PARCELS
§ 1
Towards the middle of June parcels began to arrive, and the camp became
a very whispering gallery of rumours. It started with a wire from the
Red Cross at Copenhagen stating that a consignment of relief parcels had
been dispatched. From that moment, there was no incident of the day that
was not somehow construed into a veiled reference to Danish bread.
Lieut. Jones would meet Lieut. Brown on the way to the library.
“Any news this morning, Brown?”
“Nothing official.”
“Then what’s the latest rumour?”
“Well, I shouldn’t put too much trust in it, old man,” Brown would
answer guardedly, “but I saw Colonel Croft talking to one of the
Unter-officers this morning.”
“Did you hear what they were saying?”
“No,” said Lieut. Brown. “You see, I can’t speak German, but by the way
they were gesticulating and all that, I feel pretty certain it was about
these parcels.”
And within two hours it was common knowledge throughout the camp that
the Unter-officer of Block II had told Colonel Croft that there were two
hundred parcels within the camp.
As the days passed, and no consignment arrived, conjecture exceeded
every bound of possibility. It was asserted on the one hand that the
parcels had been commandeered on the way by the German army, and on
another that the parcels had actually arrived and were in the camp, but
that the Commandant had refused to issue them till he had received
instructions from Berlin. During these days there was no epithet with
which the word Boche went uncoupled.
At last, however, the parcels did arrive; a large cart was perceived
entering the gate laden with cardboard boxes, and a roseate mist
enveloped the outlook of the _Gefangener_. The lean years were at an
end, prosperity was in sight, and the flesh-pots of Egypt already
steamed within the imagination. “Bread’s in the citadel, all’s well with
the world.”
But one thing had been overlooked. A composition of milk and flour is
not improved by the delays of a protracted journey through the metallic
heats of a German summer. The bread was unbelievably mouldy.
Well, we tried to imagine that we enjoyed it, and it was certainly
something to eat; we doctored it and applied every remedy that the
ingenuity of the R.A.M.C. could devise; but there are limits beyond
which redemption cannot pass. There are stains which only dissolution
can annul, and the freshness of white bread once lost is as
irrecoverable as virginity. Green it was, and green it remained. The
taste of mould was there and baking would not remove it.
Perhaps there was some comfort in the assurances of the doctor that,
after it had been soaked and heated, it could do no active harm: but it
could not change the nature of the object. Sadly it was agreed that
bread was a washout.
However, it served a moral if not a physical purpose. It was the prophet
of the sunrise, the false dawn that was the inevitable herald of a
readjusted life. If bread could come from Copenhagen, it followed that
the grocery parcels from London were not so immeasurably remote.
For weeks they had appeared on the horizon far withdrawn, invested with
Utopian glamour. Orderlies who had been captured since Mons had told us
what tins each parcel of the cycle would contain. The list of delicacies
had been devoured by eager eyes, but their existence had always savoured
of the impossible. They were the dreams of some incurable romantic;
there could not really be such things, at least not in Germany. But now
they actually began to approach within mortal gaze; after all, the
Citadel Mainz was not so utterly separated from the rational world. The
authorities in England had apparently realised that some six hundred
officers were beleaguered there upon those ultimate islands. An
agreeable reflection; and, once more, conversation centred wholly upon
food.
And a more barren topic could hardly be discovered. Perhaps some romance
might be woven round the intricacies of a Trimalchio’s banquet, and a
distinguished novelist made one of his characters woo triumphantly his
beloved with a dazzling succession of French _pâtisseries_; but bully
beef and pork and beans are too solid a matter for anything but a moral
discourse. They have no lyric fervour, their very sound is redolent of
platitudes, and from the beginning of the day up to the very end to hear
nothing but panegyrics on their composition,--it was indeed a trial.
[Illustration: A “PRISON CELL.”
