OUR GENERAL TREATMENT
A great deal has been said and written on the subject of the treatment
of British prisoners of war, and the general idea at the present moment
is one of a succession of unparalleled brutalities and insults. That
much inhumanity has been shown it is neither possible nor desirable to
deny, and it is only just that those responsible should have to give an
account of their actions. But it must be borne in mind that though all
the instances brought forward are perfectly true and authentic,
propaganda aims not at the _vraie vérité_, but at the establishment of
an argument; and the individual instances, which have formed the
foundations of this conception of inhumanity, do not present a complete
picture of captivity, and should not be taken as typical of every prison
camp.
Of course one can only write about what one knows. Baden-Hessen is one
of the more moderate provinces; and the treatment of officers is
infinitely better than that of the men. But, speaking from my own
experience, I can say with perfect sincerity that, from the moment when
I was captured to the moment of release, I was not subjected to a single
insult or a single act of brutality. I was treated with as much courtesy
as I should have expected from a battalion orderly-room, and the
discomforts and inconveniences of the journey were due in the main to
faulty organisation. It sounds bad when one hears that a batch of
prisoners were sent on a four days’ journey with rations for one day,
but the corollary that the accompanying German sentries were provided
with exactly the same amount of food casts a very different aspect on
the case.
The starvation of prisoners has become almost an axiom, and indeed they
were miserably underfed; but so was the entire German people, and the
custom of treating prisoners as well as civilians is confined to
England. Among all continental nations it is an understood thing that on
the scale of diet the enemy should come last, and in Germany there was
only enough food for a bare existence.
In this respect, I believe, officers were much more fortunate than their
men, and certainly they had the great advantage of a permanent address.
For the men were being continually moved from one camp to another. At
one time they would be working in the fields, at another in the salt
mines, sometimes stopping for a couple of months, sometimes only for a
few days. The result of this was that their parcels were trailing after
them right across Germany. At times they would go several months without
one at all, and then if they had the luck to make somewhere a prolonged
sojourn, they might receive thirteen parcels within three days. Of
course the men shared out their parcels as far as possible, but they
were never certain what was coming next, and they had many very hungry
days.
With us there was none of that: we were in a permanent camp, and our
parcels when once they had begun to arrive came through regularly. There
were delays occasionally, especially when heavy fighting involved
congestion of the railways; but eventually we received every parcel
dispatched from a central committee. The only ones that did get lost
were the home parcels that were sent privately. Everything sent from the
Red Cross Committee, or from Harrod’s or Selfridge’s, arrived intact and
in perfect condition.
As regards actual treatment, owing to the fact that officers were not
made to work, there were very few occasions when physical violence was
possible, cases of this sort generally occurring when men proved
intractable in the factories. The only opportunities that were presented
were when officers tried to get away, and the sentries availed
themselves of these chances pretty generously.
There were four or five attempted escapes, and on two of these occasions
the officers were badly mauled by the sentries. The second time that
this happened the German orderly officer put a stop to this treatment at
once; but on the first occasion the officer stood by while the sentries
belaboured their captive with the butts of their rifles.
The would-be Monte Cristos turned to the German officer and asked him if
he considered such treatment proper for a British officer.
The German shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well,” he said, “you must expect
this sort of thing if you try to escape. You ought to stop in your
room.”
Before, this particular German had always been especially agreeable to
us. The only possible excuse for his behaviour lies in the fact that he
was very fond of the bottle, and might have been a little drunk. But
however one looks at it, it was a sufficiently discreditable affair.
Of the insults and degradations to which the officers of the camp at
Holzminden were subjected we had no experience. The Germans adopted
towards us an invariable attitude of respect that was if anything too
suave. They were always profuse with promises, but it was very hard to
get anything out of them.
“Oh, yes,” they would say, “we can do that easily. We will go to the
General and it will be all right. Don’t worry any more about it. We’ll
see to it, it will be quite simple.”
But nothing ever happened. The simplest request always managed to lose
itself somewhere between the block office and the Commandant’s study;
and gradually we learnt that formal applications were no use whatsoever,
and that if any one wished to change from one room to another, the
surest way to get there was to collect all his baggage into a heap and
move there independently.
The probable cause of this was the General himself, who was one of the
most arrogant and pompous little men that militarism could produce. He
was the complete Prussian, the Prussian of the music-hall and the
Lyceum. Very small and straight, he would strut about the parade-ground
clanking his spurs, or else he would stand in a pose, his cloak pulled
back to reveal his Iron Cross. And he was utterly vindictive. One does
not wish to misjudge any human being, but I feel sure he must have
derived an acute pleasure from sitting at his window and looking down on
the court, his eyes hungry for some misdemeanour on our parts, in which
he might possibly find an excuse for some punishment.
