After you have been in solitary for some time, it becomes increasing
difficult to retain your judgment. I know that first I would make up my
mind that I was going to be in prison for two years, and then a great
and irresistible hope would arise within me, that I should be sent to
a concentration camp called Ruhleben, that I had had a whisper of from
my friends. I had hoped for some sort of a trial to know how long I was
going to remain where I was. Every day that passed at ten o'clock,
when I imagined that anyone, before whom I might be brought, had come
down to his office, I would put on the one collar I had. Every day at
six I would take it off again, preserving it for the next day. At times
I became convinced that, because I was not yet of age, I was to be kept
for a few months more, and that the day after my twenty-first birthday,
I was to be sentenced to some ghastly sort of punishment, like solitary
for two years, or for life. (There seemed absolutely no difference
between these two, and I dreaded the one as much as the other. Both
appeared interminable, and I had no hopes of coming out sane, even
after the shorter period. I pictured myself moaning about the London
Law Courts in a celluloid collar, picking up a little copying work
here, and a little there, until I finally sank into a mumbling old age
at twenty-five, and died in delirium tremens at thirty.)
Another fact made me terribly despondent, and, fight how I would, was
gradually making me utterly hopeless. About fourteen days after my
companions of the British Relief Committee had gone, a new-comer had
arrived. He spoke German absolutely perfectly, but with an Austrian
accent. I had heard him say something to the warder. I will not tell
his story, for he is at the present moment in another prison in Berlin,
though not in solitary, and is, I know, writing his reminiscences
in readiness for when the war shall come to an end. Let it suffice,
however, to say that he had been discovered, soon after war broke out,
writing articles for a London paper. He was arrested at the flat he
happened to be living in, and, after a large amount of palaver, was
given twenty-four hours to leave the country in. He was accompanied
to the frontier. Within a fortnight he was back again. He had gone
to London, had seen his paper, had come back to Holland, and at the
frontier had pretended to be an Austrian waiter who had been expelled
from England. He so exasperated his interrogators at the frontier
by his eternal repetition of his ill treatment at the hands of his
dastardly English employers, that they finally let him pass. However,
in the end he was caught--as we all are--and recognised. He had been
told that he was to be sent to this place Ruhleben, and, when one day
he disappeared, I naturally surmised that he had been taken there.
He was very good to me, for he had managed to get permission to buy
fruit; I had been refused it. So he used to buy double the quantity,
and daily, on going down the stairs, smuggle me an apple. "If he," I
argued, "who has done this thing _twice_, and who is hoary with old
age (he was about thirty-five), gets sent to this camp Ruhleben, after
being here for three weeks, and I, who have only done it once, and am
not yet of age, and have been here nine weeks, and have not been sent
there, then there is no hope of my ever getting there. They would have
sent me there by now, were they going to do so at all." Afterwards, I
found, of course, that he had never been sent anywhere near Ruhleben,
but simply to another prison. I heard the most wonderful stories about
his doings there, from a friend who was sent to prison for a time. He
would appear for exercise dressed in flamboyant pink running shorts, a
vest and socks to match--and a top hat. What on earth for? Well, if the
walls of prison don't supply you with humour or whimsicality, you must
undertake the task yourself.
The best of luck to him. He probably thinks I am still in that
Polizeigefängnis.
For some time I had been the oldest inhabitant of the prison. The usual
denizen of the place came for a day or two, and then went on his way
through that process called Law and Justice. My position gradually
came to give me tiny privileges. For instance, they became quite
convinced that I was going mad, for, apart from my habit of walking
round and round the exercise yard at nearly five miles per hour, every
night I would repeat the Jabberwocky. It had taken me a whole week
with my broken-down memory to piece together the odd bits of lines and
verses that I still carried in my head; and another week to evolve Mr.
Kipling's "If." I would suddenly shout loudly into the solid blackness
that "All mimsey were the borrow-groves and the moamwraths outgrabe,"
I knew quite well that borrogoves was the correct litany, but I
preferred borrow-groves; so borrow-groves it was. "One two, one two
and through and through the vorpel blade went snicker snack. He left
it dead and with its head he went galumphing back," and I would make
that "snicker snack" all slow and creepy, like Captain Hook; and would
rise to a triumphant roar as I announced the fact that he "galumphed"
back, in preference to any other form of locomotion that might have
been available, glorying at his ability to resist temptations such
as taxi-cabbing, taking the tube, or walking, and, above all, the
insidious run.
"_If_ you can make one heap of all your winnings,
And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,
And lose; and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss."
_If_ (and I shouted as if I was praying for life itself)
"_If_ you can force your heart, and nerve, and sinew
To serve their turn, long after they are gone,
And so hold on, when there is nothing in you,
Except the will, which says to them, 'hold on.'"
And I would repeat it softly to myself, until loudly again, pacing
madly up and down the cell, I would argue, "Yes, that's all very well,
you know, but your will is the very thing that suffers before your
heart and nerve and sinew are anywhere near gone. Why, it's the very
base, the very foundation of all things, that it attacked, and then
what are you going to do, Mr. Rudyard?" Nevertheless, I found an odd
sort of comfort, and they were nearly always my prayer to the setting
sun as the darkness stole in.
I also used to hum, whistle, and sing. This was strictly forbidden by
one of the thirty-three regulations pasted on the back of the door. One
night in December, when the darkness had been extra oppressive,--I was
in darkness for eighteen out of the twenty-four hours--and I had been
singing loud enough for the warders to hear, one came up and, rapping
on the door, said that such behaviour was forbidden, nevertheless,
he would ask the Herr Direktor as an especial favour, if I might be
permitted to whistle occasionally. This is what comes of being the
oldest inhabitant of a jail. The next day there was solemnly filled
into the ledger by the chief warder, and countersigned by the Direktor,
"Erlaubnis zu nummer acht und fünfzig zu singen und zu pfeifen."[5]