[_To face page 104._
]
§ 2
It was not till the end of June that parcels began to arrive at fixed
and regular intervals, and those were days of great excitement. Each
morning at 8.30 a.m. the names went up on the notice board, and
immediately a cry ran round the barracks, “List up.” Pandemonium broke
loose. The laziest _Gefangener_ leapt from his bed, pulled on a pair of
trousers, dived into the safety of a trench coat, and rushed for the
board. In that space were waged Homeric contests. Some hundred brawny
soldiers were all struggling towards a small board, on which fluttered
the almost illegible carbon copies of the sacred list. There was much
craning of necks, and driving of elbows, much cursing and much
apologising. The weak were driven to the wall; and even when a forward
surge had borne the eager aspirant to the portals of his inquiry, there
remained for him the ardours of retreat. Through a solid square of
humanity he had to drive his harassed frame.
These were moments of high excitement and of an equivalent depression.
Those to whom the rush for the board had seemed too hazardous an exploit
waited impatiently within the room for the tidings of some enterprising
herald. Anxiously they would lean out of the window looking for a
returning comrade.
“By Jove,” some one would say, “look, here’s Evans coming.”
“Has he signalled anything?”
“No, but he’s coming awful slow. There can’t be anything for him.”
And sadly Evans would re-enter the room from which he had set forth with
such gay hopes.
“One for you, Turner; and you’ve clicked, Smith, two for you; and
Piggett, you’ve got one. Nothing for the rest.”
“Nothing?” echoed the rest.
“No,” Evans would grunt, and for him, as for the other unfortunates, the
remainder of the day had lost all savour and romance.
For the lucky, however, the excitement of the morning had only just
begun, and a mere name on the parcel list served but as a preliminary
excitant. The real zest of dissipation was still in store. Behind the
barred doors of the “Ausgabe” lay all the innumerable varieties of an
assignation. There might be cigarettes, clothing perhaps, a cycle parcel
from Thurloe Place, or, and this was in parenthesis, a mouldy loaf from
Copenhagen.
First of all, there was the queue, the inevitable prelude to every form
of punishment and amusement; and in this queue conjecture ran wild on
the probable percentage of bread parcels in the camp.
“Well, I was standing by the gate yesterday,” one fellow was saying,
“and I saw a load of parcels come in, and damn me if every one wasn’t a
Thurloe Place.”
“Ah,” but the pessimist would break in, “that was the second load, you
saw. I watched all three come in, and believe me, in the first and last
loads there was nothing but bread.”
This, however, no one would believe, and the imparter of this rumour
was told to secrete his information elsewhere.
Slowly the queue moved forward, and at last the claimant passed through
the sacred portals that were watched over by guardian angels in the form
of whiskered sentries with zigzagged bayonets; within the sacred place
there were even more seraphim. Behind a long table stood four slovenly
civilians, whose duty it was to open the parcels, and see that no sabres
or revolvers were concealed beneath the apparent innocence of a tin of
Maconochie’s beef dripping. At a far corner of the table was the high
priest, the master of the ceremonies. He sat there “coldly sublime,
intolerably just,” with a large book in which he entered every name.
Action proceeded on lines of Teutonic formality. The claimant for a
parcel would first of all present himself before the high priest, and
murmur the number of his parcel.
“Twenty-one.”
This the high priest would translate into German with a commendable
rapidity.
“Ein und zwanzig.”
He would shout this over his shoulder to one of the many satellites
whose work it was to produce the required parcel. The next few seconds
would be anxious ones for the hungry _Gefangener_. He would watch the
sentry move about among a store of boxes, moving one, displacing
another. He would lift a parcel so small that it could assuredly contain
nothing but boot polish, and a shiver would pass through the leanly
expectant. But at last, after many vacillations and counter-marches, he
would emerge triumphantly with a cardboard box bearing the large Red
Cross of the Central London Committee.
But even then there was more to be done. Each parcel had to be carefully
opened and its contents examined. No tins nor paper could be taken away.
Packets of tea and cocoa had to be stripped of their covering and
emptied into baskets, while the tinned foods were spirited away to the
block cellar, where later in the day they were opened in the presence
of a number of sentinels.
The reason for all this palaver we never quite managed to fathom. It was
surely enough that the British Red Cross had pledged its word not to
include for exportation tracts for the times, pulpit propaganda, or
prismatic compasses. With delightful duplicity the German authorities
laid the blame of this on to our Allies.
