathe more deeply when we have passed into the street. In a word, as he moves among us, the senior British officer has warned us that we are on parole.

Two electric tram-cars, connected, await us, and we mount and take our places. It is a cold morning, one of the coldest for some months. A small crowd which has collected gazes silently and not unsympathetically[48] upon the scene. The group consists mostly of children, going schoolward, and perhaps it is owing to the severe cold, but their faces are pinched and thin. It moves me mightily to imagine that we are in any sense of the word at war with these little ones.

As the car speeds through the streets we rub the frost from the panes and gaze out upon the world like a batch of schoolboys on an excursion. Old Maier, the German orderly, indeed, takes particular pains to point out to us places and objects of interest as we pass; the Stadthaus; the monument to the Margrave Charles William, founder of the city, which encloses his dust; the various churches. The architecture is interesting, although, as I understand, we are moving through the least opulent parts of Carlsruhe.

On the outskirts of the town the cars stop in front of a church, where is drawn up a German guard of over a hundred, with a brass band, and a firing-party of fifty men. We file into the chapel, and the wreaths are laid upon the black coffin, which rests under the shadow of a great cross with a bronze[49] Christ. This, and a painting of a miracle of healing, are the only adornments of an interior which is dignified and harmoniously coloured in greys and greens.

“That is the General of the district with the Commandant,” whispers Maier in my ear.

The service is brief and simple. The Lutheran pastor, in black cap and white bands, delivers a short address, reads a few passages from the Scriptures, and engages in prayer. Then the bearers take up their bitter burden and pass down the aisle. One green wreath lies on top of the coffin; it falls off, and I stoop down and replace it. As we reach the door Maier is once more at my ear. “That wreath is from the Grand Duchess of Baden!”

As we pass down the steps the band is playing somewhere in front, softly and sorrowfully, then there is a few minutes’ silence while the procession passes into the avenue leading to the cemetery. Here and there are a few desolate-looking civilians. Now comes the sound of drums; something between a distant thunder-roll and the heavy dropping of rain in a thunder shower.[50] Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” I have never heard it played in a more fitting environment. The dark-grey body of German soldiery winds among the trees, which throw up gaunt, leafless branches agonizingly against a dull grey sky.

How illogical is war! I have seen a hundred men—as many as are here assembled for the burial of one—huddled into what was practically one common grave! Surely we are not come forth entirely to bury the dead with ceremony; but to persuade ourselves, to prove as convincingly as may be, that the ancient courtesies, the old kindlinesses, are not entirely dead and buried!

As the music passes into the lyric movement of the march I see wistfulness in the faces of some of the veteran warriors; regretfulness in the very stoop of their shoulders. There is something moving at all times even in the formal and ceremonial grief of man; it is accentuated when he is clothed in the full panoply of war.

A short service over the grave, then the firing-party throw their three volleys into the air, as if making noisy question as to the[51] scheme of things at the unanswering heavens. The brasses seem to make mournful reply that no answer has indeed been vouchsafed. Then, the body being lowered into the grave, each of us casts upon it three shovelfuls of earth, making the sign of the Cross or saluting the military dead according to our creed and conception. And so we leave the poor dust, till it be disturbed by music more insistent and clamorous than the clarions of men!

THE CATHOLIC PRIEST.

A French soldier who has died in hospital is also being interred, and, though it is bitterly cold, we all wait until the cortège has arrived, and the burial service—in this case performed by the Catholic priest—has been carried out. As we return through the avenue we overtake the sad, solitary figure of a widow in sombre black leading a boy of six or seven by the hand. Both figures are suggestive of refinement, both faces are pale, and that of the mother is grief-stricken. As we pass I am so near that I almost brush them.[52] I turn and look back at the boy, whose face is full of beauty. The insistent gaze of an enemy officer seems to frighten him, and he shrinks closer to his mother’s side.

A Lecture on Abyssinia

THE REV. MR. FLAD.

The Rev. Father Daniels, the Roman Catholic priest to whom I have referred, made regular visitation to the camp, and we had, furthermore, occasional ministration from a Protestant divine, the Rev. Mr. Flad. This gentleman appeared in our midst with great suddenness one morning, and there was much ado to beat up a creditable congregation for him. This ultimately being forthcoming, and at the moment when the pastor was inviting us to accompany him with a pure heart to the Throne of Heavenly Grace entered Hans with an urgent and whispered message, which turned out to be an invitation to lunch from the Grand Duchess of Baden. The summons left the[53] good padre obviously preoccupied during the service, and necessitated a postponement of the Communion until the afternoon. This led to a suggestion that the pastor might lecture us in the evening on his experiences in Abyssinia.

The father of Mr. Flad was a missionary in Abyssinia during the reign of King Theodore. His mother, a friend of Florence Nightingale, was a deaconess in the Church. When trouble arose between the King and the British Government—through the ignoring of the former’s letter suggesting a latter-day crusade for the liberation of the Holy Land from the Turks—Flad senior and fifty-eight other Europeans were imprisoned, and many of them had to undergo the punishment of being chained to a native soldier for four and a half years.

The native soldier, it is a relief to learn, was changed every week—a transaction which one can imagine as being welcome as a change of linen!

Ultimately Flad was despatched as Ambassador from King Theodore to Queen Victoria, with whom he had two interviews[54] at Osborne, his wife being meanwhile held as hostage for his return. “I have here your two eyes and your heart,” said King Theodore.

During these difficult and dangerous years Mrs. Flad kept a diary, which was published, but which is now out of print. With the coming of Lord Napier the prisoners were released, and King Theodore came to a tragic end by his own hand. The pastor is hopeful of some day taking up his father’s work and he passed round a book printed in Geëz, I take it, a page of which he reads every day. His father used to tell him how in the native cafés he had heard discussion as to whether the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon was ruler of Abyssinia or Arabia.

One need not be in Abyssinia to be chained to a black mood at least, if not a black man. Sitting in the court at Carlsruhe, watching the barbed wire shake and shiver like a man in an ague to the play of my foot, I have been seized with a sudden fear of the horrors from which I have emerged. This fear in retrospect, so to speak, was greater far than anything I can confess to[55] have felt in actuality; as if one who had boldly and blindly crossed a profound abyss on a tight-rope should faint or falter, grow dizzy and fall, having reached firm ground once more; as if one had all the past still to pass through, and it were not possible that one should safely pass through it.

To me, on such an occasion, appeared my buoyant young Italian friend Cotta, who, passing an arm through mine, haled me off for a glass of the atrocious white wine of the country—or at least of the Kantine. Thereafter we walked together in the Close, Cotta giving his English an airing.

“Yes, I speak English very well, very well. Have you see the donkey?”

The little donkey, which, yoked to a little waggon, brings us on most days a load of parcels, and which has become so friendly to an alien officer that even in charge of a somewhat obdurate driver it will make a sudden detour from its course in order to shove its muzzle into my hand, was grazing in the circular grass plot in the centre of the square.

“It is the better German in the camp!”[56] says Cotta. “Ah, I am very sad, very sad,” he proceeds. “I have no letter from my girl, and the Germans have take from me her photograph. Damn! damn!”

AN ITALIAN MAJOR OF MOUNTAIN ARTILLERY.

[58]

PLAYBILL FOR LADY GREGORY’S “THE RISING OF THE MOON”

[59]

OUR ORCHESTRA.

IV
Entertainment in Exile

Man cannot live by bread alone—nor may he, even with a supplementary basin of soup! Immediately after dinner on the Saturday evening of my arrival in Carlsruhe, a steady stream of officers set in towards the salon d’appel. Being still without chart or compass as regards the camp, I also drifted in this direction, and found that at the far end of the hall a stage was erected, and that a[60] cosmopolitan audience was already gathered in the expectant dusk of the auditorium. A few rows of forms from the court served as dress circle and stalls; later arrivals brought their own chairs or stools from the dormitories; standing in the background, the orderlies, obviously washed of their week’s labours in the kitchen or the camp, were the gods, and from their Olympus gave occasional encouragement, or passed comment and criticism upon the performance.

On this particular evening, together with various musical and vocal efforts, there was a very capable representation by a cast of French officers, of Max Maurey’s comedy in one act, “Asile de Nuit.” Prior to the enactment, and for the benefit of those in the audience who might be innocent of French, a British officer gave out the motif in English.

As I sat contentedly in my place—the burden of the wearinesses of the last weeks fallen from my shoulders—it was borne in upon me that much of the success of a play is in the eager and receptive mood of the audience; also that in the naïve freshness[61] of an amateur performance is a charm which has too frequently perished in the more finished production of the professional actor. At all events, in “Asile de Nuit”—the “Night Refuge”—I found indeed refuge for the night!

Monsieur the Superintendent of an—uncharitable—institution, is pompous, proud, and overbearing, particularly to his unwelcome clients. It is just on the closing hour of nine, and he is preparing to depart for the business of his favourite café, when one of these waifs blows in. Monsieur storms at the tramp for the lateness of the hour, for the ludicrousness of his name, for anything and everything, and ultimately, after passing him over to a brow-beaten assistant for the condign punishment of a bath, goes off himself for a beer.

He returns almost immediately, quite chapfallen. He has learned that the Superintendent of another “Refuge” has been dismissed for failing to entertain an angel unawares in the person of a disguised journalist. He is persuaded that the piece of ragged illiteracy which he himself is[62] harbouring is a pen also charged and pointed for his undoing. Consequently the amazed vagrant is overwhelmed with clothing from the Superintendent’s own wardrobe, cigars from his private cabinet; he is even finally permitted to escape the last indignity of ablution!

A CARLSRUHE CONCERT PROGRAMME.

Into the service of the theatre I immediately found myself intrigued and impressed, in the somewhat composite character of scene-painter, scene-shifter, poster-artist,[65] actor, prompter, “noises-off,” and playwright. My first essay in this latter capacity was entitled “A Chelsea Christmas Eve,” the scene being a studio, embellished with sundry artistic audacities—nudes and nocturnes, post-impressionisms and cubisms—and from the cardboard window of which was a view of the Thames, including the Tower Bridge!—there entirely for economical reasons, and not geographic.

“A CHELSEA CHRISTMAS EVE,” AS PLAYED AT CARLSRUHE LAGER

So pleasant, nevertheless, was this little make-believe interior that we rarely entered for a rehearsal without discovering and disturbing sundry reading animals who had crept into it as a quiet and congenial environment, and who frequently and regretfully suggested that it would be desirable as a permanency. During the performance the on-coming of a monstrous and realistic pie, built—not baked—in a wash-hand basin, filled with boiling water, and covered with a richly-coloured cardboard crust, was nearly provocative of an assault upon the stage by a hungry and overwrought audience!

Another dramatic effort, devised for the bringing on to the stage of my good friends—and[66] the good friends of all the camp—Bertolotti, Calvi the pianist, and Lazarri the sweet singer, was “An Italian Vignette.” The scenery, which was painted on paper readily reversible, so that one could very literally have “a prison and a palace” on each side, I evolved from pleasant if somewhat untrustworthy recollection of a fortnight’s stay in Venice many years ago.

There is a glorious city in the sea.

The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets—and that after such sort as proved somewhat disconcerting to the two Venetians present in camp. Owing to the circumscriptions of the stage the scene was more suggestive than realistic, the gondola, instead of entering from below the Ponte dei Sospiri, swimming in a canal running parallel with the Bridge of—Sighs—but of no dimensions!

As regards dresses, it was possible to hire through “Hans,” the German orderly, one evening dress suit, one blue ditto, one odd pair of quite unmentionable “unmentionables,” and one Homburg hat. To prevent effort at escape these garments had to be returned to the authorities immediately[67] after each performance. Nothing in anywise approximating to a garb mediæval being obtainable, each man—and “woman”—must dress the part to the best of possibilities.

Clelia (Lieut. Smith), for example, of whom I, as Marco, was supposed to be enamoured, trusted to hide his identity—particularly as disclosed by his feet—in a few yards of chintz, rather unhappily of identical pattern with the stage curtain! A cardigan jacket, frilled and ruffled with an edging of white linen torn from a frayed pocket handkerchief, made a quite presentable doublet for me. Toulon, the French orderly’s béret, turned up at the corners, and bearing red plumes, held in place by a shining tin pipe-top, served as headgear. The lid of a boric ointment box suspended from my black lanyard formed a distinguished-looking decoration of merit; the tasselled cord of a dressing-gown made an admirable sword-belt.

An Italian military mantle completed my costume. A mandolin—an instrument of torture to be dreaded above all others, but which musically was mute in the piece, and[68] pictorially represented a guitar—was borrowed from an orderly.

