Part 21 (2/2)

Apparently there is no lack of amus.e.m.e.nt. I visited the cinematograph theatre, and the operator asked, ”What would you like to see--something funny?” He showed us a rather familiar old film.

The reels are those that have been pa.s.sed out of service of the German moving picture shows. In the large theatre, which would hold, I should think, seven hundred to a thousand people, there was a good acrobatic act and the performing dog, to which I have referred, with an orchestra of twenty-five instruments, almost all prisoners, but a couple of German Landsturmers helped out. The guarding of the prisoners is effected by plenty of barbed wire and a comparatively small number of oldish Landsturmers.

A special cruelty of the Germans towards prisoners is the provision of a lying newspaper in French for the Frenchmen, called the _Gazette des Ardennes_. The _Gazette des Ardennes_ publishes every imaginable kind of lie about the French and French Army, with garbled quotations from English newspapers, and particularly _The Times_, calculated to disturb the relations of the French and English prisoners in Germany. For the British there is a paper in English which is quite as bad, to which I have already referred, called the _Continental Times_, doled out three times a week. The _Continental Times_ is, I regret to say, largely written by renegade Englishmen in Berlin employed by the German Government, notably Aubrey Stanhope, who for well-known reasons was unable to enter England at the outbreak of war, and so remains and must remain in Germany, where, for a very humble pittance, he conducts this campaign against his own country.

For the Russians a special prevaricating sheet, called the _Russki Visnik_, is issued. All these newspapers pretend to print the official French, British, and Russian communiques.

For a long time the effect on the British prisoners was bad, but little by little events revealed to them that the _Continental Times_, which makes a specialty of attacks on the English Press, was anti-British.

The arrival of letters and parcels is, of course, the great event for the prisoners and, so far as the large camps are concerned, I do not think that there are now any British prisoners unprovided with parcels. It is the isolated and scattered men, moved often from place to place for exhibition purposes, who miss parcels.

Soltau, although a model camp, is bleak and dreary and isolated.

At the outset cases of typhus occurred there, and in a neat, secluded corner of the camp long lines of wooden crosses tell the tale of sadness. The first cross marked a Russian from far-away Vilna, the next a Tommy from London. East had met West in the bleak and silent graveyard on the heather. Close to them slept a soldier from some obscure village in Normandy, and beside him lay a Belgian, whose life had been the penalty of his country's determination to defend her neutrality. Here in the heart of Germany the Allies were united even in death.

As I made the long journey back to Berlin I reflected with some content on the good things I had seen at Soltau, and I felt convinced that the men in charge of the camp do everything within their power to make the life of the prisoners happy. But as the train pounded along in the darkness I seemed to see a face before me which I could not banish. It was the face of a Belgian, kneeling at the altar in the Catholic chapel, his eyes riveted on his Saviour on the Cross, his whole being tense in fervent supplication, his lips quivering in prayer. My companions had gone, but I was held spellbound, feeling ”How long! How long!” was the anguish of his mind. He must have been a man who had a home and loved it, and his whole expression told unmistakably that he was imploring for strength to hold out till the end in that dreary, cheerless region of brown and grey.

His captors had given him a chapel, to be sure, but why was he in Germany at all?

Soltau and other camps are satisfactory--but there are others, many others, such as unvisited punishment camps. The average Britisher in confinement in Germany is under the care of an oldish guard, such as Heiny of the Landsturm, but the immediate authority is often a man of the notorious _Unteroffizier_ type, whose cruelty to the _German_ private is well known, and whose treatment of the most hated enemy can be imagined.

The petty forms of tyranny meted out to German soldiers such as making a man walk for hours up and down stairs in order to fill a bath with a winegla.s.s; making him s.h.i.+ne and soil then again s.h.i.+ne and soil hour after hour a pair of boots; making him chew and swallow his own socks have been described in suppressed German books.

I believe that publicity, rigorous blockade and big sh.e.l.ls are the only arguments that have any effect on the Prussians at present.

It is publicity and the fear of opinion of certain neutrals that has produced such camps as Soltau. It is difficult for the comfortable sit-at-homes to visualise the condition of men who have been in the enemy atmosphere of hate for a long period. All the British soldiers whom I met in Germany were captured in the early part of the war when their sh.e.l.l-less Army had to face machine-guns and high explosives often with the s.h.i.+eld of their own b.r.e.a.s.t.s and a rifle.

Herded like cattle many of the wounded dying, they travelled eastwards to be subject to the insults and vilifications of the German population. That they should retain their cheery confidence in surroundings and among a people so ferociously hostile so entirely un-British, so devoid of chivalry or sporting instinct, is a monument to the character of their race.

CHAPTER XXII

HOW THE PRUSSIAN GUARD CAME HOME FROM THE SOMME

Early in August, 1916, I was in Berlin. The British and French offensive had commenced on July 1st. Outwardly it appeared to attract very little notice on the part of Germany and I do not believe that it attracted sufficient attention even in the highest military quarters. It was considered to be Great Britain's final ”bluff.” The great maps in the shop windows in every street and on the walls in every German house showed no change, and still show no change worth noticing. ”Maps speak,” say the Germans.

One hot evening in Berlin I met a young officer whom I had known on a previous visit to Germany, and who was home on ten days'

furlough. I noticed that he was ill or out of sorts, and he told me that he had been unexpectedly called back to his regiment on the Western front. ”How is that?” I said. He made that curious and indescribable German gesture which shows discontent and dissatisfaction. ”These ------ English are putting every man they have got into a final and ridiculous attempt to make us listen to peace terms. My leave is cut short, and I am off this evening.”

We had a gla.s.s of beer at the Bavaria Restaurant in the Friedrichstra.s.se.

”You have been in England, haven't you?” he inquired. I told him that I had been there last year. ”They seem to have more soldiers than we thought,” he said. ”They seem to be learning the business; my battalion has suffered terribly.”

Within the next day or two there were other rumours in Berlin--rumours quite unknown to the ma.s.s. How and where I heard these rumours it would be unfair to certain Germans, who were extremely kind to me, to say, but it was suggested to me by a friend--a member of the Extreme Left of the Social Democratic Party--that if I wanted to learn the truth I should go out to Potsdam and see the arrival of the wounded men of the famous Prussian Guard, who had, he said, had a terrible experience at the hands of the English at Contalmaison on July 10th.

He drew me aside in the Tiergarten and told me, for he is, I am sure, a real German patriot, that the state of things in the Somme, if known throughout Germany, would effectively destroy the pretensions of the annexationist party, who believed that Germany has won the war and will hold Belgium and the conquered portion of France and Poland.

<script>