He was certainly given opportunities, and I think that considering the
man he was, it would have been judicious to have approached him in a
slightly different way. But it always happens that the majority have to
suffer for the faults of a few thoughtless people, and several
restrictions were placed on the camp that could have been easily
avoided. In every community there is the rowdy section, and this
rowdiness was accentuated by the lack of freedom. There was no outlet
for energy, except a walk round the square, or a very occasional game of
hockey. And the spirits of the swashbucklers found expression in “rags”
organised on an extensive scale.
But it was unfortunate for those who, having realised that they were
prisoners, wished to make the best of their conditions. And really the
rags were extraordinarily futile. One sportsman conceived the idea of
lowering from the top-story windows dummies which the sentries would
mistake for escaping Britishers and fire at. Luckily this scheme was
suppressed, but there was nevertheless one night a very large and
organised jollification, which was of course exactly what the General
wanted.
For three weeks he closed the camp theatre, and put a stop to music and
concerts of any description, which meant the removal of the only form of
amusement that we had.
On another occasion when bombs were being dropped on Mainz, a few
officers began to cheer and shout. It was again playing straight into
the General’s hands. He immediately stopped for a period of two months
all walks outside the camp, and any one who has been a prisoner will
know what the curtailing of that privilege meant. It was a great pity,
and our prison life would have been much more easy, if only the
turbulent few had realised that it was in their own interests to keep
quiet, considering the man with whom they had to deal.
Though as a matter of fact I have little doubt that, however well we had
behaved, the General would have found some excuse for inflicting
reprisals. For he was quite capable of inventing regulations off his own
bat. He was a sort of self-elected dictator, and drew up his own code
and Army Act. His most scandalous infliction was an order that the
covers should be removed from all books before being issued to the camp.
The old excuse was brought forward; the French used to hide maps and
poison between the cardboard and the cloth.
For this order the General had apparently no authority whatsoever, and
it was particularly unjust, because we had been precisely told at
Karlsruhe that all books must come direct from a publisher, so as to
prevent any danger of their being tampered with. The result was that we
had all sent home for new copies of books of which we already had soiled
duplicates, and then when the books arrived, we found that they had to
be practically cut to pieces.
They told us that the books could be kept for us if we liked, but
naturally we did want to read them, now that they had come, and we had
no other alternative but to authorise their execution; and surely for
the true book-lover there can be no fate more awful than to have to
stand in silence and watch book after book being barbarously mutilated.
Occasionally we would try and save a volume. The Bible was the centre of
much controversy. There was no reason why it should be regarded as any
more innocent than a Swinburne as a possible receptacle for propaganda,
but the censor did certainly hesitate over it for a moment. But
eventually he did not relent.
“No, I’m afraid it must go,” he said; “after all that God has put up
with during the last four years, He ought to be able to survive this.”
It was the one flash of wit he showed, but it did little to save our
covers. To all intents and purposes the books were ruined. The leaves
began to turn up at the edges. After a book had been read three times,
the glue at the back had cracked, and the pages gradually loosened. It
was a sorry business; at least two hundred pounds’ worth of books must
have been cut up within three months, and there was absolutely no
authority for the order. This we discovered later on, when we managed to
lodge a complaint before the Central Command at Frankfort. They told us
there that they had no objection at all to the issue of books with
covers, and the restriction was instantly removed; but in the meantime
no small part of a library had been destroyed.
But our chief grievance was a medical one. The organisation of the camp
was quite inadequate to meet the demands of any sudden epidemic. In
ordinary times it certainly worked well enough. Personally I never went
to hospital, but a friend of mine who spent a week in the isolation
hospital brought back a very favourable account of his treatment. The
food was excellent, and the sister was particularly kind, going out of
her way to do everything that lay within her power. But it was very
different towards the end of the autumn, when the grippe was raging in
the camp to such an extent that in the average room of eleven officers,
there was hardly a day when less than four officers were in bed, and the
arrangements were very poor. Of course every allowance must be made for
the fact that there was hardly any medicine in Germany, and that when a
disease had once started there, it was almost impossible to stop it. But
the medical attendance was both ignorant and desultory. Those cases
that were removed to the hospital were given, it is true, attendance as
careful as they would have received in England. But in the camp the
doctor appeared to take no interest in his work at all. Very often he
only visited the patients once every three days, and when he came he did
not take much trouble with them. He used to ask a few casual questions
and then say, “Aspirin and tea.” The sick had to rely entirely on the
other occupants of their room, and the help they received was willing
but naturally ignorant. The result was that many officers became very
seriously ill, and several of them died. The German organisation was in
this case criminally inadequate.