In passages where “A Venetian Vignette” did not awe the audience it at least amused it. Owing to an eleventh-hour timidity on the part of two of our Italians I had to touch the light guitar and raise my voice in apparent song, while off, Lieut. Calvi, with piano muted with newspapers, and Lieut. Lazarri, with distended larynx, supplied the actualities, and this with such success that the many new-comers among the audience, knowing neither Joseph nor Lazarri, were deceived, and I received a very ill-deserved ovation for Toselli’s “Serenade.”

SCENE FROM “A VENETIAN VIGNETTE”

The Portuguese Captain Teixeira, who had wonderful imitative faculties, so that twice I have seen him hypnotize young birds to within a few inches of his hand, as a nightingale “off,” “trilled with all the passion of all the love songs that have been sung since the world began”—an interpolation made by the dramatist in his dialogue to permit of an effect so original! “Noises off” tolled the bell—the great kitchen poker—which was intended to warn the[71] lovers of the fleet passage of the hour, just about five minutes behind time, making his thus tardy entry on the principle that nothing be lost.

Lieut. H., who had taken part in bull-fighting in Southern America, gave me the coup de grâce in his own fashion, between the shoulder blades, and, judging by the force, with a momentary forgetting of the fact that he was only in Southern Germany. With a “Mio Dio! Io sono morto!” for the sake of local colouring, I and the curtain fell almost simultaneously.

“The Secret: A Shudder in 3 Scenes,” was probably most memorable from the secret fact that it secured me a few inches of forbidden candle, which I used in surreptitious reading after “lights out” for some nights after. “The Brigand: a Musical Absurdity,” written by a versatile Roman Catholic padre, was apparently sufficiently realistic to procure me the first visit next morning from an officer in the audience who had lost his watch! Unrehearsed effects in this performance were the igniting of the cardboard brazier by the toppling over of[72] the candle set within to illuminate it; the rolling across the stage of an empty and otherwise rather suspicious looking bottle, and the violent antipathies evidenced by “Bobby,” a French officer’s adopted fox-terrier, which I had to keep at bay with my double-barrelled cardboard blunderbuss.

A CARLSRUHE PLAY-BILL.

Emerging from the hall within a few minutes of roll-call and with our faces masked by the vigorous colourations of our brigandage[73] “under the greenwood tree,” we discovered to our dismay that the water supply had been cut off. For days afterwards my knees had a brownness unknown to them since I discarded the Black Watch kilt.

POSTER FOR A FRENCH PLAY.

A very creditable performance was given of Bernard Shaw’s one-act play, “How He Lied to Her Husband”; Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” abridged to one act, was essayed with great[74] earnestness. The French players gave us some very adroit performances, particularly of such comedies as Labiche’s “J’invite le Colonel.”

One day there arrived in camp Lieut. Martin, late of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, a little Irishman with a big brogue, a fund of humour and of its concomitant, good humour, and a budget of news of literary import, as that W. B. Yeats was married, and that G. B. S. had taken his place at the theatre.

It was suggested to Martin that we might stage one of the Irish plays. He had had copies of a number of these in his valise when he was captured, but, of course, these were lost. He was able ultimately, however, to write out from memory Lady Gregory’s “The Rising of the Moon,” and for my guidance he gave me a little paper model of the staging as designed originally, I imagine, by Jack Yeats. For the performance the German authorities lent us a huge beer barrel—entirely empty. The cast was an all-Irish one, Lieut.-Colonel Lord Farnham playing the part of Sergeant of the R.I.C., Lieut. Martin playing the supposed ballad-singer.

[75]

A week later, when Martin departed for another camp, he slipped into my hand a scrap of paper bearing a scrap of philosophy from “The Rising of the Moon”: “’Tis a quare world, and ’tis little any mother knows when she sees her child creepin’ on the floor what’ll happen to it, or who’ll be who in the end.”

Well, I hope that I may yet chance across the humoursome little Irishman once more before the final—setting of the sun!

“The Homeland”

While we were thus making effort to entertain ourselves within the camp, outside in the Fest Theatre in Carlsruhe there was a performance, for the benefit of the Eighth War Loan, of “The Homeland,” a war vision by Leo Sternburg. A translation of this appeared in the Continental Times, a ridiculous and half-illiterate propaganda sheet which we could receive thrice weekly at a cost of 2.70 marks per month.

The scene is the battlefield. Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, moves amid the dead[76] men that lie about. The dawn is coming up the skies. Soldiers of the Medical Corps carry stretchers to and fro. Occasionally the mutter of the distant battle rolls over the scene.

The Wandering Jew laments that he has been unable to find extinction even in this welter of the world war. A dying soldier greets him as a messenger from the Homeland:

Give me your hand—that hand from home. They have not left me to die alone in a strange land. They have sent me greetings.

Ahasuerus: No, no!

Soldier: Your hand——

Ahasuerus: You have it. It is well. The most homeless of men stands before thee—he is as homeless as thou.

Soldier: As I! I who die for home—I homeless!

Ahasuerus: Thou art in error. The homeland would not die for thee.

The Wandering Jew goes on to speak of apathy among the people, and reminds the soldier that “not only arms win victories to-day. The war of all men against all men has been unloosed. War against the woman[77] and the child. War against fields and forests and farm and house. Peaceful labour turns to battle. The metal of the church bells fights. The seed fights as it falls into the furrow. Money marches in ranks.... But ... men eat and sleep and wax fat. They hear of the death of millions, and say: ‘Yes, yes.’ Gods that descend before their very eyes, and the wonders of a heroism half divine, no longer move their senses—no sacrifice can stir them out of their daily rut. They have but one care to trouble them—it is that you might return greater than when you set forth.”

Soldier (emphatically, to the men of the Medical Corps): Away! away! I would die of life and not of death.... Let me lie down beside mine enemy, he that hath endured what I have endured, he, as a comrade that understands me.

Ahasuerus: Come, thou mayst deem thyself blest in that thou diest so that thou mayst not behold a race of lesser men. Ye have grown beyond human compass in the fires of your time, your heads would strike the ceilings in your little chambers.

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Ultimately, however, new troops enter, and one of these gives reassurance to the dying man.

Second Soldier: Property hath converted itself into armies, and the joy of riches means only the capacity to give.... Coffers and chests fly open. Countesses bring their silver, the legacy of famous ancestors, the old maid-servant her hoarded wage. The widow gives up her golden chain, the last love gift of her dead mate; the merchant his gains, and the old peasants the walnut tree in whose shadow they played as children.... The whole land becomes a mighty armoury ... they hammer, hammer, hammer, day and night.

Dying Soldier: Do you not hear the thunder of Wieland’s hammer? The ringing armour of the Valkyries? Do you not hear the hoof-beats of their stallions?

Second Soldier: Yea, rivers and fields, mountains and woods dream anew their German dreams.... Silently the women offer up their beauty ... the park of roses becomes the potato patch. The savant is his own servant. The mother can no longer[79] mother her child. Work puts out the torch of love ... but all bear this ... they bear it for the sake of the blood which flowed for their sake.

Soldier: I die ... I die happy.

[He dies.]

Ahasuerus: O Fate! This moment outweighs all my two thousand years of torment. I am reconciled with my sorrow, in that the centuries have spared me to behold the mighty heroism of this people.

[Curtain.]

ONE OF OUR ORCHESTRA.

[80]

ENGINEER OF THE “HITACHI MARU.”

V
Victims of the “Wolf”

Carlsruhe Kriegsgefangenenlager being what was known as a Distribution Camp, there was a continual coming and going of officers. Here we had no continuing city. An occasional prisoner might linger on—as if entirely overlooked and forgotten—for a year or even[81] two; in the majority of cases, however, the stay only extended for a few weeks, sometimes merely a few days. On three consecutive weeks the cast for one of our plays was removed almost en bloc. Friendships were formed overnight, to be violently disrupted by departure on the morrow. In our little world was a complete epitome of life.

One afternoon in early March there arrived in camp a cartload of trunks and sea-chests bearing strange hieroglyphics, with a rumour that these would be followed by the officers of various nationality, including Japanese, captured from the ships sunk by the notorious German cruiser Wolf.

Two days later they arrived, sailormen from the seven seas, British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, so that the next morning their blue suits and brown boots gave the salon d’appel the appearance of a mercantile marine office when a crew is signing on. Some of the Captains, grizzled and weather-beaten, had an easy gait, a quiet laying down of the foot, which inevitably suggested the bridge or the moving decks of ships; different entirely from the more formal military stride.[82] Some of them were doubtless glad to stretch their legs, having been cruising in the piratical Wolf for a year or fifteen months.

The Japanese officers made me very heartily welcome to their hut, on a shelf in which I noticed immediately on my entry a little statue of Buddha. While I sketched some of these placid, not readily fathomable faces, I heard, in broken English, the tragic story of the broken life of their Captain, the Commander of the Hitachi Maru.

The Captain had intended suicide from the time he lost his vessel—thirteen of her crew were killed in the fight—and simply awaited his opportunity. This came to him in the darkness and amid the floes of Iceland, when the Wolf, with fangs red with blood, was running back for Kiel.

Engineer Lieut.-Commander K. Shiraishi, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is speaking, his immobile face—so that I may complete my sketch—as rigid as that of the little Buddha which I can see behind him. He has shared a berth with the Captain, and tells me that on the night of his disappearance he left the cabin, “and he come not back.” He had[83] slipped quietly overboard—“in the dark and among the ice”—thus embarking on a final voyage, new and strange.

“All night we hear the ice grinding past the ship,” said my Lieut.-Commander, without the flicker of an eyelid. “In the dark—and among the ice!”

Returning to my hut, by a literary coincidence not uncommon, I opened Joseph Conrad, and read in “Il Conde”: “He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breast-bone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operation of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one’s feelings.”

Captain Meadows, of the Tarantella, the first steamer sunk by the Wolf, was a man of Herculean build, and quite apparently, and as befitted the skipper of a ship named as his was, he had led the German Commander something of a dance. Every morning, until he was caught in the act, the Captain used to empty the water from his bath into the sea, and with it a bottle giving[84] the bearings of the Wolf, and some account of her depredations. Even when the time came that two or three German sailors flung themselves suddenly upon him, he succeeded in “mailing his letter,” and when he received a vehement reprimand he made retort that if the Commander thought it necessary to shout even louder he might use his megaphone!

CAPTAIN OF THE “TARANTELLA.”

The Wolf apparently employed a hydroplane with great effect in locating her prey, and in evading capture. The Captain of the Matunga showed me a snapshot—from which I made a sketch—of the last moments of his sinking ship.

Clinging to Office

However unwillingly officers may have come to Carlsruhe, there was always a certain loathness to leave for another camp, on the[87] principle, doubtless, that it is better to “bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” There was something hugely diverting in the tenacity with which prisoners clung to whatever shred of office or appointment they could lay claim to. The members of the Cabinet cannot be more reluctant to leave hold of their portfolios than were the Gefangenen to pack up their portmanteaux.

A SERBIAN OFFICER PRISONER OF WAR

One officer was Secretary for the English section; another was Assistant Secretary, while there were a number of Committeemen whose labours were not over-arduous. Two or three of us attended to the distribution of food to the needy; two or three to the doling out of clothing to the nude. Then there were the masters of music; pianists, violinists, and at least one ’cellist; the dramatic entertainers under the “O.C. Theatres”; and a group of choristers who in chapel every Sunday evening at evensong did lustily raise their voices in “Magnificat” and “Nunc Dimittis”; partly, it must be confessed, that the Lord might let His servants remain in peace!

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A REHEARSAL.

[89]

A Debating Society was formed, whose primary object, when the secrets of men’s hearts are laid bare, will probably prove to have been the providing of permanencies for the President and the Secretary. At these meetings, by the way, we gravely discussed problems so original as the Reconstitution of the Lords; the Influence of the Press; Classical or Modern Education in Public Schools; and with equal gravity on a more irresponsible evening the profound question, “Should bald heads be buttered?” To the best of my recollection we arrived at the conclusion that they should at least be boiled.

A French Captain, who in civil life was a wine merchant, gave a lecture on the wines and vineyards of France, the designing of a series of drawings and maps illustrative of which permitted me to pass out of my captivity for a spell, and wander in the pleasant region of the Gironde.

These were our only feasible ways of escape at Carlsruhe. A bird might flutter past the window of my chamber with a sharp little flight of song. At once I was out and away with it,[90] not necessarily to the magnificences and splendours, but perhaps to almost penurious patches and spaces on the outskirts of the dour old town of my nativity, where pavement and grass-plot touch, and where, amid the lamp-posts and the telegraph poles, there are familiar trees to be recognized and loved—where, indeed, one may lift to the lips and kiss the hem of Nature’s somewhat bedraggled skirt. And still—“You can’t get out!” said the starling.

