THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRISON
The contrast of tragedy and farce and the incidents, and the lack of
incident, which I have attempted to sketch in the foregoing chapter, had
a marked mental effect on all of us. But each felt the effects of
confinement differently. With me, I came to look on my life in Turkey as
something outside the actuality of existence. I did not feel "myself" at
all. I was disembodied, left with no link with the outer world, except
memory and anticipation. I was in a dark forest far from all avenues of
activity such as the sanity of society and the companionship of women.
My world seemed make-believe, and my interests counterfeit.
I worked at a novel with a friend of mine, and for a time that seemed
something practical to do. But there was always the fear that it would
be taken from us by the Turks, and the possibility that we would never
publish it.
Doubt and indecision lay heavy on me. I did not know how long captivity
would last. A criminal's sentence is fixed: not so a prisoner of war's.
He is dependent on matters beyond his control, and a will beyond his
narrow ambit. To reach that outside will, and to form a part of it
again, was my dominating wish. Through the glasses of captivity the
world was colourless and distorted. Only freedom could make me see it
again aright. And when freedom seemed remote, the world was very
colourless.
The novel amused me by snatches. Learning languages amused me at times.
But these things were really the diversions of a child, who dreams
through all its lesson-time of another and a fairer world.
But, unlike a child, I became absorbed in self. I analysed my moods, and
thought gloomily about my health. I mourned my youth, as my hair turned
grey. The sorrows of the spinster were mine and the griefs of the
middle-aged. The value of material things was magnified. The pleasures
of the palate, I confess, assumed an exaggerated importance. I found a
new joy in food, and sometimes I dreamed that I was eating. Also I
contracted the habit of smoking cigarettes in the middle of the night.
And I learnt that the effect of alcohol, when one is very depressed, is
like putting in the top clutch of the car of consciousness, so that one
runs forward smoothly on the road of life. In short, I enjoyed eating
and drinking and smoking in a way that I had never done before, and
never will again, I hope. But I know now why public-houses flourish.
After my own experience of deathly dullness, I heartily sympathise with
those who seek relief in alcohol and nicotine. They may be poison, but
in this imperfect world the deadliest poison of all is boredom.
Prohibition, as I saw it in Turkey, when tobacco was short, or food was
scarce, or alcohol was forbidden, did not impress me as being
beneficial. The fact is, we all need stimulant of one sort or another.
Normally our work, our home, or our hopes supply this need. Almost
everyone in the world is struggling (however carefully they may disguise
the fact) to be other than they are, and better (or worse) than they
are. We strive after superlatives and are rarely satisfied by them. But
in captivity, as in other circumstances of distress, this stay in life,
this hope of something different and wish for something _more_, is
suddenly removed. We are left without _stimuli_. Nothing seems to
matter. One's mental and material habits inevitably relax. A muddy idea
seems as good as a clear one--a sloppy suit of clothes serves as well as
a tidy one. Energy wanes.
But why? The reason is that the average mind cannot live on
abstractions. It must grapple with something practical. One must sharpen
one's wits on the world, and it is just this that as a prisoner one
cannot do. One cannot "lay hold on life," because there is no life to
lay hold of, except an unnatural and artificial existence, where the
sympathy of women and the dignity of work are absent. That was the crux
of the matter. Sympathy and dignity were lacking in our life. We heard
of advances and retreats as from another sphere. We read of great
heroisms and great sorrows without being close to them. We had no part
in the quarrel. We were in a squalid by-way, living out a mean tragedy,
while the fate of all we loved was in the balance. Never again would we
go fighting.
From the moment of our capture we had passed into a strange narrow life,
where the spirit of man, while retaining all its old memories and hopes,
could not express them in action.
Captivity is a minor form of death, and I was dead, to all intents and
purposes.
Often, lying a-bed in the early morning, I used to feel that my body was
completely gone, and that only a fanciful and feverish intelligence
remained. I remember especially one dawn in the spring of 1917, when I
watched two figures passing down the station road. Slouching towards the
station, and all unconscious of the beauty of the waking world, came a
soldier with his pack and rifle. He wore the grey Turkish uniform, his
beard was grey, his cheeks were also grey and sunken. Slowly, slowly he
dragged his heavy feet towards the train that would take him away to the
war. The train had been already signalled, I knew (for I kept notes of
the traffic in those days), and I found myself hoping anxiously that he
would not be late. The sooner he was killed the better. He was old and
ugly and ill. If only such as he could perish. . . . Then my thought
took wings of the morning. From the soldier, plodding onwards devotedly,
as so many men have gone to their deaths, my eye ranged across the
plains, lying dim and dark to eastward, to the horizon mountains of the
Suleiman Dagh, whose snow had already seen the messengers of morning
hasting from the lands below our world. And man seemed mean and minute
in the purposes of Nature. So ugly was he, such a blot on the landscape
with his trains and soldiers, that I wondered he continued to exist.
There was a life above our life in the dawn. The powers of the world
knew nothing of this soldier's hopes and fears. To them his endeavours
were a comedy. A huge mountain-back, with the gesture of some giant in
the playtime of long ago, seemed shrugging its shoulders at this
ridiculous straying atom of a moment's space. The train came in, and I
saw its smoke above the tree-tops of the station. It whistled shrilly,
and the soldier quickened his pace. No doubt he was late. Perhaps he
still survives, and is toiling even now towards some trench. Anyway he
passed from my ken, but I still stood at the window, looking towards the
mountains and the sky.
Then there passed an archaic ox-cart, creaking down the road slowly, as
it has creaked down the ages, from the night of Time. It was drawn by a
white heifer, whose shoulders strained against the yoke, for it was a
heavy cart. But she went forward willingly, resignedly. Work was her
portion. She would live and die under the yoke. She licked her cool
muzzle, dusted flies with her neat tail, and looked forward with
wistful eyes that seemed to see beyond her working world, to some
ultimate haven for the quiet workers. Somewhere she would find rest at
last. To my feverish imagination that white heifer symbolised the pathos
of all the driven souls who go forward unquestioning to destiny.
And the soldier with his pack was a type also of voiceless millions who
carry the burden of our civilisation.
We stagger on, under the bludgeonings of chance, and but rarely lift our
eyes to the dawn, although a daily miracle is there. Someone conducts
the orient-rite, regardless of the lives of men, which come sweeping on,
on the tide of war, to end in foam and froth. Yet from this stir of hate
and heroism some purpose must surely rise. From the travail of the
trenches some meaning will be born.
I saw things thus, through images and symbols. Across the vast inanity
of that waiting time, streaks of vision used to flash, like distant
summer lightning. Impermanent, but beautiful to me, they lit a fair
horizon. Else, all was dark.
To call this time a death in life seems an overstatement, but if my
experiences in Turkey had any mental value at all, it was just this: to
teach me how to die. A curtain had come down on consciousness when I was
captured. Since then I only lived in the Before and After of captivity.
My old self was finished. I saw it in clear but disjunct pictures of
recollection: pig-sticking, sailing, dining, dancing, or on the road to
Messines one hard November night when feet froze in stirrups and horses
slipped and struck blue lights from the cobbles. And my new self awaited
the moment of freedom. It still stirred in the womb of war.
Even so, in my belief, do the souls of our comrades lost consider their
lives on earth and look back on their time of trial with interest and
regret. Discarnate, they cannot achieve their desires, yet they long to
manifest again in the world of men. With level and unclouded eyes they
consider the incidents of mortality, and find in them a Purpose to
continue. There is work for them in the world through many lives, and
love, which will meet and re-meet its love. And so at last, drawn by
duty and affection, those who have woven their lives in the tapestry of
our time will one day take up the threads again.