THE DAILY ROUND
§ 1
Within a few weeks, however, the arrival of a parcel had ceased to be an
affair of momentous import. We could look on bully beef and Maconochies
with comparative unconcern. The contents of each parcel varied only in
such incidentals as sugar, chocolate, and packets of whole rice. The
framework was the same, a solid enough construction, but one that as a
continuous diet proved ineffably tedious. To begin with, we tried to
make our meals more interesting with improvised puddings. We mixed a
certain number of different ingredients into a bowl of water, beat them
up into a paste, and then baked them in a tepid oven. The result was
usually stodgy and quite tasteless. Personal vanity prevented us from
confessing this, and night after night we struggled through these
lukewarm, unpalatable dishes. How long this would have gone on I do not
know; when the end came it came very suddenly.
One evening there was a lecture in connection with the Pitt League, and
it was rumoured that Colonel Westcott was going to speak. And Colonel
Westcott’s speeches were such that no one would willingly miss. He had
always ready some new panacea, some fresh catchword. As long as he
remained passive he was infinitely entertaining.
“We must go to this,” said Evans, and with some alarm I noticed that of
the five other members of our mess, four were preparing to move seating
accommodation.
“That’s all very jolly,” I said, “but who’s going to cook the dinner?”
The answer came back with a startling unanimity.
“You.”
“But look here,” I began to protest, “you know what I am at these
things. I’ve never cooked a dinner before.”
“Time you began then.”
And I was left standing before an empty stove. There remained only one
other member of our mess, my friend Barron, who spent the greater part
of his day asleep. I woke him up.
“Barron,” I said, “we’ve got to cook the dinner.”
He blinked up through sleep-laden eyes.
“But, my dear Alec....”
“It’s no good,” I said sternly. “If we want anything to eat, and I most
certainly do, we’ve got to cook it ourselves.”
Slowly Barron rose from his seat.
“Well,” he said, “what have you got?”
“There’s a tin of bully, some beans, half a Maconochie, we can make a
stew of that.”
The stew was the work of a second. We mixed it all up with water,
scattered some salt on the top, and left it to boil.
“And now the pudding,” I said.
This proved a more difficult matter. There was no rice left, and we had
used the last of the Turban packets.
“Archie,” I said, “we’ll have to invent one.”
For five minutes we argued about the ingredients. Hodges wanted to give
it a fish-flavour by adding a tin of salmon and shrimp paste.
“There’s been no taste to the beastly thing for the last six days,” he
protested. “It might just as well taste of that as nothing.”
Finally, however, we decided on what we euphemistically dubbed a
chocolate _soufflé_. First of all we spread a handkerchief flat on the
table, and sprinkled over it a little cornflour. We then took a packet
of cocoa.
“How much shall I upset?” I asked.
We read the directions on the outside, but on the subject of chocolate
_soufflés_ the manufacturers were sadly reticent. So as there was no
clear guide, we used the entire packet.
The mixture now seemed to demand some moisture, so we poured a little
warm water on it, and tried to knead it into a dough. But it did not
work: a brown paste adhered to our fingers; nothing more.
“It won’t bind,” said Barron. “We must put some butter with it.”
“We’ve got no butter.”
“Oh, well, then, try some beef-dripping.”
So the next ingredient was half a tin of dripping, and as regards
appearances it certainly had excellent results. A few minutes’ hard
kneading produced an admirable dough. But when we sucked our fingers
afterwards, the flavour was anything but that of chocolate. It had a
thick and greasy taste.
“Alec,” said Hodges, “this dripping’s ruined it.”
“Your idea,” I said cheerfully.
For a moment he looked fierce, then returned to the matter in hand.
“Something’s got to be done,” he said; “we’ve got to swamp that dripping
somehow.”
“What about some treacle?” I hazarded. “We drew some this afternoon.”
And within a minute the bulk of our pudding was further increased by an
entire tin of treacle, and whatever its taste after that, it was
certainly not of dripping.
“That’s about enough, isn’t it?” I said.
“Well, you know,” said Archie thoughtfully, “I don’t really think it
would be harmed by some salmon and shrimp. After all, it would help to
counterbalance the dripping.”
But already I had begun to wrap the handkerchief round the brown sticky
ball. When it was firmly incased and knotted, we lowered it into a small
saucepan, put it on the oven, and waited for the wanderers’ return.
They came back as usual with a great clatter of feet, expressing their
hunger in the most forcible terms.