One morning, lying alongside him in my cot, I remarked to a fellow-prisoner, “You look very happy.” To which, being well versed in the Scriptures, he immediately retorted, “I am happy in all things saving these bonds!”

It is not good for man to be alone, but doubtless Gefangenen had a little too much of the gregarious—one felt a recurring need for some seclusion deeper than the common captivity. Such a place of retirement I ultimately discovered, not in the chapel, but in the more mundane environment of our tiny theatre, crawling mouse-like into a crevice between one of the sidewings and the[91] wall. Here I was safe from even those who made their casual entrances and exits. Here also could I read to the plaintive accompaniment of M. Calvi’s violin busy on a Vieuxtemps “Air Varié,” or of M. Lazarri rehearsing a vocal number for Saturday evening’s concert—could indeed afford time to cheer and encourage these kindly artistes at the close of each piece by muffled applause from a hidden but not entirely anonymous audience.

At one corner of my narrow cell was a portion of a window giving on to the quadrangle, so that by raising an occasional eye I could see how our little world was wagging. To the rear was part of a set scene showing a lurid and blood-red sun setting over the waters, even in which primitive art there was the suggestion of many sunsets that I have seen; many that I yet hope to see.

A Straining of the Entente

Even in this quiet retreat, however, one could not count on being entirely free from faction and fight. On an otherwise quiet[92] Sunday afternoon, an English aviator at the piano and a French officer with a violin have fallen into feud over a matter of musical precedence, and within a few feet of each other are playing at the same time entirely different tunes, and that with vehemence and vindictiveness. The pianist, firmly planted on the piano stool, where he has spent most of the day, passes without pause or punctuation from Chopin to ragtime and from ragtime to absolute incoherence.

The Frenchman sits on a form with his back to the wall—literally and metaphorically—and vents his spleen on the catgut. I stand it for full fifteen minutes by my watch, and then, going quietly into the empty chapel and leaving the door sufficiently ajar, I open the organ, pull out all the stops, brace my knees against the swell pedals, and so burst into a sort of Grand Chœur in G.

When I emerged the Frenchman had fled and calm was once more settling upon the piano keys. Blessed are the peacemakers!

Our piano was ultimately a “baby” grand, though its tone was less infantile[93] than suggestive of that of an old roué. Indeed, there was little grand about it, except that there was so little “upright.”

Early next morning I discovered the French violinist in the court taking a variety of exercise, running, circling on the horizontal bar, and jumping over the forms and seats, in an effort doubtless to keep the muscles and sinews of his body as taut as his fiddle-strings.

A “Stirring Time”

There was one respect in which we could quite legitimately claim to be having a stirring time in camp, and that was as regards our ceaseless culinary operations. Recurrently as cook it was one’s duty to see that the members of one’s mess did not perish of starvation, surfeit, or ptomaine poisoning. Frequently with inadequate means as regards fuel, so that I have suggested to an officer endeavouring to thaw tinned sausage over burning paper that he might try Thermogene! Personally I achieved something of repute—or disrepute—for two dishes of my own[94] contriving, one a mock Scottish haggis, and the other what I am afraid was little more than a mockery of English plum-pudding.

It was through no reflection on our cooking, however, but simply for the reduction of a steadily increasing embonpoint that one of our number undertook a voluntary five days’ fast. Besides being under ordinary conditions extremely good-natured by day, X had a mirthful habit of laughing in his sleep, the only case in a considerable experience of somnambulistic phenomena among soldiers during the war which I have yet encountered.

In the early hours of the final morning of his fast he indeed laughed, but in a minor key, just a ghost of a guffaw, with a very apparent and pathetic tendency to merge into a sob. That morning he finished his fast and his breakfast almost simultaneously. In order that he should break the glad tidings gently, so to speak, to his famished and clamant stomach, we had specially reserved for him a tin of rice and milk, very happily designated “Amity.” This was followed up later in the day by a handful of[95] stewed prunes, and he was soon once more in his right mind, if not so essentially clothed upon. He had, in fact, dropped just about one stone in weight in these five days of fasting.

There was a suggestion that after the war some of us would be qualified to publish a cookery book: “Mrs. Beeton Beaten!”

TWICE WOUNDED

[96]

ORDERLY HANET—“LE PÈRE NOËL.”

VI
Air Raids and Other Activities

Carlsruhe Lager was located on the spot where a hundred people, mostly women and children, were killed during an air raid on Corpus Christi Day, 1916. A few days before the second anniversary our mess was at tea in the hut, when Father Daniels, the German priest, arrived in search[97] of the Roman Catholic padre, and partook of a cup. Our talk was of raids, of which there had been a succession, and of the air raid in particular.

“It happened,” said Father Daniels, “just outside the window of this hut; there, where the pole is.” The pole is only a few feet away. It is used as a bumble-puppy pole now. The trees around still bear marks of the explosion; pieces of shell and shrapnel embedded in the stems. There was no Corpus Christi procession, however, as so often claimed; simply a crowding for admission into a circus and menagerie. Old Maier, the German Lazarette orderly, had a son wounded that day.

Carlsruhe and Mannheim both suffered heavily from our aircraft during the period of my captivity. In one week there were eight raids—one every day and two on Sundays, so to speak. In the early hours of the morning we would awaken to the melancholy music of the warning sirens, and, getting out of bed and into slippers, would find all the heavens intersected by searchlights.

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Soon the shrapnel would begin to fall heavily into the courtyard, the pieces striking the ground and the roofs of our huts very viciously. In the morning we could usually pick up a large amount of shrapnel, some of the ragged shreds being almost a foot in length. During the night the sounding of the air-raid warning signal was customarily greeted by ironical cheers from the Allied prisoners; during a day attack we would stand out in the court and watch proceedings, although, with a commendable anxiety for our safety, the German authorities would urge us to take cover.

One such air raid took place about nine o’clock on the morning of the 31st May, the day after the festival of Corpus Christi. An arrangement had been arrived at between the belligerents, I understand, that no bombing should take place on that day, but, in their usual absent-minded fashion, the Germans had committed a misdemeanour. So here were our boys over first thing with a gentle reminder. This consisted of ten bombs—a sort of decalogue of imperative “thou shalt nots”—several of which fell quite near to[101] the camp. Heavy damage was done, and there were a considerable number of casualties among the civilians. We were so unhappy, however, as to witness one of our ’planes brought down in combat, and later we learned that a second machine had fallen.

FUNERAL OF TWO BRITISH AVIATORS

This last fell into a marsh, and neither the craft nor the crew were recovered. The other two men, however, were buried the following afternoon. Besides representation from all the other nationalities in camp, the funeral party included twelve British officers. After selection of the aviator officer prisoners and the senior ranks five places were still available, and these we balloted for. I drew a blank, but R., successful, was not too keen about going, and I secured a gift of his place, helping him to a decision, if truth must be told, by a little present of two tins, each containing one hundred cigarettes!

This was my second time outside the gates during the whole of my seven months’ captivity at Carlsruhe. The journey was the same as before, though now was visible the whole wondrous work of Nature in these last few months of spring and early summer.[102] In church I sat in the second row immediately behind General von Rinck, and could not help observing how his grey hair and his grey, deeply-engraven face, harmonized and were at one with the field-grey of his uniform, but that in that face there was no note of answering colour to the red facings of his tunic, or to the finely-arranged ribbons of his many decorations and distinctions.

The service was similar to the former, and throughout the brief time that it lasted the sides of the two black wooden boxes which lay before the altar, a wreath at the foot of each, appeared to fall asunder, and I seemed to see clearly the poor mangled bodies which were therein. The same impressive music as we passed from the church and up the avenue to the cemetery; the same word of command to the firing-party; the same volleys fired upward into futility; the same tribute paid by each of us, a spadeful of dust—to what would soon be but a spadeful of dust. There is little variation in Death, or in the ceremonies by which we endeavour to disguise from ourselves his distressing and disturbing realisms.[103] Being Saturday, there were many civilians in the cemetery, staid old men who seemed to have come in from the country; students and schoolboys standing at the salute; women weeping at the burial of the dead who have caused their dead!

A few days later the civilians, mostly factory girls, killed in the air raid were buried, but we neither heard nor saw any evidences of the funeral. The German communiqué read: “Shortly after 9 a.m. an attack ensued on the open town of Carlsruhe. Ten or twelve bombs were dropped, which fell, partly in open country, partly in gardens. Some damage to houses caused. Unfortunately, four people fell victims to the attack; six others were badly hurt, partly from their own fault. At 9.45 the alarm was over.”

And—the four aviators and the four civilians were lying very quiet!

An Inimitable Imitator

Sometimes, after “lights out,” a warning siren would be blown in camp, which, to the initiated, simply made warning that Captain[104] Teixeira, our inimitable imitator, had been induced good-naturedly to give a performance. Then might be heard the Captain sawing his way to freedom, to the bringing in of the disconcerted guard. Followed imitation of all the fowls in the farmyard, and all the feathers in the forest, or, most humorous of all, “an infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry.” Perhaps I would suggest twins, whereat the Captain, who is a family man, would revert to poultry, and give an imitation of an exultant hen, whose cackling we found none the less realistic in that we have a tin of “eggs and bacon” under way for to-morrow’s breakfast.

CAPTAIN TEIXEIRA.

Captain Teixeira could not only imitate the song of birds. He was a singer himself. Among many other manifestations of[105] friendship, he gave me a set of improvisations, “Songs from Coimbra”—Coimbra, a University town and capital of the Portuguese province of Beira, giving its name to that school of poetry which had inception in 1848 with the publication of “O Trovador.” I have made effort to convert these “Cantares” into English verse:

[106]

A German Bombardment

One afternoon German aviators bombarded the camp—very harmlessly, however—with broadsheets, and not with bombs. After an exciting race and scrum I succeeded in securing a copy. It was in the form of a child’s catechism, with as heading a quaint woodcut of a town on the Rhine. It commenced: “Mother: My child, lovst thou thy Fatherland? Son: Yes, mother, Yes, with my whole heart. Mother: Why lovst thou thy Fatherland? Son: Because there was I cradled.” It ended with an appeal for the Eighth War Loan.

Although we had, of course, no access to English newspapers, the German authorities permitted us to order the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt, and from these the most imperative news was translated and written up daily in a communiqué book. During more urgent periods Extrablätter were posted up in the dining hut. Thus news of the great German offensive in March, 1918 percolating into camp caused us unutterable dullness and depression. Most of us seemed[107] absolutely helpless and hopeless in these dark days.

“I love my country,” said Lieut. H—— chokingly.

To make matters worse there was almost an entire clearance of the camp, including many of the men who had added to the gaiety of such nations as were here represented. Flags were flying, and in the distant streets one could hear the sound of singing and cheering. Whether by chance, however, or, as is possible, by more delicate design, none of the banners, except the two official ones at the gate, were hung so high in the surrounding houses as blatantly and jubilantly to overlook the camp. In the case of the Russian peace, as in that with the Ukraine, the flags were hung from the topmost stories; in the present instance they were not hung above the level of the palisades, and were more evidently intended for the man in the street.

The Bath Attendant

The soldiers on sentry duty were rarely unfriendly, though they were forbidden to[108] have any intercourse with the prisoners. Certain functionaries, however, we, of necessity, got to know more intimately. Entering the bathing hut one morning, the attendant—a new man, youthful, and of healthy and happy appearance; his predecessor was the most morose and doubtless liverish of Germans—was reading a book with a lurid cover giving an account of the U-boat campaign. He made endeavour to hide the volume from my sight. I found that he had been a sailor, and, among other English vessels, had served in the steamers of the White Star Line. He was certainly decidedly at sea as to the duties of his present office, his aim apparently being to give us a douche with the cleansing properties of a hot and the tonic virtues of a cold bath at one and the same time. All, however, in the happiest and most friendly fashion.

One morning he was in beaming, if somewhat bashful, mood, and confided to me that he had been married the previous night; showed me his ring, and ultimately a photograph of the blushing young bride—who, it must be confessed, looked decidedly older[109] and more experienced than her mate. He further informed me that she had “viel Geld,” while he—rolling up his sleeve, and demonstrating—had nothing but his muscles. Perhaps it was owing to over-much happiness, but on that morning he seemed quite unable to manipulate the various screws and levers, so that we were quite chilled before the coming of the cold douching.