“You see,” they said, “we’re very sorry, but the French get so many
things in their tins; poison for our herbs, and knives and files. We
must take precautions. Of course many parcels are quite all right, but
the French, you see....”
And to our Allies the Germans told the same tale.
“You see,” they said, “your parcels are all right, but the English hide
corkscrews in their bully beef. We must take precautions....”
And so another link was added to the immense chain of queues.
At this time, too, letters and books began to arrive, and over these
officialdom wound all the intricacies that it could muster. Letters had
to be fumigated first, each page had to be carefully censored, and
stamped with a large messy blue circle usually deposited over the least
legible portion of the correspondence. And every novel had to be read
from beginning to end.
Numerous were the regulations. Any reference to Germany was taboo, the
mere mention of the word Hun or Boche was the signal for confiscation.
Of my first consignment of books, two were suppressed. One of them being
rather a prolix novel to the tune of khaki kisses, was not much loss;
but the other, Ford Madox Hueffer’s volume of poems, I made valiant
efforts to save. One evening I caught the censor unprepared, and pointed
out to him that the author was a man of complete literary integrity, and
that nothing he could write could be looked upon as dangerous.
“Ah, but,” the censor expostulated, “it is all full of Huns and Boche.”
“Ah, well,” I said, “can’t you tear those pages out?”
“But then there would be no pages left,” and against this assertion
argument was impossible. “And you see,” he went on, “we are not Huns.”
“No?” I said.
“No, the Huns were beaten at Chalons in A.D. 453. You have no right to
call us Huns. That is your Northcliffe Press your hate campaign; we are
men the same as you.”
And it was quite useless to point out that the average soldier applies
the nickname “Hun” or “Boche” or “Jerry” in very much the same way as we
call the Scotch “Jocks” and the Frenchmen “Froggies.”
The censor would not see it. “You think we are all barbarians,” he
maintained. “It is your hate campaign, and we are not Huns; the Huns
were beaten in 453 at Chalons by the Romans.”
East of the Rhine there is not much sense of humour.
And indeed, considering the way in which the Kaiser has compared himself
to Attila, our warders were peculiarly sensitive on this point. And they
always approached it with that strange Teuton seriousness that is for
ever hanging over the crags of the ridiculous.
At Karlsruhe, on the preceding Christmas, a certain officer, who had
spent most of the afternoon beside a bottle, in the middle of a camp
concert arrogated to himself the right to play a leading part. And
leaping on the stage, he had for the space of half an hour regaled the
audience with an exhilarating exhibition that contained many
good-humoured but forceful references to his “sweet friend the enemy.”
Unfortunately a German censor was present, and the next morning the
officer was testily buttonholed by the sleuthhound.
“Captain Arnold,” said the censor, “I do not wish to make any trouble
between you and us, but you said last night many things that were most
offensive.”
Captain Arnold, whose memories of the preceding evening were shrouded
in a mist of cocktails, endeavoured to be jocular.
“Oh, no, surely not? Not offensive; come now, not offensive.”
“Oh, yes, indeed they were; most offensive, Captain Arnold. You called
us Huns.”
The gallant officer realised that he had been indiscreet, and saw that
only one way lay open to him.
“Hun,” he said. “But why not, that’s what you call yourselves, isn’t
it?”
The censor looked astonished, and aggrieved.
“But surely, Captain Arnold, you know what is a Hun?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“Very good. I will show you.”
The next day the censor appeared bearing a history of Germany in three
volumes.
“Now, Captain Arnold,” he said, “you will find here all there is to
know. It is quite simple; no doubt you will be able to borrow a German
dictionary, so that you can look up the words. You will find all about
it.”
For three days Captain Arnold kept the books, and then returned them
with many thanks and a promise not to repeat his insults.
“I thought you would understand,” said the German censor. “It is only
ignorance on your part that makes you call us Huns; and now you will
tell your comrades, and they will understand too.”
And the little man trotted off, happy in the thought that his race had
emerged from the examination triumphantly vindicated.