“It is better here than on the battlefield,” said one of them. “We are
glad to be prisoners.”
One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns which were firing
ceaselessly.
“I pity our poor people there,” he said.
One of them, who spoke English, described all he had seen of the battle,
which was not much, because no man at such a time sees more than what
happens within a yard or two.
“The English caught us by surprise when the attack came at last,” he
said. “The bombardment had been going on for days, and we could not
guess when the attack would begin. I was in a deep dugout, wondering
how long it would be before a shell came through the roof and blow us
to pieces. The earth shook above our heads. Wounded men crawled into the
dugout, and some of them died down there. We sat looking at their bodies
in the doorway and up the steps. I climbed over them when a lull came.
A friend of mine was there, dead, and I stepped on his stomach to get
upstairs. The first thing I saw was a crowd of your soldiers streaming
past our trenches. We were surrounded on three sides, and our position
was hopeless. Some of our men started firing, but it was only asking for
death. Your men killed them with bayonets. I went back into my dugout
and waited. Presently there was an explosion in the doorway and part of
the dugout fell in. One of the men with me had his head blown off, and
his blood spurted on me. I was dazed, but through the fumes I saw an
English soldier in a petticoat standing at the doorway, making ready to
throw another bomb.
“I shouted to him in English:
“'Don't kill us! We surrender!'
“He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he would throw his
bomb. Then he said:
“'Come out, you swine.'
“So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, your Highlanders,
with bayonets. They wanted to kill us, but one man argued with them in
words I could not understand-a dialect-and we were told to go along
a trench. Even then we expected death, but came to another group of
prisoners, and joined them on their way back. Gott sei dank!”
He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, who had been a
clerk in a London office. He had the truthfulness of a man who had just
come from great horrors.
Many of the men around him were Silesians-more Polish than German. Some
of them could not speak more than a few words of German, and were true
Slavs in physical type, with flat cheek-bones.
A group of German artillery officers had been captured and they were
behaving with studied arrogance and insolence as they smoked cigarettes
apart from the men, and looked in a jeering way at our officers.
“Did you get any of our gas this morning?” I asked them, and one of them
laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“I smelled it a little. It was rather nice... The English always imitate
the German war-methods, but without much success.”
They grinned and imitated my way of saying “Guten Tag” when I left them.
It took a year or more to tame the arrogance of the German officer. At
the end of the Somme battles he changed his manner when captured, and
was very polite.
In another place--a prison in St.-Omer--I had a conversation with two
other officers of the German army who were more courteous than the
gunners. They had been taken at Hooge and were both Prussians--one a
stout captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, jovial
manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which he had just escaped,
and his hatred of us; the other a young, slim fellow, with clear-cut
features, who was very nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with his heels
together, as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high officers
came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. One of our mines
had exploded under him, flinging a heap of earth over him. The fat man
by his side--his captain--had been buried, too, in the dugout. They had
scraped themselves out by clawing at the earth.
They were cautious about answering questions on the war, but the younger
man said they were prepared down to the last gaiter for another
winter campaign and--that seemed to me at the time a fine touch of
audacity--for two more winter campaigns if need be. The winter of '16,
after this autumn and winter of '15, and then after that the winter of
'17! The words of that young Prussian seemed to me, the more I thought
of them, idiotic and almost insane. Why, the world itself could not
suffer two more years of war. It would end before then in general
anarchy, the wild revolutions of armies on all fronts. Humanity of every
nation would revolt against such prolonged slaughter... It was I who was
mad, in the foolish faith that the war would end before another year had
passed, because I thought that would be the limit of endurance of such
mutual massacre.
In a room next to those two officers--a week before this battle, the
captain had been rowing with his wife on the lake at Potsdam--was
another prisoner, who wept and wept. He had escaped to our lines before
the battle to save his skin, and now was conscience-stricken and thought
he had lost his soul. What stabbed his conscience most was the thought
that his wife and children would lose their allowances because of his
treachery. He stared at us with wild, red eyes.
“Ach, mein armes Weib! Meine Kinder!... Ach, Gott in Himmel!”
He had no pride, no dignity, no courage.
This tall, bearded man, father of a family, put his hands against the
wall and laid his head on his arm and wept.