Our Orderlies

Our orderlies, like ourselves, were of various nationality, but there was a consensus of opinion that the genius of the French soldier seemed to lie most in the direction of that office. I, at all events, was fortunate in my Frenchmen. First was our faithful Gustav—breaker of cups and not too scrupulous a cleaner of the same, but nevertheless a kindly and willing servant and a shrewd. When one morning, amid great excitement and much embracing and kissing upon both cheeks by his countrymen, Gustav left the camp en route for France—his indifferent health and the long period of his[110] captivity entitling him to an exchange—we were somewhat disconsolate.

ORDERLY TOULON, CHASSEUR ALPINI.

Followed Robert, however, who told us that we might call him “Bobby,” and who broke cups quite as effectively as Gustav, and cleaned them no more efficiently. To us he was docility itself, but one morning, having dressed with extreme care, and having found a substitute to wait upon us, he went[111] off mysteriously to town before breakfast, and on his return informed us that he had been sentenced by the Germans to fifteen months’ imprisonment “for revolt.” His offence was committed in the first year of the war, and there was dubiety as to when the punishment would commence. He showed me a photograph of his “femme et enfants,” whom he had not seen in the flesh since 2nd August, 1914. Then he wept. “Courage, Robert,” said I. “You will see your enfants, après la guerre.” “Yes, but they will no longer be enfants!”

[112]

THE TWO SERBIAN COLONELS TAKE THE SUN.

[113]

LT. BERTOLOTTI.

VII
Carlsruhe at its Kindliest

With the coming of spring and early summer, Carlsruhe Camp, which for many weeks had lain under deep snow, followed, at the touch of thaw, by layers of mud and great pools of water, began to assume a more pleasing aspect. In the centre of the court was a plot of green with a bordering of rose bushes.[114] On either side of this were two brief avenues of horse-chestnut trees, which towards the middle of April were in full foliage, the leaves hanging downwards like hands held demurely or devoutly, the flowers showing like candles before an altar, or fairy lights upon a fir tree at Christmas time.

A month later, sitting in the court reading, we would be bombarded by blossoms from these chestnuts, as if they would say, Look! And assuredly they were well worth looking at. Whimsically they reminded me of rubicund country faces framed in old-fashioned white bonnets.

A prisoner myself, I imprison a few of these blossoms where they have fallen between the pages of my book. In the fall of a blossom or of a leaf from a tree there is the suggestion of a launch as well as of a funeral.

Outside the Lager was a great poplar with a fine upward thrust and sweep above the palisade; within was his tremulous sister, an aspen, with leaves all aquiver like sequins upon the attire of a gipsy dancer.

Even the barbed-wire fences seemed to make effort to hide something of their[117] menace, the grasses and weeds growing at their feet, laying frail hands upon them as if clinging to them for support.

LIEUT. CARUSO

A new hut is being erected in camp, and in the early morning, among the other perfumes of Nature, I noted with pleasure the smell of new wood. After all, a wooden hut is but a tree forced and fashioned into another growth. Pity it is, almost, that it in turn cannot bourgeon and bring forth!

I am reading Turgenev. Lieut. Hunt passes me running; he is doing his daily three times circuit of the camp. “Torrents of Spring!” he cries laughingly, kicking up his heels colt-like, in reference both to my book and to his own exuberance!

Linguistic Efforts

If we did not subsist by taking in each other’s laundry we possibly survived death from ennui by teaching each other languages.

As I read I can hear Dr. Griffin’s deliberate and enunciating voice. He is our most proficient of professors, and is giving a French officer a lesson in English, with special reference to the pronunciation. “The[118] knife of the boy and the stick of the man. Have you the pen of the sister?”

Two wounded officers are pushed in through the gates—one in a bath chair, the other on a stretcher on wheels. A gramophone is giving forth a military march with well-nigh the full power of a military band. The march finishes with “God Save the King,” and a number of the officers stand to attention. A drayman, who has been delivering stores to the Kantine, cracks his whip with a report like a revolver shot, until the sentry opens the gate, and he passes out. From one of the adjoining houses come flights of arpeggios from a piano well played.

One of my Italian friends, who, on the maternal side, is of Scottish descent, is learning English, with the very tender idea of “giving a surprise to Mother.” Bertolotti, another good comrade, and very apt pupil of my own, approaches me after about a week’s tuition. “Good morning,” he says. “Good morning.” Then, with more deliberation, “It is a—bloody fool (beautiful) day!”

Even this, however, is not so bad as the[119] story told of Commandant Niemeyer of Clausthal, who, when some prisoners on parade showed evidence of mirthfulness at his somewhat pretentious display of rather dubious English, burst forth irately, “You officers think I know nothing—but I know damn all!”

LT. VISCO.

I must not pass from my Italian friends without reference to the hospitable and, indeed, quite regal dinner to which the group[120] entertained me upon a certain Sunday afternoon. Major Tuzzi sat at the head of the board, for the covering of which my hosts had succeeded in conjuring up from somewhere or other a white table-cloth—the only one I saw during my captivity. They had also achieved quite a variety of dishes, all of undeniable cookery. Chief of these was a great trencher of macaroni, in the consumption of which—because of the greater deftness in manipulation of my friends, and the unbounded generosity of their helpings—I was easily the last man. A right merry and unforgetable repast, with more of kindly family suggestion in it than any I had in Germany.

Last Day in Carlsruhe

On Friday morning the 5th July, between six and seven, “Hans” entered our room, and fixing a sorrowful eye upon me—as one who should enter the condemned cell to announce that it is approaching eight o’clock—commenced his customary formula, “Well, gentlemen, I’m sorry——” I knew that the hour of my departure had come, and, before[123] he had finished speaking, had mentally begun to pack up.

LIEUT. LAZZARI

My chief emotion was exhilaration at the notion of a change of environment after just two hundred days of captivity at Carlsruhe. I bought a suit-case—chiefly composed of cardboard—into which I made as diplomatic a packing of my sketches and papers as might be, in case of trouble in that direction during the search which prefaces our departure as it did our advent.

“Naked we came into the world,” but I discovered that I had gradually amassed very considerable possessions. Bundled most of them into a woven straw sack which had held French biscuits, and which had already done me comfortable service as a rug in front of my couch. Handed over the cash-box—I had been appointed cashier of the camp the night before—and gave account of my stewardship to the Brigadier-General who was senior British officer in camp. 3.50 marks expended to repair broken violin strings; 6.20 marks received from an orderly, being the billiard-table takings for two days. Then farewells to be said all round.

[124]

Teixeira embraces me in true Portuguese fashion, Tuzzi wrings my hand and repeats sadly, “It is necessary,” a phrase which we have both come to use in pressing upon each other little presents of tobacco and edibles. Lazzari gives me to understand that his robust tenor will be mute to-morrow night, Calvi that his heart-strings as well as those of his violin are broken. And so we pass into the “silence” room for search. It turns out in the present instance to be a mere formality—the interpreter puts his hand into my portmanteau and makes a few pressures, as if he were feeling for heart-beats rather than for hidden devices and designs.

We partake of soup—the last plate of an uncountable series—and then we form up outside the court. We hear that we are bound for Beeskow, near Berlin.

We answer to our names, and take up position in fours; there is a hoarse order, and a clicking of magazines—the guards are loading their rifles. The officer reports all correct, salutes, and then motions us forward with a movement of his hand, and thus, amid cries of encouragement and[125] injunction from our comrades who remain, we get into step, and pass through the gates. My last vision of Carlsruhe Kriegsgefangenenlager shows me the British Brigadiers and the Serbian Colonels returning our salute; Maggiore Tuzzi, with a look of settled melancholy upon his face, and Capitaine Teixeira, standing aloof, with his hand upon his heart, as suggesting that I shall ever have occupancy there.

MAGGIORE TUZZI.

[127]

PART II

BEESKOW—BERLIN

[130]

“ALTES AMT,” BEESKOW LAGER

[131]

A “VERBOTEN” SKETCH.

VIII
Beeskow Lager

The journey from Carlsruhe, in Baden, to Beeskow in der Mark presented a marked contrast to the nightmare, the shivering and sleepless progression between Le Cateau and Carlsruhe in mid-winter. We occupied second-class carriages, well and warmly upholstered, and these we held without change throughout the journey of thirty odd hours.

[132]

The people encountered en route were entirely civil, and not over-curious. Every second woman seemed to bear upon her back—besides the apparent burden of the war—a basket; every third man a rucksack. Everywhere were visible evidences of intensive agriculture; the making the most of a possibly not too opulent soil. Tillage right up the hillslopes; potato patches almost up to the six-foot way. Continually we alternated field and wood; brown boles of fir and pine, with, hidden in their duskiness, the white stems of the silver birch, like flashes of summer lightning.

We had just a glimpse of Heidelberg, with its castle on the hill, and arrived at Frankfurt towards six o’clock in the evening. We marched through the crowded station—which in one of its wings bore evidence of a recent air raid—to a hall where we had a meal of macaroni and rissoles served by a pert and self-possessed boy of eleven clothed in a precocious suit of evening dress.

Next morning Weimar, with its quiet memories of Goethe and Schiller; Merseburg, with its vast and unquiet Krupp works,[133] springing up here in precaution against possible air raids on Essen. And so, about nine of the clock on Saturday evening, after a divergence from the main line, the train pulled up at Beeskow, where it became at once apparent that practically all the youngsters, and a large number of the grown-ups of the town, had turned out to witness our arrival.

It was the nearest thing to taking part on the wrong side at a spectacle or victory that I had yet experienced—of being “butcher’d to make a Roman holiday”—and yet it was soon evident that there was not a sufficiency of “hate” in the whole crowd to cover a 50-pfennig piece. To most of the children this was the first sight of the Engländer, and they had obviously expected much more of monstrosity and oddity than was forthcoming, and were disposed to be mirthful on very easy provocation.

A Lieutenant of the Cameron Highlanders, dressed in an arrangement of the garb of old Gaul, which permitted of carpet slippers, puttees, and an orderly’s peaked cap, consequently received most of the attention.

Presently we came to a red-brick building[134] of grim and ancient aspect, with still visible evidences of an ancient moat. Turning up a rudely cobbled way, we passed through an old wooden gateway, which, opened for our admittance, closed immediately again, making a welcome shutting-out of the noise of the rabble. We were in a sloping courtyard of circumscribed appearance, with a square old red-brick tower standing up in the dusk, and a surrounding of other buildings, with rolling roofs, having rounded dormer windows in them.

Most of the other officers were disappointed at a first impression of the place. “Lee’s happy,” said one, “because he’s got an old castle to sketch!”

Before we could presume on bed—for which, having spent a sleepless night in the train, we were more than ready—there had to be a searching of baggage. This brought me no little searching of heart, my impedimenta, as an old-timer, being easily the heaviest, and containing sketches and journals which I desired to preserve. I was busily explaining the multitude of these note-books by hinting at my theatrical activities at[136] Carlsruhe, when another of the examining officers produced from one of my portfolios what at first sight might have seemed to be a somewhat incriminating sketch of that camp. Beyond a rather flattering interest in my artistic efforts generally, however, the drawings were passed without trouble, but the Oberleutnant said that it would be necessary to retain for perusal one book of my journal.

THE PRISON CAMP AT BEESKOW—AN AUDIENCE WITH THE COMMANDANT.

I found that my dormitory was located in what had been a bishop’s palace, the arms still being visible on either side of one of the windows. Passing up a very old and dirty, but not uninteresting staircase, and through a somewhat dingy and dilapidated dining-hall, I obtained sanctuary with eleven other officers in an equally dingy and disreputable room, the ancient oaken cross-rafters of which had been painted to a ridiculous imitation of marble! Notwithstanding, there was small likelihood of my dreaming “that I dwelt in marble halls.” Lights, for this night only, were not turned out until midnight, though I have it on my conscience that I endeavoured to mislead[139] the Feldwebel into the belief that this was the customary hour at Carlsruhe.

THE OLD TOWER, BEESKOW LAGER

Hot coffee—Ersatz—made from acorns, was served at eight o’clock next morning; at nine, to the sound of hammer-blows struck upon the old, red-rusted coulter of a plough swung from a wooden frame, we mustered in the court for roll-call. There were three officers—the Commandant, an elderly gentleman, with an obviously explosive temper, and a decidedly unmilitary stoop; the Oberleutnant, portly and complacent-looking; and the Lieutenant, a young man, and the only one of the trio to have seen service in this war. He was here, indeed, because he had been very badly wounded. The orders of the camp were read by the interpreter, who would doubtless have looked rather distingué in evening dress, but whom a private soldier’s uniform rendered stiff and gauche.