“Hellish hungry,” shouted Evans, “and the dinner’s bound to be awful if
Waugh’s cooked it.”
“You wait,” I said, and plumped the stew down before him. This dish,
probably because it had cooked itself, was quite eatable; and there was
so much of it that in the earlier days it would have formed a meal of
generous proportions. And by the time we had finished it, none of us
felt in the mood for any more solid fare. Something delicate and
appetising would have been delightful, a _pêche melba_ perhaps, but suet
... no. And of course this rather militated against the success of the
chocolate _soufflé_.
And to begin with, it was a little burnt. There was a large hole in the
encircling handkerchief, and the bottom of the pudding was black.
Considering the bulk of the pudding, this had really very little effect;
but it prejudiced the others, and the artist has to be so tactful with
his public.
And then the pudding itself. Well, if we had not had the stew first, I
am sure we should have all enjoyed it; but coming as it did on the top
of a heavy dinner, even Barron and myself were hard driven to finish
it. And it was only self-respect that made us. The others took a
spoonful or two and desisted. Barron and I struggled manfully to the
end, and were then conscious of four steely pairs of eyes. Evans, who
acted as a sort of mess president, was the first to speak.
“What did you two use to make this pudding?”
“Oh, nothing much,” I said, in an offhand way; “a little cocoa, a little
treacle, a little cornflour.” Somehow I felt I could not confess to the
dripping.
“But how much did you use?”
Barron must be a braver man than I am, or it may have been he was still
feeling a little sore because the salmon paste had not been included; at
any rate he went straight to the point.
“A tin of each.”
There was a general consternation. That a whole tin of treacle, half a
tin of dripping, a complete packet of cocoa, had all gone to a pudding
that only a third of the mess had been able to eat at all ... it was
unbelievable, a gross case of misplaced trust, perfidy could go no
further.
Barron and myself were not popular that evening. But our peccadilloes
bore fruit later. That chocolate _soufflé_ served the purpose of a
climax. From that day onward it was implicitly understood that no cook
should invent recipes for puddings.
§ 2
With the regular arrival of parcels, and the consequent immunity from
hunger, our life settled down into that ordered calm which would have
been the constant level of our routine as long as the war lasted. And it
was here that captivity weighed most heavily.
Before, our routine had always been to a certain extent progressive. We
had been a new camp, we had had to form societies and committees. We had
a library to build up, and there was always the parcel list to add its
daily incentive to enthusiasm. But there came a time, when all these
wishes either for books or food were satisfied, and when the individual
had to depend for amusement solely on his own resources. Here was the
real trial of captivity.
Since my return several people have said to me, “It must have been
beastly living among the Huns.” But that was an infliction that it
required little fortitude to bear. The Huns never worried us, unless we
worried them. We could have exactly as much intercourse with them as we
wanted, and there was no need to have anything to do with them at all.
But there was no escape from the continual presence of five hundred
British officers, and the continual conversation of the ten other
members of the room. For not one moment was it possible to be alone. And
as the evenings grew darker, the doors of the blocks were closed
earlier; and by October we found ourselves shut in at six o’clock, with
the prospect of a long evening in the room.
Those evenings were simply appalling. We all got on each other’s nerves
horribly; as individuals we liked each other well enough; but it was no
joke to be in the constant company of the same people, to hear the same
anecdotes, the same opinions; and, owing to the limited area of common
interests, talk always centred on the war. And there is no subject more
wearisomely distasteful. By the end of six months’ imprisonment nearly
every one had got utterly fed up with his room and the inmates of it.
Smith would meet Brown outside the _Kantine_, and a conversation of this
sort would take place.
“My Lord, Brown, but my room is the absolute limit, it drives me nearly
wild.”
“But, my dear man, you’ve got some topping fellows in there, there’s
Jones and Hawkins and May.”
“I dare say, but you try living with them for a bit. You wouldn’t talk
like that then.”
“Oh, well,” Brown would say, “you haven’t got much to grumble at; if you
were in my room, now....”
“But your room, Brown; why, there are some tophole men there....”
And so the world went round. For indeed, however patient one is, it is
impossible to live in the same room as ten other men, to eat there and
sleep there, to spend half the day in their company, and not get nervy.
