Two German Prison Camps
Visiting a prison camp is somewhat like touching at an island in the
night--one of those tropical islands, for instance, whose curious and
crowded life shows for an instant as your steamer leaves the mail or
takes on a load of deck-hands, and then fades away into a few twinkling
lights and the sound of a bell across the water. You may get permission
to see a prison camp, but may not stay there, and you are not expected,
generally, to talk to the prisoners. You can but walk past those rows
of eyes, with all their untold stories, much as you might go into a
theatre in the midst of a performance, tramp through the audience and
out again.
It is a strange experience and leaves one hoping that somebody--some
German shut away in the south of France, one of those quick-eyed
Frenchmen in the human zoo at Zossen--is keeping a diary. For while
there have always been prison camps, have there ever been--at least,
since Rome--such menageries as these! Behind the barbed-wire fence at
Zossen--Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin--there are some fifteen
thousand men. The greater number are Frenchmen, droves of those long
blue turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing sluggishly between
the rows of low barracks, Frenchmen of every sort of training and
temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity. I
do not remember any picture of the war more curious, and, as it were,
uncanny than the first sight of Zossen as our motor came lurching down
the muddy road from Berlin--that huge, forgotten eddy, that slough of
idle, aimless human beings against the gray March sky, milling slowly
round and round in the mud.
But the French are only part of Zossen. There are Russians--shaggy
peasants such as we see in cartoons or plays at home, and Mongol
Russians with flat faces and almond eyes, who might pass for Chinamen.
There are wild-eyed "Turcos" from the French African provinces,
chattering untamed Arabs playing leap-frog in front of their German
commandant as impudently as street boys back in their native bazaars.
There are all the tribes and castes of British Indians--"I've got twenty
different kinds of people in my Mohammedan camp," said the lieutenant
who was showing me about--squat Gurkhas from the Himalayas, minus their
famous knives--tall, black-bearded Sikhs, with the faces of princes.
There are even a few lone Englishmen, though most of the British
soldiers in this part of Germany are at Doberitz. Whether or not Zossen
could be called a "show" camp, it seemed, at any rate, about as well
managed as such a place could be. The prisoners were housed in new,
clean, one-story barracks; well fed, so far as one could tell from their
appearance and that of the kitchens and storerooms; they could write and
be written to, and they were compelled to take exercise. The Roman
Catholics had one chapel and the Greek Catholics another, and there was
an effort to permit Indian prisoners to observe their rules of caste.
As we tramped through barracks where chilly Indians, Russians with
broad, high cheek-bones, sensitive-looking Frenchmen with quick, liquid
eyes, jumped to their feet and stiffened at attention as the commandant
passed, a young officer, who had lived in England before the war and was
now acting as interpreter, volunteered his guileless impressions. The
Turcos were a bad lot--fighting, gambling, and stealing from each other
--there was trouble with some of, them every day. The Russians were
dirty, good-natured, and stupid.
The English--well, frankly, he was surprised at their lack of discipline
and general unruliness--all except some of the Indians, and those, he
must say, were well-trained--fine fellows and good soldiers. One could
surmise the workings of his mind as one thought of the average
happy-go-lucky Tommy Atkins, and then came across one of those tall,
straight, hawk-eyed Sikhs and saw him snap his heels together and his
arms to his sides and stand there like a bronze statue.
It was a dreadful job getting the Frenchmen to take exercise--"they
can't understand why any one should want to work, merely to keep himself
fit!" Aside from this idiosyncrasy they were, of course, the pleasantest
sort of people to get along with. We saw Frenchmen sorting mail in the
post-office, painting signs for streets, making blankets out of pasted-
together newspapers--everywhere they were treated as intelligent men to
whom favors could be granted. And, of course, there was this difference
between the French and English of the early weeks of the war--the French
army is one of universal conscription like the German, and business men
and farmers, writers, singers, and painters were lumped in together.
There was one particularly good-looking young man, a medical officer,
who flung up his head to attention as we came up.
"He helped us a lot--this man!" said the commandant, and laid his hand
on the young man's shoulder. The Frenchman's eyes dilated a trifle and
a smile flashed behind rather than across his face--one could not know
whether it was gratitude or defiance.
A sculptor who had won a prize at Rome and several other artists had had
a room set aside for them to work in. Some were making post-cards, some
more ambitious drawings, and in the sculptor's studio was the head of
the young doctor we had just seen and an unfinished plaster group for a
camp monument. On the wall was a sign in Latin and French--"Unhappy the
spirit which worries about the future," a facetious warning that any one
who loafed there longer than three minutes was likely to be killed, and
the following artistic creed from "La Fontaine:"
"Ne for fans point noire talent. Nous ne ferions rien avec grace. Jamais
un lourdaud quoiqu'il fosse, ne saurait passer pour gallant."
("Don't strain your talent or you'll do nothing gracefully. The boor
won't pass for a gallant gentleman, no matter what he does.")
The Germans, at different times in their history, have conquered the
French and humbly looked up to and imitated them. Generally speaking,
they study and try to understand the French, and their own
intellectuality and idealism are things French-men might be expected to
like or, at any rate, be interested in. Yet it is one of history's or
geography's ironies that the Frenchman goes on his way, neither knowing
nor wanting to know the blond beasts over the Rhine--"Jamais un lourdaud
quoiqu'il fasse" . . the young sculptor must have smiled when he tacked
that verse on the wall of his prison!