He was sufficiently gracious to give me some details as to the history of our new domicile, the altes Amt, and the squat old Turm. The place was erected in 1252 by Barons or Knights, in whose hands it remained for a[140] couple of centuries. These Barons becoming financially indebted to the Bishops of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and Lebus, the buildings ultimately passed into their possession, and were used as an ecclesiastical residence. About the beginning of last century they reverted to the Crown, and finally to the Corporation of Beeskow. It was looked upon as a punishment camp, and we were the first British prisoners to be held there.

The Kantine and the Catering

We had a Kantine, run by a civilian named Herr Solomon, who, however, because of his dilatoriness, and an easy deferring until to-morrow of what should have been ordered to-day, was always known as “Morgen, Morgen!” The Kantine, which was open daily from 11 to 1, and 5 to 7 evening, contained a selection of commodities ranging from a lager beer—which was very essentially a Lager beer—to a solitary example of a variation of Sandow’s chest-expander, for which no purchaser was ever forthcoming. Something to expand a still[141] lower compartment of our anatomy was what we were in continual search of.

HERR SOLOMON, THE KANTINE KEEPER.

The catering here, however, which was also in Herr “Morgen, Morgen’s” hands, marked a great advance on the Carlsruhe kitchen. The finer hand of femininity was quite apparent in the cooking, a number of women from the country being employed, and we usually were served with a soup which we could eat without loss of self-respect. Being in the centre of an agricultural district, we had a good supply of potatoes and certain vegetables, and when we were able to supplement[142] these with a slice of bully, we did not do too badly.

“Much Reading——!”

Immediately on our arrival at Beeskow I was appointed to the enviable post of librarian, but found myself in the unenviable position of having no library. I accordingly placed upon the notice board the following urgent appeal:

“ONLY ONE BOOK!”

This rather tickled the camp, including the German officers, who immediately responded with a gift of some twenty volumes. Unfortunately, these were entirely in German, through which only one or two of the[143] officers could even spell their way, but they were in the nature of a godsend to M. Bloch, a Russian dentist, who was the only foreign officer in camp, and who spoke German as fluently as one may speak that influent tongue. Pro tem., then, I considered myself as acting to him in the not onerous capacity of private librarian.

A few fragments of Tauchnitz editions were very literally “fluttering” around the camp, and on these I affixed wherever possible the seal of my office—and a touch of seccotine. I also sent out appeals to the Christlichen Vereine Junger Männer, Berlin; to Sir Alfred Davies, and the Camp Libraries Committee, London; while I made ordering of a formidable list of Tauchnitz publications. Berlin responded almost immediately with thirty volumes of varied sort, mostly the gift apparently of private citizens.

In several of the works I observed a bookplate, inscribed “Sophie, Mein Buch,” and representing a very green and very flourishing Tree of Knowledge, bearing five apples of a more than tempting redness, a rising sun,[144] and an open volume. Somehow the bookplate conjured up before me a vision of the gentle Sophie, fresh as the dawn, and rosy and ripe as the pictured apples.

With this collection and the odds and ends floating about the camp I decided to open shop, though my shelves would only afford a fraction of a book per man. Accordingly at nine o’clock in the morning, immediately after roll-call, I headed a regular rush and stampede to the library; undid the padlock, swung wide the door of the book cupboard, and declared the library indeed open.

As senior officer of the camp, the Colonel had choice of the first volume, after which it was a case of first come first served. For a few minutes the floor space in front of my cupboard presented something of the appearance of a football field with a “rugger” scrum on, and then I closed the door upon only two books—and these the second volumes of two-volume novels. In less than a month, however, I had several hundred books under my charge.

One day the German interpreter handed me a note of four volumes which he was[145] desirous of having on loan. These were: “The Poems of Robert Burns”; “The Adventures of Tom Sawyers”; “An Ideal Husband,” by Oscar Wilde; and “East Lynne,” by——Carlyle! This last rather nonplussed me until I recalled that the name of the greatly-wronged and long-suffering solicitor in the novel—which one might say had solved the problem of perpetual emotion—was Carlyle.

It was this same interpreter who, donating to the library a small guide book of Beeskow, first tore off the cover which carried a map of the town and environs. “As a good German,” he said, “it is my duty to prevent you from escaping.”

We Walk Abroad

Having adhibited our signatures to a form of parole stipulating that we should not make effort to escape, under penalty of death, during such time as we were out for exercise, on the third or fourth day after our arrival we went out for a walk under conduct of Lieut. Kruggel.

[146]

Beeskow is a country town of four or five thousand inhabitants, and possesses certain streets picturesque and paintable. There is a red-brick church, with a steeple and a great sloping roof. On the old walls, which still stand, are a series of towers, on the largest of which, as if presiding over the town, were two storks, who gazed at us as if with curiosity over the edge of their nest.

On this first morning we elected to visit the playing-field allotted to the camp, which is situated about a mile distant from it. To the professional eye of one of our number, an old internationalist, it will serve for football, but not for cricket.

On the other side of the road, behind a Gasthof, and just on the edge of a strip of forest, there was a tennis court, but it had obviously not been played on for many a day. We at once commenced clearing the ground, a task in which we were soon being aided by mein Herr of the Gasthof—who is proprietor of the court—his wife, and his daughters.

One of the girls has a rake, which she[147] playfully aims at Lieutenant Kruggel, who promptly throws up his arms and cries, “Kamarad!”

THE STORK TOWER, BEESKOW.

As we returned, a bald-headed, elderly gentleman standing behind the gate of a villa garden spat upon the ground, and treated us to a mouthful or two of morning hate. Lieutenant Kruggel apologized profusely. Strange that the civilian should be uncivil—the soldier never.

[148]

Birds of a Feather

In the little courtyard three or four white fan-tailed pigeons fluttered about the roofs, like peace birds prematurely arrived from oversea, while on the other side of the barbed wire was a small colony of rabbits and poultry and pigs, the property of the German guard. Then there was Jacob, a ferocious and fearless jackdaw with clipped wings, who was not indisposed to be friendly, however. Certainly we were companions in misfortune, my wings not less thoroughly clipped than his. Ultimately, while I read, or even sketched, he would lie on his back in my hand with his legs in the air, ever and anon opening a drowsy eye. Long before I had seen them, however, he would have greeted several of his own kind, if not his own kin, wheeling round the old tower, and they would return answer.

PRISONERS ALL.

Sometimes of a morning I would pick Jacob up as I passed to the bath, and, perched upon my finger, he would participate with me in the rigorous joys of the cold douche, the water rattling off his back[150] like rain from an umbrella. Latterly there were two jackdaws, and I have watched a German sentry feeding them with spiders collected in a matchbox, swinging them out on their own thread as an angler would cast a baited line. After the Armistice these two delightful vagabonds suddenly and mysteriously vanished. Rumour had it that they appeared on a German table in a German pie!

[152]

THE PRISON GATEWAY

[153]

IX
Escapes and Escapades

Only one officer ever escaped from Beeskow Camp, and he only by the dusty and tenebrous passage of Death. He was a Rumanian, and he actually succeeded in scaling the high wall encircling the Lager, but fell off into the dried moat and broke his neck.

Tunnelling under the ancient wall was the method that seemed to hold out most promise of success, and a number of efforts were made in this direction. These were all detected, however, at various stages of the mining operations. One such discovery led to a regular hue and cry and the hunt up for possible “holes.” Three or four Posten, one of whom put a facetious finger to the side of his nose, came clattering into the reading-room on this errand, when we all[154] held up our feet to facilitate matters! In explanation of the gaping hole found behind a cupboard in one of the dormitories “rats” were suggested.

A new Feldwebel who came to the camp seemed to have received strict injunction to look daily at the bars of the windows to make certain that there had been no tampering with them overnight. Thus he had a habit of dropping in at unexpected moments to the library, the dining-hall, or the dormitories, but always with an air of looking for some one or something else. Assuredly he did not wish to impute to us the using upon the windows of anything so unfriendly as a file.

One morning he came suddenly into our room, walked awkwardly and self-consciously to the window, by which was standing a deck chair; then, casting a quick, sidelong glance at the barred pane, he said smilingly in German, “A very good chair,” and so departed.

THE MARIENKIRCHE, BEESKOW

This Feldwebel, by the way, although he arrived in July, came in like a lion, and went out like a lamb, turning out to be the gentlest[157] German of them all. He was black-bearded as Thor or Odin, and at his first parade, on the appearance of the Commandant and staff, he bellowed “Ach-tung!” in a stentorian voice, which, if it did not make us shake in our shoes, certainly caused us to smile in our sleeves. Even the camp officers were amused, and Lieut. Kruggel laughed outright. Next morning the poor Feldwebel’s “Ach-tung!” was so subdued and so robbed of its virility, that it was more stimulating to our risible faculties than that of the day before. He had obviously been requested to modify his powerful “word of command.”

The Flight that Failed

One day I had been sketching the interior of the Marienkirche at Beeskow, a sentry with loaded rifle sitting by me in the silent church. He informed me that he also was an artist, but with his feet and not his hands, and that he had danced at the London Hippodrome. That night, after roll-call, the German, Lieutenant Stark, expressed a desire to see the drawing.

[158]

As it was dark, I practically impelled him for a few paces to the arc-lamp at the gate, at the very moment when three Captains courageously made an effort to pass through the building used as an office, which gives on to the garden, from whence access to the road would have been comparatively easy. A further diversion was created by a Lieutenant falling down in the court as if in a fit, though this was nothing but a feint. The office was occupied by Germans, however, and, softly and politely closing the door behind them, the trio turned back. Captain Brown, by reason of his great stature—he was six feet six inches—was readily recognized, and next morning the three officers were brought up for attempting to escape, and sentenced to three days’ confinement in the “Tower.”

Imprisonment in this old strong place, by the way, was not looked upon as a very grievous punishment. In fact, but for the disability of being deprived of the daily walk, it was an improvement on our ordinary condition. The prisoner had a room, a bed, a table, and a chair to himself; a lamp, which[161] he could keep burning long after “lights out,” and meals sent up to him by a member of his mess punctually at the appointed times. Then, as librarian, I allowed certain latitudes in the supply of literature. To Captain Brown, as appropriate to his position, I sent Tighe Hopkins’ “Dungeons of Old Paris”; then, relenting, and remembering that he was a Scot and an Edinburgh man, I followed this up immediately by Stevenson’s “The Master of Ballantrae.”

THE LATE LIEUT. W. L. ROBINSON, V.C. (A FELLOW-PRISONER AT BEESKOW LAGER)

Another bid for freedom was made by Captain R., to whom for the purpose I lent a red neckerchief and a civilian cap, which had somehow escaped the authoritative eye and got through to me. R.’s scheme was to secrete himself under a table covered with a blanket, at which a quartette was playing a belated game of “Bridge” in the court under one of the lamps and in close proximity to the barbed fence, cut the wire, and lie hid in the shrubbery until such time as he might find opportunity of passing out of the gate.

We had just sat down to dinner, when the violent ringing of the Appell bell[162] announced to us that the plot had been detected. Next morning I met a German soldier carrying a yard or two of barbed wire—like a line newly baited—with which to replace the cutting made by the Captain, and at parade a camp order was read notifying all concerned that no more tables or chairs would be permitted in the courtyard. Almost immediately thereafter, amid the groans of the British officers, began a ruthless cutting down of the few shrubs and saplings which adorned the yard and which could conceivably afford us any hiding.

Even Lieut. Kruggel’s sunflowers and creepers, which provided a hedge of privacy for his little cottage, had to be sacrificed, to his great distress and disgust. In the afternoon three pumpkins sat forlornly upon the three steps of the Lieutenant’s cottage, all that had been left to him of horticultural adornment!

On another evening in October an officer, disguised as a German Posten, boldly approached the gate with the somewhat optimistic hope that he would be permitted to pass out unchallenged. He was detected by[163] the sentry, however, and came running back, taking off his disguise as he fled. When the guards ultimately reached his room for a search, he was playing “Patience.” Before making his venture he returned me his library book, which, I observed with interest, was the Iliad. Unhappily, there was to be no Odyssey for him on this occasion.

One morning at breakfast a civilian arrived in the dining-hall, accompanied by a sentry, to execute some repairs upon the gas stoves. He turned his back for a moment; the Posten is reported to have looked lovingly and longingly into a pot of rice, and lo, presto! a couple of pairs of pincers belonging to the plumber had disappeared. No trace of what they called the “tongs” being forthcoming before morning roll-call, a search was instituted, during which time, except for the senior officer of each room, we were excluded from our quarters. The pincers were discovered next day, but for two mornings we were deprived of our walks abroad.