Before long we had reached that state when we quarrelled over the most
trifling things--about the dinner, whether we should have bully beef or
a veal loaf. The slightest inconvenience awoke resentment. All the
domestic details that cause friction in the married home were with us
intensified a hundredfold, because there was with us none of the real
and selfless affection which alone can bridge over these difficulties.
Things had reached a sorry state by the time we had left; there was
hardly a single officer who had a good word to say about his room. What
we should have been like after another year I dread to imagine.
As it was, it was bad enough. For myself I never stayed in the room one
moment more than I could help. And often in the evenings after the
doors had been shut, I used to walk up and down the cold stone corridor
with Barron; we would do anything to get away from the room. It was the
only way to preserve our balance.
And here in its psychological aspect lies, I think, the true meaning of
captivity; for in the bare recital of incidents there must be always a
savour of the soulless. The conditions of life are only really important
in as far as they form a framework for personality. It is the individual
that counts, and the real meaning of eight months’ imprisonment does not
lie in their political or sociological aspect, but in the effect that
they have on character. For each person they had a different message,
each person was touched in a different way. Probably through the mind of
each individual flitted the same recurring moods, modified and altered
by the demands of each particular temperament, but still the moods were
the same fingers playing upon different strings.
And for me, at any rate, the mood that recurred most frequently was one
of a grey depression, mixed with a profound sense of the futility of
human effort. Confinement inspires morbidity very quickly, and some of
us used to take an almost savage delight in wrenching down the few frail
bulwarks of an ultimate belief. From certain quotations we derived an
exultant satisfaction.
“Pleasure of life what is’t? the good hours of an ague.”
We used to croon the words over to ourselves and endeavour to arrive at
some stoic standpoint from which we could completely objectify ourselves
and our ambitions.
The wearisome sameness of the days, the monotony of the faces, the
unchanged landscape, the intolerable talk about the war, all these
tended to produce an effect of complete and utter depression. This was
far and away our worst enemy: whole days were drenched in an incurable
melancholia. The continual presence of sentries and barbed wire flung
before us a perpetual symbol of the intelligence fettered by the values
of the phenomenal world. Life resolved itself into a picture of eternal
serfdom: sometimes the body was enslaved, sometimes the mind, but there
was always some bar to Freedom. It was all so much “heaving at a
moveless latch.” Purposeless and irrevocable.
It is easy enough to laugh at it all now. But then it was a very real
trial. Those doubts and uncertainties, which at some time or another
assail all men, and with a great many form a silent background or
framework for the events of their mournful odyssey, were with us
continually present; and however gloomy a view one may take of the
universe, one wishes to be able to escape from it at times. And the only
remedy was work.
Indeed confinement must have been a very real ordeal to those whose
temperaments were not self-sufficient, and who depended on the outside
world for their amusements and distractions. It has been said times
without number that the dreamer loses half the pleasure of life, and
that he lies bound up by his own fantasies and wayward creations: that
he has no eyes for what Pater has called “the continual stir and motion
of a comely human life.” Well, Pater wrote that of Attic culture, of the
light-hearted world that is reflected in the pages of the _Lysis_, and
perhaps modern life presents none too comely an aspect. Certainly in
place of “stir and motion” we have bustle and excitement, a clumsy
fumbling after sensation. Perhaps the dreamer has not lost so very much,
and he does at any rate carry his own world with him: he is
self-sufficient; within the sure citadel of his own soul he can always
find those pleasures which alone have any claim to permanence. Flaubert
is always the same, behind barbed wire as in the shadow of a Wessex
garden: the change of environment makes no difference there.
But on those who preferred action to contemplation, prison life bore
very heavily, and there was something rather pathetic in the various
attempts that were made to fight against the growth of listlessness and
apathy. To begin with, of course, every one entered his name on the roll
of the Future Career Society; no one took less than three classes; there
was a general rush to attain knowledge which lasted about three weeks.
After that, life resolved itself for a great many into a laborious
effort to kill time, and here the Germans showed their commercial
instincts. The _Kantine_ authorities catered for this hunger for
novelty, and from sure knowledge of the depression of markets gauged the
exact moment when each particular craze would begin to ebb.
The first hobby was wood-carving, an affair so hazardous that the first
day numbered about ten per cent. casualties. It demanded enormous
delicacy. Boxes of all descriptions were on sale, on which were traced
patterns of labyrinthic intricacy; one could cut photo frames, cigar
boxes, paper cutters, and to accomplish this labour there were provided
small knives of a razor-like sharpness, which under the influence of
the least overweight of pressure flew off the box at an alarming angle,
to bury themselves in the palm of the other hand. It required enormous
patience, and to me appeared one of the most monotonous occupations. It
took hours of work to complete the smallest job.