Ruhleben is a race-track on the outskirts of Berlin, and a detention
camp for English civilians. This is quite another sort of menagerie.
You can imagine the different kinds of Englishmen who would be caught in
Germany by the storm--luxurious invalids taking the waters at
Baden-Baden; Gold Coast negro roust-abouts from rusty British tramps at
Hamburg; agents, manufacturers, professors, librarians, officers from
Channel boats, students of music and philosophy.
All these luckless civilians--four thousand of them--had been herded
together in the stables, paddock, and stands of the Ruhleben track. The
place was not as suited for a prison as the high land of Zossen, the
stalls with their four bunks were dismal enough, and the lofts overhead,
with little light and ventilation, still worse.
Some had suffered, semi-invalids, for instance, unable to get along with
the prison rations, but the interesting thing about Ruhleben was not its
discomfort, but the remarkable fashion in which the prisoners had
contrived to make the best of a bad matter.
The musicians had their instruments sent in and organized an orchestra.
The professors began to lecture and teach until now there was a sort of
university, with some fifty different classes in the long room under the
grand stand. And on the evening when we had the privilege of visiting
Ruhleben it was to see a dramatic society present Bernard Shaw's
"Androcles and the Lion."
The play began at six o'clock, for the camp lights are out at nine, and
it was in the dusk of another one of Berlin's rainy days, after
slithering through the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete
apartment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab swung to the right,
lurched down the lane of mud, and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben.
Inside was a sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen--
professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young
fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in
faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons,
men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with a Thermos bottle, and
crisp "Right you are!"--a good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic
cross-section of the London streets, drifting about here in the German
mud.
There were still a few minutes before the play began, and we walked
through some of the barracks with the commandant, a tall, bronzed
officer of middle age, with gracious manners, one of those Olympian
Germans who resemble their English cousins of the same class. Each
barrack had its captain, and over these was a camp-captain--formerly an
English merchant of Berlin--who went with us on our rounds.
The stables were crowded with bunks and men--like a cattleship
forecastle. One young man, fulfilling doubtless his English ritual of
"dressing for dinner," was punctiliously shaving, although it was now
practically dark; in another corner the devotee of some system of how to
get strong and how to stay so, stripped to the skin, was slowly and with
solemn precision raising and lowering a pair of light dumb-bells. Some
saluted as private soldiers would; some bowed almost as to a friend,
with a cheery "Guten Abend, Herr Baron!" There seemed, indeed, to be a
very pleasant relation between this gentleman soldier and his gentlemen
prisoners, and the camp-captain, lagging behind, told how one evening
when they had sung "Elijah," the men had stood up and given three
English cheers for the commandant, while his wife, who had come to hear
the performance, stood beside him laughing and wiping her eyes.
As you get closer to war you more frequently run across such things. The
fighting men kill ruthlessly, because that, they think, is the way to
get their business over. But for the most part they kill without hate.
For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms you must go back to the
men who are not fighting, to the overdriven and underexercised
journalists, sizzling and thundering in their swivel-chairs.
The dimly lit hall under the grand stand was already crowded as we were
led to our seats on a rostrum facing the stage with the commandant and
one of his officers. There was a red draw curtain, footlights made with
candles and biscuit tins, and so strung on a wire that at a pull,
between the acts, they could be turned on the spectators. A programme
had been printed on the camp mimeograph, the camp orchestra was tuning
up, and a special overture had been composed by a young gentleman with
the beautiful name of "Quentin Morvaren."
You will doubtless recall Mr. Shaw's comedy, and the characteristic
"realistic" fun he has with his Romans and Christian martyrs, and the
lion who, remembering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had once pulled a
sliver from his foot, danced out of the arena with him instead of eating
him. And you can imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the
dialogue between Mr. Shaw's meek but witty Christians and their
might-is-right Roman captors, spoken by British prisoners in the spring
of 1915, in a German prison camp before a German commandant sitting up
like a statue with his hands on his sword!
The Roman captain was a writer, the centurion a manufacturer, Androcles
a teacher of some sort, the call-boy for the fights in the arena a
cabin-boy from a British merchant ship, and the tender-hearted lion some
genius from the "halls." Even after months of this sodden camp it was
possible to find a youth to play Lavinia, with so pretty a face, such a
velvet voice, such a pensive womanliness that the flat-capped, ribald
young cockneys in the front row blushed with embarrassment. A professor
of archaeology, or something, said that he had never seen more accurate
reproductions of armor, though this was made but of gilded and silvered
cardboard--in short, if Mr. Shaw's fun was ever better brought out by
professional players, they must have been very good indeed.
It was an island within an island that night, there under the Ruhleben
grand stand--English speech and Irish wit in that German sea. You
should have seen the two young patricians drifting in, with the
regulation drawl of the Piccadilly "nut"--"I say! He-ah's some
Christians--let's chaff them!" The crowd was laughing, the commandant
was laughing, the curtain closed in a whirl of applause, one had
forgotten there was a war. The applause continued, the players straggled
out, faltering back from the parts in which they had forgotten
themselves into normal, self-conscious Englishmen. There was a moment's
embarrassed pause, then the rattle of a sabre as the tall man in
gray-blue rose to his feet.
"Danke Ihnen, meine Herren! Aeusserst nett!" he said briskly. ("Thanks,
gentlemen! Very clever indeed!") He turned to us, nodded in stiff
soldierly fashion. "Sehr nett! Sehr nett!" he said, and led the way out
between a lane of Englishmen suddenly become prisoners again.