[164]

Ragging the Commandant

There is a piece of music of amazing eccentricity and extravagance, yclept “By Heck,” by Henri. It is what is known as a “Fox Trot,” and, as recorded for the gramophone, is played by the Metropolitan Band. We were sufficiently mischievous one morning to arrange that it commence its erratic riot at an open window immediately the word “Achtung!” from the Feldwebel announced the arrival of the Commandant on parade.

The scheme worked beyond wildest imaginings. One blow from the hammer upon the old coulter, and we tumbled out—and fell in. Simultaneously with the second stroke the door of the Commandant’s room opened, and he emerged, for all the world after the fashion of the little male figure which used to issue from the old-fashioned weather-house when the day promised fine, or foul, I forget which. It was certainly to be foul this morning.

CARICATURE OF THE CAMP COMMANDANT.
By a Rumanian officer.

“Achtung!” We came to the salute, and simultaneously there came a burst of mirthful music from the window. The effect on the Commandant was electrical. He[165] shook his fist at the open window, and in two or three seconds had as many convulsed sentries tearing up the stairs to stop the ribald strains. Meanwhile, with thumping of timpani, drum-tap, cat-call, cock-crow, whistle, and motor-horn, the gramophone ground out its litany, until at last it was pulled up with a jerk. The Commandant had the instrument commandeered and sequestered in the tower, but later, yielding to the plausibilities of Lieut. D., he returned[166] it. “I think I like theatre better in the morning,” was the new interpreter’s comment.

The mere sight of our somewhat careless parade seemed sometimes sufficient to throw the Commandant into a frenzy. One morning a Lieutenant was caught smoking by the old man, who swung his arms furiously, and passed sentence of three days’ confinement in the tower. To relieve the tedium the prisoner must have taken a flute with him, for towards evening melancholy notes floated from the barred window, the air being “The Close of a Perfect Day!”

“His Excellency Wishes”

On a certain day in August, the result doubtless of our continual complaint as to conditions in the Lager, His Excellency General Waldhausen, Inspector of Prisoner of War Camps, paid us a visit. Rather a soldierly type this old General, with gruffness and kindliness apparently continually contending for the mastery. He shook hands with the Colonel and some of the senior officers, and asked the name of each of the others—to what purpose I cannot[167] conceive, as most of these names could convey nothing to him.

“His Excellency wishes that you are to gather round!” Thus the interpreter. We gathered round very intimately, something to His Excellency’s dismay, who had not anticipated such an encircling movement.

Then His Excellency opened his mouth and spoke to us, and signalled with his hand to the interpreter. The interpreter looked more than usually pallid, and more than usually uncomfortable. He began in trembling tones: “His Excellency wishes—His Excellency wishes—His Excellency wishes you to know that we consider you no longer our enemies.”

His Excellency casts glances, first at the interpreter, then at us, to see whether his magnanimity has been rightly understood.

Then he talks again, and the interpreter, with knocking at the knees and dismay in the eyes, essays to interpret.

“His Excellency wishes—His Excellency wishes—that you do obey strictly the prescriptions of the camp.” The staff smile; His Excellency looks suspicious. “Have they[168] rightly understood?” One of the staff suggests to him that some of the English officers are laughing. Gruffness predominates at once.

The interpreter, more visibly nervous than ever, is incited to try again. “His Excellency wishes—His Excellency wishes—His Excellency wishes that——”

His Excellency fumes; His Excellency wishes that the poor interpreter—now almost in a state of collapse—commit his message to paper before he commit further indiscretions. There is a lengthy confabulation and concoction of phrase, and ultimately the interpreter reads stammeringly:

“His Excellency wishes you to know that he considers you as no longer our enemies. His Excellency wishes you to know that he will do everything he can possibly for your comforts. His Excellency wishes you to strictly observe the prescriptions of the camp.” Thereafter His Excellency gives audience, and, as a result, it is understood that a card system of parole will be adopted; that an effort will be made to combat the plague of fleas, and that otherwise there will be immediate reform.

[169]

NARROW ALLEY, BEESKOW.

[170]

X
In Church—a Polish Baptism

Once a month we were privileged to attend the ancient Marienkirche, where a service modelled as nearly as might be on the English Church evensong was conducted by the German Lutheran pastor. The service, including the sermon, which only lasted three minutes—a model brevity for homilies—was sympathetic, simple, and not difficult to follow for anyone with a slight knowledge of German.

As not infrequently, I probably received most benefit and benediction from matters extraneous to the ritual. My ears would be assailed by the sharp, almost metallic, tapping upon the windows of the leaves of the elm tree outside, which may have sported thus to the winds of a century or more. My roving eyes sought the Last Supper upon[171] the reredos, whereon it was to be observed that one of the Twelve is handing a morsel to a dog, while the Disciple whom Jesus loved has his arm affectionately through that of his Master. The interior of the church is entirely white, with here and there a quickening and vivification in a note of red or blue or brown on the altar, the pulpit, and the organ.

After the service, I wandered up the old wooden stairs to the choir and organ loft, remarking the carven names and other havoc wrought by generations of choir boys, and, indeed, impressed with a sense that their roguish spirits were tripping up before me.

The organ is old. On the manual the sharps are in white, the naturals in black. The blowing arrangement consists of a succession of three movable beams, on which I had a glimpse of the old blower, like some ancient, dilapidated god chained to his task and making ascent of interminable flights of stairs. The organ had been stripped of all but the very smallest of its metal pipes for the making of munitions; doubtless they have gone hurtling through the air to[172] deeper diapasons than they ever sounded here!

In the ambulatory is an ancient and crude wooden Calvary; a great tributary box “Für die Armen,” much bestudded with nails, and dating from Luther’s day; also cases with medals of Beeskow men who have fought for the Fatherland from the Napoleonic Wars onward. In the pulpit is a quaint old hour-glass of four glasses; in the vestry a church clock centuries old.

As we returned from one of these services the interpreter—the third in succession—told me that as a young man he set out to adventure to Iceland. He got as far as Swinemunde, when he met a young lady, and so, as he said, “I got engaged instead.” “Such things happen,” he added reflectively. I could only express the hope that never since had he got into such hot water as he might have experienced at the Geysers! The interpreter’s wife, by the way, was Madame Reinl, who has sung at Covent Garden in such parts as Isolde, and who for a number of years was a prima donna in Berlin.

[173]

For the Dead

The Sunday after the signing of the Armistice a score of us attended morning service. We had seats in one of the galleries facing the pulpit, so that we could participate without being too conspicuously present. As it was, the congregation evinced no undue curiosity, though the three or four choir boys in the organ loft seemed to accept us gratefully as something of a spectacle for the enlivening of a dull day.

The congregation was very sparse, and consisted mostly of elderly women, sombre, sorrowful, almost emblematic figures; sad-faced, black clad, lonely. The vast white interior seemed cold—was cold, so that the organist, in his high latitudes, kept on his coat, with the collar upturned, and during the sermon made excursion among the architecture of the instrument. The pastor looked ill and depressed, and, with obviously a sad heart, he commenced his discourse, “This has been a heavy week for the Fatherland.”

On the following Sunday was held the[174] yearly service for the dead. There were six or seven hundred people present, again mostly women, and again all in black. Many of them wept silently throughout the service, others gave way now and again to audible outbursts of grief. I could only see one living German soldier, but who shall say the spirits of how many dead were there?

SERVICE FOR THE DEAD

A Polish Baptism

In our walks abroad we have frequently passed a humble little chapel, which has been built for the numerous Poles who work on the farms in the neighbourhood. One Sunday forenoon in October, when hints and hopes of peace were in the air, I accompanied the padre and the Roman Catholic party in camp to this chapel, and was witness of a very interesting and picturesque baptismal ceremony.

The low-roofed room with its humble altar at one end, its walls hung with the stations of the cross, and perforated with windows showing the golden dying glories[177] of the trees, was crowded with these rural folks. The women and girls were wearing quaint and brightly-coloured skirts and head-dresses showing pathetic effort after fashion and fitness of attire for the occasion. A virile femininity this, obviously built for child-bearing. In fact, most of the women seem to be in an interesting condition, and the officiating priest has no fewer than five infants to baptize. From these bundles of babyhood, which look like white bolsters tied with brightly-coloured ribands, comes a continuous, but not too vehement, crying, which, even to my not unsympathetic ear, seems something similar to the squealing of little pigs.

Three women stand up, supported by their lawful lords, ungainly, in unfamiliar Sunday garments, and diminutive beside their wives. Ever and anon one of the women performs mystery and miracle with her fingers in the mouth of her offspring to the temporary appeasing of its rage.

The remaining two women, who are seated, are in deep black, and their husbands are not forthcoming. When their turn[178] arrives, and they too stand before the priest, there is something peculiarly pathetic in the unconscious crying of these posthumous infants whose fathers have doubtless fallen, just as I can behold the leaves falling from the trees outwith the windows.

These humble folk, many of them, would desire to remain behind for our service, but the guard has received special instructions from the Commandant this morning, and the German soldiers turn them out. One elderly dame makes a spirited demand for admission, and, the soldier proving obdurate, she bides her time until his back is turned, then enters and falls upon her knees facing the altar as if defying him to turn her out.

The padre gives us a little homily on the approaching peace, with a further urging of that “Peace which the world cannot give.”

On the march back to our Lager we pass an ancient and dilapidated hackney-coach, open to display to an admiring world two of our mothers, with bundles tied with blue ribbon and red, in which the babies have[179] been entirely buried out of sight against a biting wind.

OLD INN AT BEESKOW, NOW BURNED DOWN.

Adventures Afoot

On the outskirts of Beeskow was a great Kaserne or barracks of the Garde-Feldartillerie-Regiments, from which in the morning we could sometimes hear the bugle sing reveille. This is not dissimilar to our own, and carries the same suggestion in it of the ascending sun. In those dreary[180] and difficult days the same heavy and uneasy suggestion also, that it falls upon many ears as unwishful to hear it as they would the Last Trump on Judgment Morn.

Sometimes we would meet a company of German soldiers coming back from a route march or returning from the shooting range—a likely enough looking lot, marching stoutly and singing lustily. When the Unteroffizier saw us he would give the order to march to attention, which was very smartly carried out. In walking through the town we were continually followed by the little children, who would clatter after us in their sabots, in manner reminiscent of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” making demand for “Kuchen.” They would even break into our ranks, and insinuate their hands into our tunic pockets in search of the biscuits which were sometimes tossed to them.

During a walk one afternoon we were overtaken by a sharp shower, and sought shelter under the trees around some cottages. A little girl watched us with a timid wonder,[181] which ultimately gave place to half-confidence. The rain increasing in violence, the mother threw open her door in invitation, while she and the little girl retired to the kitchen, leaving us the lobby, in which we sheltered until the worst of the storm was over.

One day we met an aged woman bearing a burden of faggots through the forest. When she cast eyes on us she suddenly put her hand to her face and burst into bitter tears. One afternoon we passed an old road-mender, whose carefully built piles of stones had much of the order and durability of a wall, and on whose bent back was a tangible token of the passage of years as big as any of his boulders.

On another occasion when we walked to the tennis court the German Lieutenant’s wife was waiting for him at the Gasthof, and the two partook of refreshment together at a little table under the trees. When we marched back we found that she was still accompanying him on the side-walk, which seemed to give to the whole parade a decidedly homely suggestion.

[182]

On Saturday afternoons we played football with the orderlies, when, in view of my advancing years and other discretions, I occasionally acted in the more retired position of full back. Pleasanter for me, however, was it to lie on my back in the forest, watching the young fir trees swaying to the wind like the masts of ships, while ever and anon they struck with a noise suggestive of the crossing of swords.

One of our orderlies, by the way, had been captured at Mons, and was a typical soldier of the period. He and his mate were lying in a ditch, up to the middle in mud and water, and under heavy fire. “I says to him, ‘Put a little artificial flower on me grave—I’m fond o’ roses myself.’” His teeth were knocked out by the butt of a soldier’s rifle, and he was flung into a church. When he first saw a loaf he “charged it,” toothless gums and all. He is still in the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” attitude towards his enemies. And he has lost practically a whole set!

Another orderly, who had recently been on commando, showed me his leg, which[183] was badly scalded. “That’s the sort of thing we do, sir,” he said, “to prevent being sent down the mines!”

“IN SINCE MONS!”

[184]

KIRCHESTRASSE, BEESKOW.
One of many such sketches made freely in the streets after the Armistice.