This, of course, was not at all what the _Kantine Wallahs_ desired. They
wanted a hobby which would require a lot of material and very little
time. Wood-carving took much too long, and the profits arrived much too
slowly, and so they accelerated the slump in wood-carving by the
innovation of satin-tasso, which was in every way a far more noble
craft.
To begin with, it gave the personality of the artist a fuller freedom.
In wood-carving individual preference was hopelessly bound down by the
laws of pattern. As in the cast of certain modern painters who having
once conceived a “stunt,” proceed to pour the most unlikely moods into
one artistic mould, the individual was a slave to shapes. Against this,
liberty was driven to revolt, and satin-tasso provided the necessary
outlet.
Even here, of course, there were, it is true, laws and patterns, but
there was full scope for the peculiarities of taste. The satin-tasso box
had on it simply the bare outline of a picture. This one cut round with
a sharp knife, and then proceeded to colour in with special paints; and
in the employment of these paints any extravagance was permitted.
Mediæval costumes offered superb opportunities for splendour and pagan
gold. Across a pearl-flecked sky emerald clouds could fade into a wash
of scarlet. It was truly a noble craft, and the whole business only took
a few hours, which was most advantageous both for the suppliers and the
supplied.
There is nothing that pleases the craftsman more than the sight of a
finished article, and there is nothing that gives more pleasure to the
tradesman than the swift return of gigantic profits, and both these
wishes were granted. The _Kantine_ did a roaring trade in satin-tasso,
and the portmanteaus of the artisan grew heavy with trophies and
souvenirs.
But all the same it was rather a pathetic sight to see a man of about
twenty-eight, in the prime of life, sitting down every afternoon and
evening, fiddling about with a piece of wood and a box of paints. He
derived no pleasure from it: it merely served the purpose of a narcotic.
As long as his hands were employed his brain would go to sleep, and he
need no longer see the tedious procession of days that lay before him.
He was symbolic in a way of the Public School Education that
deliberately starves a boy’s intellect for the sake of his body. The
type of clean-limbed Britisher, that Public Schools produce, is all very
well in its way, and is infinitely preferable to the type produced by
any other system, either in England or France. Of that there can be no
doubt whatsoever. But the schoolmasters who adopt this line of argument,
forget that they are dealing with a material refined upon by the
breeding of centuries. The question is not, “Is the material good?”
because it is. The question is, “Does Education make the best of this
material?” and I am very certain that it does not. Every man should have
sufficient part in the intellectual interests of life, to be able to
keep his intelligence active for eight months in surroundings that
provide no physical outlets. For after all, it is the mind, or, to use
Pater’s phrase, “the imaginative reason” that counts.
“Thank God that while the nerves decay
And muscles desiccate away,
The brain’s the hardiest part of men
And thrives till threescore years and ten.”
And it is surely a severe condemnation of any system that its average
products can derive no sustenance from the contemplative side of life,
that the moment they are out of the theatres, they have absolutely no
resources left. It would have given me the most acute satisfaction to
have been able to escort there some of the many schoolmasters who so
fiercely defended themselves behind the legend, “By our works ye shall
judge us,” which was exactly what I tried to do.
The narrow limits of our captivity provided us with only one other
craze, the last and the most decadent, for which reason, probably, it
was the only one to which I succumbed--Manicure. It was really a
tempting lure. One evening I went to the _Kantine_ to buy a pencil, and
saw a row of beautiful plush boxes, in which reposed long-handled files,
and scissors, and knives; and beside these were bottles of delicate
scents and polishes and powders, strangely reminiscent of Amiens. The
lure was too great, and forty marks went west.
From that day onwards our room was a sort of general manicuring saloon.
Several of us bought sets, and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. we received
visitors. As our guests received treatment gratis, and the initial
outlay towards the opening of the saloon was sufficiently generous, it
might have been thought that our guests came out of the transaction
rather well. But they paid richly for their adornment in pain. We were
all amateurs, and the manipulation of a pair of curved scissors requires
feminine skill; no one has ever yet called me neat-fingered, and those
scissors were very sharp. During the operations of our first fortnight,
of all those who came to us with gay step, there were few who went away
without at least one finger swathed in bandages.