[185]

XI
The Revolution

From scraps of conversation with the sentries and the interpreter, we knew by the middle of October that the Germans would sign an armistice whatever the terms might be. One afternoon the “Top” and “Bottom” of the house were engaged in a hockey match. As I stood on the road watching the contested field, passed me a cart driven by a French soldier prisoner of war. A German boy, burdened with a great sack of Kartoffeln for Beeskow, gave hail, and the soldier pulled up and waited patiently until both boy and burden were on board. As he moved off he saluted me, and cried cheerily, “Bientôt, la paix!”

I approached Lieut. Stark and asked him when the game was likely to finish. “I suppose,” said he in his slow, deliberate[186] English, “when they have won enough.” The German civilian, who had some days before surreptitiously slipped us a copy of the Times, was here again to-day, and obviously anxious to unburden himself to some one. Lieut. Stark, however, succeeded in hedging him off until the return journey, when we in front overtook him on the footpath. While still two or three yards behind him, I said, “Change your umbrella to your left hand!” As we passed we were thus able to slip him a couple of packets of tea in exchange for another copy of the paper, and also to arrange that in future he place the paper behind a certain tree. These papers were about a fortnight old usually, but they were very precious to us, and were circulated in rotation to every officer in the Lager.

On Saturday evening, the 9th November, an Extrablatt, announcing the “Abdankung des Kaisers,” found its way into camp, and created some little excitement. At Beeskow we were within breathing distance of Berlin, one might say, and we almost seemed to be haunted by a vision of that haunted man who[187] had striven, in his own egotistical way, to fashion his country, and who seemed destined to see it shattered into shards. There was a rumour that the officer at the Kaserne had been deposed, and, in expectation of trouble, all the shops in Beeskow closed at six o’clock. In the dark outside we heard two or three shots, but no one seemed able to explain them.

The Passing of the Commandant

On Sunday morning, as it transpired, we paraded before the old Commandant for the last time. Shortly after Appell he was waited upon by a delegation from the men, headed by a stout corporal who in peace time is a North Sea fisherman, and informed that his services were no longer required. With a touch of pride the corporal told me of his part in the deposition.

When informed that he must resign, “Warum?” inquired the Commandant. This was explained, but he still demurred. “I must wait,” said he, “for instructions from headquarters.” “We give you your[188] instructions,” replied the corporal, “and you must go.”

Thereupon the old man wept. “Er weinet,” said the corporal, and he drew a finger from his eye downward to demonstrate. Greater than the Commandant wept in these days, I take it!

While we talked, standing on the road by the playing-field, came along the civilian, who succeeded eventually in transferring to my possession a copy of the Times for 29th October containing a sensational discussion in the Reichstag, and also a slip of paper folded to a spill on which he had pencilled the terms of the armistice.

Over the barracks we found that the Imperial flag had been shorn of its black and white strips, and that only a thin red shred stood out menacingly in the wind from the staff.

A picket, with arms piled, was posted at the forked roads, and from the caps of all the soldiers the badges had been torn. These men more than ever seemed disposed to be fraternal; indeed, as we passed the Kaserne some of the soldiers at the windows shouted[189] out that they would be glad to play us a game of football now.

They deposed the Major who was in charge of the barracks, and the Medical Officer—he of the dashing manner and the Airedale terrier, who visited us for inoculatory purposes—had also to go. The Major and his young daughter were in a hotel when the soldiers demanded an audience. The Major endeavoured to escape by a back entrance, but was held, and had the humiliation of having his epaulets torn off, while his sword was broken and the pieces handed to the children standing around. So we had the story.

In our own camp Lieut. Stark, who was a ranker, and also reputed to be sympathetic to the revolution, was elected Commandant by the men’s committee—distinguished by white bands on their arms—in spite of the fact that Lieut. Kruggel was his superior in rank. The men took off Kruggel’s epaulets and badges, and then saluted him.

It was in these troublous times that Captain U., who was being transferred to another camp on account of his health,[190] succeeded in jumping off the train when it slowed down somewhere in the neighbourhood of Storkow. The train was stopped, but no very effectual search was made, and the Captain, retracing his steps, had almost reached Lubben, when he was overtaken and held up by a gamekeeper on a bicycle, and carrying a gun. He was brought back to camp, and had a great reception, particularly from the members of his own mess, we having prepared a sort of composite meal of breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner. U. was looking none the worse for two or three nights’ and days’ exposure, and attributed his healthful appearance to “having had something to do.” Lieutenant Stark imposed no punishment, his only comment being, “This is not the good time for escaping; there will be peace in two days.”

Latitudes and Liberties

Under the new regime our privileges were considerably extended. A few days after the[191] Armistice, for instance, we were permitted to be present at a cinematographic entertainment.

The show was held in a rather dull and sad little hall, on the roof and walls of which, however, some artist had made valiant efforts at decoration with impossible pots and vases of impossible roses—neither white, nor red, nor even blue.

Behind the screen was a suggestion of a small stage, on which, doubtless, tragedy histrionic had been achieved in the days before tragedy overtook the town and the country generally. A dispirited-looking woman seemed to be in charge of affairs, and under her rather anxious direction our orderlies—all out for the afternoon—wheeled a piano into the hall, on which Lieutenant Davies and a German soldier, who has studied at the Berlin Conservatorium, alternately played melodies classic and cinematographic during the performance. A preliminary notice flung on the screen, “Rauchen ist Verboten,” went unheeded.

The first film, which gave rather charming glimpses of German family life, represented the adventures and misadventures of a poor[192] little girl, who, after drinking a magic elixir, dreamt that she had become the daughter of a Graf. Mark Twain’s “Prince and the Pauper” in more modern guise. Second item, the efforts of a policeman to bring home his sheaves with him in the shape of a very sly and slippery tramp. The third, a Lustspiel in four most amatory acts, introducing the customary machinery, so well known to the cinema stage, of love missives, magnificent motor-cars, bedrooms and bathrooms; keyholes betwixt these apartments; the never-failing porter with the inevitable trunk which forms the last inevitable stronghold and sanctuary for the inevitable hapless lover pursued by the inevitable unhappy husband.

Altogether, not too bad an entertainment for the money, which was one mark per head—Lagergeld, we having not yet been supplied with ordinary currency. This was the first night I had been out after dark since my capture, and it was pleasant to step free upon the pavement, and to see the comfortable lights in the shops. At a second cinema entertainment, we had—by[193] request—a series of pictures showing German soldiers at work and play in rest billets.

In the outskirts of the forest stood the Gesellschaft Gasthaus, with, in the window, announcement of an entertainment in the form of an acrobatic act by “Les Original Alfonso Geissler.” The handbill, highly coloured, represented in one part of it, Monsieur, in evening dress, and with all the suavity of the dove, making request for a glass of beer from Mademoiselle at a public bar; in a second tableau discovers him, sloughed of his garb of respectability and, arrayed in multi-coloured tights, displaying all the cunning and pliancy of the serpent in marvellous contortions among the barroom properties. The proprietor informed us that he and his wife and three sons—one the hero of the handbill—were all travelling acrobats, that they had appeared frequently in England, and that they were in Sweden when the war broke out. It was observable that during the entertainment—which, despite the bill, proved to be entirely cinematographic—the proprietor obtained his incidental music by making demand[194] upon several of the talented among the audience.

In this connection a rather notable incident occurred, though here it seemed to pass without note. A boy of about fourteen, who had earned his admission by operating the cinema for the major part of the evening, came quietly forward, took the violin from the rather faltering hand of a young soldier who had been agonizing for the last hour, and commenced to play with a sure and virile bow. He proved to be a friend of our German soldier pianist, and like him has studied at the Berlin Conservatorium.

Sketching in the Streets

I was now allowed to sketch freely in the streets without hindrance or interruption, save for the presence of the younglings, which, after all, need not prove distracting or disconcerting. On the contrary, it may be even stimulating. Their criticism, for one thing, is largely enthusiastic, and this sometimes proves contagious. “Fein!” “Hübsch!” The pencil probably makes[195] effort to prove worthy of such compliment. Then again, there is generally something patient and gently apologetic in the presence of a child, while one grown-up looking over the shoulder is usually sufficient for disconcertment.

I am sketching the Kirchestrasse. The name, however, is not visible at my end of the street, and I make inquiry of the little girl who for the last ten minutes has been standing quietly by my side. She misunderstands me at first, and upon my sketch-block writes her own name, “Charlotte Reseler.” There let it remain to add the value of a memory to the drawing.

On one such sketching expedition I was overtaken by a motor-waggon, packed with German soldiers, straight from the front, who seemed somewhat surprised to see me thus walking alone through the streets of the town with a sketch-block under my arm. The waggon was decorated with fir branches, while chalked upon the sides were such inscriptions as “Nach der Heimat!” In the streets also were decorations, flags and[196] fir festoons, and garlands bearing the legend, “Willkommen!” One thing, however, cannot be lifted from these streets, nor lightened into them, and that is the dejection of defeat; the flush of victory.

THE OLDEST HOUSE IN BEESKOW.

I was sketching what is, since the burning of the “Grüne Baum,” the oldest house in Beeskow. I had hardly started, when the proprietor of the shop in the lower part of the building came running over, and, talking too rapidly for my entire comprehension, gave me to understand at least that he desired something added to my sketch. He disappeared, and in a few minutes there was unfurled from an upper window a great chocolate and white flag of Brandenburg. A little boy had all this while stood quietly by my side, save when, quite unbidden, he went over, and placed himself by the front[197] of the house, just at the proper spot, that I might put him into the picture.

He spoke now, but whether for my information or encouragement I know not.

“England,” said he, “hat gewonnen—Deutschland hat verloren!”

I turned to look at him; he was but nine or ten, yet his voice sounded so forlornly that to me, standing in this street of gathering dusk and down-trodden snow, there came a sense of the awful tragedy of defeat!

A Soldiers’ Ball

I cannot dance, but there is always a portion of the ball, at least, to the beholder. Captain Sugrue and I had looked into the Gasthaus at the Railway Crossing. It was an animated scene which met our eyes. The saloon was decorated with flags and festoons of red roses, while about eighty couples, composed of German soldiers and their sweethearts—these last with countenances of a colour to match the decorations—danced on almost without cessation. Certainly there were[198] intervals, but these were of the shortest duration. The cavaliers would approach, possibly with a short bow; more frequently the overture was merely a smart tap upon the shoulder, and they were off. A little orchestra of piano, violins and ’cello, was housed on a little stage, upon which at one time there mounted the Master of the Ceremonies to announce the finding of a lady’s girdle.

Captain Sugrue and I also made various excursions afoot to townships within a radius of ten or twelve miles from Beeskow. One of these expeditions took us to the little village of Radinkendorf, where, after some research, we found a very modest little Gasthof, where an old woman undertook to supply us with coffee.

Whilst we waited, and she worked her coffee-mill, she invited us in motherly fashion into an inner room for warmth. Presently the coffee was prepared, and while we sipped it, “Where do you live?” inquired the aged woman.

“Zu Beeskow,” I replied. “We are prisoners.”

[199]

“Ah, das macht nichts,” said the dame kindly. “Das macht nichts. We are all human. Warum ist der Krieg?” distressfully, and touching her forehead with her finger as if in despair of a solution. “Why is the war? Why? Why?”

I could not tell her.

On another occasion Tim and I footed it to the small town of Friedland, which at one time, apparently, has had a Jewish population. As we sat together in the dusk by the stove in the Gasthaus, there entered a German soldier obviously fresh—but as obviously fatigued—from the front. He approached, recognizing our calling, but anticipating kinship, and was rather nonplussed on discovering our nationality. He told us that for the last days his company had been retiring at the rate of thirty kilometres a day, and leaving almost everything behind them.

Before returning we paid a visit to the Rathaus—in the Middle Ages the Castle of the Herren von Köckeritz. With his walking-stick Tim measured the walls—which are of amazing thickness—to the no small[200] surprise of several members of the clerical staff who appeared at the window.

MURILLO’S “IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE VIRGIN.”
Painted by a French officer, prisoner of war, on the outer wall of the camp in 1915.

[202]

CAPTAIN TIM SUGRUE

[203]

XII
In Berlin during the Revolution

On a Friday evening of early December, my dear friend and fellow-prisoner, Captain Tim Sugrue, and I conspired to take French leave from the German prison Lager and make a bolt for Berlin. Six o’clock next morning found us at the station; a little diplomacy and we had obtained tickets—singles only, as we must return by a different route.

From Beeskow to Berlin is a run of two hours and a half. For the latter part of the journey we are with business men. There is unfolding of newspapers, and we catch sight of occasional headlines. Street fighting in Berlin last night; 14 killed, 50 wounded. Anything may be expected to happen to-day—which means that anything may be expected to happen to us.

[204]

As we pass Karlshorst an obliging German directs our attention to it as the German Derby; as we enter the environs of the town he has a pointing hand for various features of interest.

Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. As we make our way out through the barriers among the crowd, a tall, handsome gentleman and a young lady—equally handsome—who is obviously his daughter, seem to convey to us a telepathic smile of friendliness. In a few minutes we find them beside us in the throng; there comes a whisper in not entirely perfect English, “Thank God, Britain has won!”—and then they are gone. With a quick understanding the girl collector at the barrier permits me to retain my ticket as a souvenir.

We have had no breakfast; we are hungry; we make so bold as to enter a restaurant near the station. The waiter attends us, without apparent curiosity, and as of long custom. For three marks we have a fried haddock, some salad, and a cup of coffee. We could easily have paid as much in London for as little—we could easily have paid more.[205] For proof of my veracity to future historians, I slip a menu card into my pocket.

From the instruction of a rather intelligent Posten at Beeskow I have taken the precaution to prepare a rough plan of the centre of this most centralized of all great cities. We pass up Friedrichstrasse, and at the point where it intersects Unter den Linden pause for a moment, undecided as to left or right. It immediately becomes apparent that we must not pause, even for a moment. We are already the centre of a curious little crowd.

“What can I do for you, Captain?” Hat in hand, a youth of seventeen or eighteen approaches. We explain that we are simply up for the day, so to speak, and as I can see what is obviously the Dom on our left, we make off at a sharp pace down the boulevard.

The people have seen British officers before; it is only when it dawns upon them that we are unaccompanied by a guard that their eyes begin to open. There is no hint of hostility, however. Twice during the day we are directly asked by civilians if we are in advance of a possible army of occupation.

[206]

The Dom is the St. Paul’s of Berlin, but it is less impressive. The organist is here, however, blowing what are doubtless his own very real personal sorrows to the roof. As he passes into a fugal passage I observe that, as at Beeskow, the pipes of the instrument have taken flight.

The picture gallery is closed to-day, but entrance is to be had to the gallery of sculpture, and entrance we make. Tim is obviously impatient; sculpturesque life is not sufficiently full-blooded for him. Consequently I approach an attendant, and request that he discover to us the most celebrated items of his collection. Whereupon is opening of doors, unlocking of cabinets, up-pulling of blinds, and letting in of more light generally.

Most celebrated of all is a Grecian sculpture of 480 B.C., taken from the Louvre in 1870. When I suggest, as delicately as may be, that there is danger of it having to make further journeyings, the attendant sighs, and softly replaces the covering curtains. Young Hercules killing the snakes; a Badender Knabe; Göttin als Flora ergänzt; Trauernde Dienerin vom Grabmal der Nikarete aus Athens;[207] a few hasty impressions—but how refreshing; white clouds in a summer sky—and Tim has haled me forth into the streets.

On the galleries, as on all similar public buildings, has been posted a placard in vivid red, “Nationales Eigentum!” National Possession.

It almost might seem as if in these penurious days for Germany, inventory of the national possessions had been taken, and, having been found to be but scanty, decision had been arrived at to hold fast to what few poor things appeared to be real and tangible! Everywhere also one finds vehement posters in red, inciting—to order! Pictured soldiers, open-eyed with terror, open-mouthed with message, beating alarum drums; sailors frantically waving flag signals of distress.

Palaces, memorials, museums, bridges; with much that is to be admired, Berlin seems so heavily encrusted and over-weighted with ponderous decoration, as to convey an impression almost that the ground may give way underfoot. That the solid foundations of things have given way must be more than an impression with many of these drawn-faced,[208] dejected-looking passers-by. In the architecture there is a suggestion of London, of Paris, of ancient Rome—a suggestion of ancient Rome that is strongest, however, in a chill and deadly feeling of decline and fall. On many of the buildings, and particularly on the Königl. Marstall, is the markings of machine-gun fire—the guns have played upon the windows quite apparently like fire hose for the putting out of a difficult conflagration. On one of the palaces is stuck a sheet of paper written upon boldly and carelessly with blue pencil:

“Für Ebert und Hasse.”

Nationales Eigentum with a vengeance! Whether they are using the Royal suite for bureau or bedroom, or both, I know not.

At all points, and indeed acting as police for the city, are soldiers and sailors of the security service with white bands on their arms. Large parties of these men patrol the streets, with a peculiar movement in the column due to juxtaposition of the measured military step, and the easy swing[209] of the sailor. We would pass such companies with a more or less unseeing eye, but we are continually assailed by cheery greetings of “Wie geht’s?” and “Guten Morgen!”

If we pause before a public building, a soldier or sailor immediately approaches and asks if we desire to enter. In suchwise we get glimpse of a number of the important public institutions, including the modern and rather magnificent Royal Library. In the Royal Opera House, despite the revolution, performances are announced for to-night of Verdi’s “Otello,” for to-morrow (Sunday) night of “Rigoletto.”

Some of the streets running off Unter den Linden bear marks of yesterday’s fighting; some of them are still big with agitation; groups and queues of gesticulating soldiers and civilians. We pass the Legations and through the Brandenburger Tor into the Tiergarten, and take leisurely view of the Reichstag, looking deserted and dejected, and as if all the glory of debate had departed from it for ever. Here is the Siegessäule and the Denkmal to Bismarck, Moltke,[210] and the long lineage of German warriors. Here also is the Hindenburg statue, looking decidedly forlorn and rather foolish. Tim and I decide that it would hardly be expedient for us to drive in a couple of nails!

Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

Now approaches a great procession of men and women, silent, sad, slow-moving, sombre-hued save for the red banners which here and there droop into the ranks and show through the trees like gouts of blood. It is the Spartacusbundes Party, with Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at their head. They are doubtless come to mourn their dead of yesterday and to demand redress and revenge. The procession winds its way through the paths, and ultimately the speakers take up position beside the statue of one of the Margraves, where Liebknecht’s father agitated before him in less agitated times than these.

Liebknecht speaks now, fiercely and with arms outflung and disturbed as the leafless branches of the trees which form a background. There is a wild scream and the[211] crowd commences to stampede. The motor-waggons of the Security Service of the Social Democratic Party are coming up, grim and grinning with machine-guns. A terrified crowd is a very terrible thing.

My last experience of its blind whirl and bewilderment was when the Germans shelled Béthune with big guns at long range on a market Monday of August, 1916. We looked like having trouble now. “Through force of habit they will doubtless take their sighting shots on us,” I said to Tim.

The soldiers have had orders, however, not to shoot unless they were attacked, and the crowd gradually regains reassurance. Standing on the outskirts of the throng, I bought an album of views of Berlin from a poor little girl, and immediately after a similar collection from an old woman equally poor and equally insistent.

My last recollection of Liebknecht is of a gesticulating volcanic figure, and of a livid face, with the wild eyes and the distorted mouth of a Greek tragic mask. He was killed a few weeks later, within a few hundred yards of where we heard him speak.

[212]

We have during the day made incursions to various cafés, the “Victoria,” and the one-time very cosmopolitan “Bauer.” In this last, at just an hour before train time we are seated, at question whether, our adventure having proved so successful so far, it be not financially possible to carry it into another day. We decide that if we go fasting during the morrow—a proceeding familiarity with which has rendered not too fearful—-we shall have purses sufficient to pay for a bed in the hotel, and our return fares to Beeskow.

We have been sitting meanwhile amid a cheerless concourse. The people enter, take their refreshment without any appearance of refreshing, and so depart. “See,” says a Russian, just released from Ruhleben, who has entered into conversation, “how they are dazed; how they are dreaming! All of Germany is as a great empty building!”

The streets are crowded, and there is much excitement in the air. Outside the Friedrichstrasse Station we make purchase of a series of severe caricatures of the Kaiser, watched by quite a crowd who seem to recognize the[213] irony of the situation. We have no difficulty in getting into a hotel, and we make no delay in getting into a very inviting bed.

A CARICATURE OF THE KAISER.
Bought in the streets of Berlin.

[214]

Captivity de Luxe!

Behold next morning two British Gefangenen in the capital of Germany, pillowed luxuriously in bed, pulling the bell-rope insistently, and, a waiter appearing, making demands for an immediate serving of coffee. Not only so, but having search made in the German Bradshaw for the hour of departure of the train which was to convey us back to prison, and the time at which we could attend a celebration of Mass.

St. Hedewick is a great circular cathedral, not without a certain impressiveness, particularly when crowded as it was on our arrival. The service was in progress, and from the great organ came a sound like a rushing mighty wind. When we emerged it was raining, and we decided to call as invited on our Russian friend of yesterday. We made our way to the address circuitously and laboriously, receiving direction—and misdirection—from a sailor sentry, who left his post and accompanied us for a ten-minutes’ march to put us on the proper car. “I have to Hartlepool and Gateshead been,” he said.

[215]

The Russian family were delighted to see us, and extended what hospitalities they could, generously and graciously. They advised us to leave Berlin by the afternoon train, as the revolutionary storm which was obviously brewing was expected to burst blood-red that day. “I will see you to the station, then I shall not leave the house again.”

A nephew entering at this time, he undertook charge of us. As we stood on the platform of the tram, there tore alongside of us a motor-car, driven furiously, and full of soldiers and sailors who bombarded us with copies of the revolutionary paper, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), and with leaflets making call for a great mass meeting of the Spartacusbund.

I secured a copy. Among the named speakers were Rosa Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Levi, Duncker.[1]

[216]

Arrived at the Gorlitzer Station, we found that there would be no train till evening, and at our guide’s suggestion we three drank chocolate—at five marks for three cups, including a 50-pfennig tip to the waiter—and listened to the melancholy music in the great café which used to be called the “Piccadilly,” but which at the outbreak of the war was renamed “Das Vaterland.”

Returning to the station, we decided that our friend had best make purchase of the tickets, to prevent possible conflict.

While we waited there leapt upon us an aggressive young woman.

“Are you English officers?” she demanded.

“We are,” said we.

“Thank God for that!” she cried. “I’m English too, though I’m married to[217] a German; and I love my country better than I love my husband, and think I shall come home!”

As this presented a marital problem too profound for our plumbing, we made the pretext of our friend’s return with the tickets to beat a hasty retreat.

We arrived back in Beeskow about ten o’clock, rang the bell and demanded admittance as good and dutiful Gefangenen. The Posten opened the gate, and when he beheld us twain he very decidedly and indubitably closed a knowing eye!

Freedom and Farewell

It has come at last! And now that it has at last come it has not brought that immediate and amazing emotion of exultation which we had imagined and anticipated so long. We are leaving for Home—To-day—in a few hours! The brain receives the message, grasps it apparently, and passes it on to the heart. The heart hears, doubtless, yet it only says, soberly, even sadly, “Yes, that is so.” Perhaps later, after many days;[218] after months; in after-years, maybe, there will be the full realization that we have come out of captivity, and we shall be moved even to tears!

Meanwhile, our boxes have to be filled; our cupboards have to be emptied. My last recollection of the German soldiery—these legions of a would-be modern Rome—is of their standing around while we piled into their outspread arms our old pots and pans, boxes of broken biscuits, and fragments of hardened bread. Sic transit!

Four o’clock. We pass through the gate of the old Bischofsschloss for the last time. As we go down the street one of the officers shows me the great padlock which he has carried off in his pocket as a souvenir! If he had been a Samson, he would doubtless have preferred the gate itself!

The people stand at doors and windows and wave us farewell. Auf Wiedersehen! Some of the passers-by insist on shaking us by the hand and wishing us God-speed. We have become familiar to them—and not too fearful—during the past five months. At the station there is something of a crowd;[219] as the train moves out there is something of a cheer.

By nine o’clock we are once more in Berlin. We hire a whole squadron of dilapidated hackney coaches and move in somewhat whimsical procession for an hour through the already dark and almost deserted streets.

Warnemünde. We pass immediately from the train to the quay, where the Danish ship Prins Christian is lying with steam up. A Danish officer is in waiting at the gangway, and as each officer answers to his name he passes over the ship’s side—a free man once more.

Lieut. Kruggel descends to the saloon to bid us good-bye. He shakes hands all round.

“Es ist vollbracht,” I said.

“Es ist vollbracht,” he replied.

And with a military salute, he turned, and, a suggestion of sadness in the stoop of his shoulders, made his way up the companion ladder.

THE END.

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