Part 13 (2/2)
FOOD DIFFICULTIES.
The food question also becomes increasingly serious in the camps, as it does in prisons. I confess I feel we ought to ration ourselves very strictly before we cut down the supplies of our prisoners, criminal or otherwise. ”The reduced diet,” wrote Fenner Brockway of his prison experiences, ”is one of semi-starvation, and every prisoner is becoming thin and physically weak.” (_Labour Leader_, September 6. 1917.) Those who care to inquire of the wives of interned men will learn their side of the case as regards the effect of changed conditions in the camps.
The sad feature is that the increasing rigour comes upon men already weakened, both physically and mentally, by long confinement. The original published statement of Sir Edward (now Viscount) Grey [Misc. 7 (1915), p. 23] no longer obtains. The food is, of course, very different, and may not be supplemented.
TWO KINDS OF RUMOUR AND SOME REALITY.
I have not cared to quote adverse ”unofficial information and rumours,”
either as regards our own or other detention camps. What some adverse critics say about our own may be read in the _Woman's Dreadnought_, Vol III., p. 551. The rather terrible appeal of the Captains at Knockaloe is also printed on p. 561. It is a letter which is unwise and hysterical. I do not wonder at its hysteria, and I confess that some things in the letter hit me rather hard. But, alas, the desperation of the interned men on either side does not help towards wise judgment, and for that desperation we are all, in every country, in some measure responsible.
It is best to remember instead the real sympathy that those actually in touch with prisoners do often feel. Colonel Panzera's message is clear evidence of this, and from a private letter I take the following:
The att.i.tude of prejudice or even hatred towards enemies, whether prisoners or not, often disappears when men are brought face to face in the work of an internment camp, for example, and find that they are very much like each other. An officer of a certain camp here was taken prisoner and interned for six months in Germany before he escaped. He says that two or three times the officers of the camp were changed, and in each case began with harsh treatment, either the result of official suggestion or of the general feeling. In each case, after the lapse of a short time, close acquaintance modified this att.i.tude, and finally kindly relations and treatment resulted. In the same way the nurses in a certain hospital here refused to receive or treat German prisoners until a company of the wounded men arrived, when the feeling of natural humanity proved too strong, and they were quite eager to attend to them. At the internment camps in this country the officers generally speak of the men under their charge with humanity and respect.
The following is significant. ”In the town near a certain internment camp of ours much indignation was roused by the story that some of the interned aliens had set in motion some railway trucks on a sloping siding, with the intention of allowing them to crash into an arriving pa.s.senger train at the bottom. An English friend of mine happened to observe the real origin of the story. The trucks _began to move in an accidental way, and two or three of the aliens nearly lost their own lives, certainly risked serious accident, in endeavouring to stop the trucks when they were already moving_.”
Thus in the quiet neighbourhood of an internment camp a brave deed becomes by popular pa.s.sion transformed into something monstrous. What would this popular imagination do in an invaded district? Its vagaries must be experienced and studied by any investigator of the atrocities of war.
Another example of heroism amongst German prisoners I take from the _Daily News_ of April 30, 1918. A small boat in which two men were sailing capsized about 200 yards out from the Leasowe Embankment, Ches.h.i.+re. The men, clinging to the bottom of the boat, were being driven out by the tide when two members of an escort of German prisoners, Sergeant Phillips and Private Matthews, jumped into the water and with difficulty brought one man back. One of the German prisoners, named Bunte, volunteered to go to the rescue of the other man, who was by then in great danger. The German swam out strongly and brought the man back.
AGAINST BITTERNESS.
I fear that on both sides it is embittered men who will be released from the civilian internment camps. People do not realise how financial ruin, hara.s.sment, illness and death (to which the hara.s.sment may have contributed) follow in the track of internment. A man is interned, his wife and family are reduced to a mere pittance, the woman is, it may be, delicate. She falls ill and dies.[31] And amid such incidents and the mental strain of the confinement a brooding hatred gradually settles down upon the souls of these sufferers. Personally, I do not feel one can expect much favourable memory of the authorities on either side.
Certainly every one who has worked for prisoners is touched by their grat.i.tude, but the iron has entered into their souls for all that. And perhaps it is well to remind ourselves that a far larger number of civilians have been suffering in the internment camps on this side. Let us not add to their bitterness by unworthy abuse or credulous malice.
Men who, after long confinement for no offence of their own, have tried to save enemy lives, and find their efforts described as an attempt at murder, must begin to feel hopeless of justice. Excess of generosity would be far wiser. The world wants no more missioners of hate. Let us try to avoiding creating such.
In our own internment camps there was often, even early in the war, an atmosphere of depression which one worker said ”haunted him for days.”
The following extract is from the letter of an interned man who showed quite remarkable courage and fought with considerable success against depression till the end of 1917. ”I refuse to give way to depression,”
he wrote. But in 1918 the strain of useless monotony had become too great, he became physically ill, and how low hope had fallen the letter itself shows: ”You can't think how good it is to hear you speak with so much sympathy. I feel sure you understand the dreariness of this life, the long and fruitless waiting, the nights of anguish-and all the misery of it, the terrible discontent and the pa.s.sionate heart longings.... You don't know how sore it is sometimes about my heart....”
Methods that seem to many of us avoidable contribute also to increase ill-feeling. I take the following from the _Daily News_ of September, 27, 1918:
Among others, I had my Christmas dinner last year with a German.
At least, his name is German and he was born in Germany. He is less interested, personally, in those facts than in these, viz., that he is an international Socialist and a first cla.s.s electrical engineer. For four years he has done extremely responsible work for a large engineering firm with important contracts from the M. of M. For four years he has had his liberty within the usual five-mile radius; for four years the local police have not found the least fault with him.
Now, thanks to the Northcliffe Intern-them-all-Stunt, he is shut up in the Isle of Man, and the country has lost the services of a man who was worth more to us than many Northcliffes.
From a letter which he wrote recently to an English friend I have copied the following:
As a result of the fact that no German paper is permitted here in the camp, not even those advocating understanding nor those critical of the German Government, and practically no English paper hitherto except those abounding in Hun-talk, there is still a general feeling here towards ”England” exactly the opposite of what these restrictions are intended to create-a bitterness and a contempt which exist side by side with the most violent criticism of the governing clique of Germany, and with anti-capitalistic, revolutionary sentiment! So I am exerting myself to make people realise that, however influential, the Northcliffe and Allied Press is not ”England,” and that the best German papers constantly work for the abatement of hatred and for genuine reconciliation and co-operation in a League of Nations.
I am sorry to say that I fear acts of kindness and fairness will be largely forgotten by the majority of prisoners on both sides. An Englishman writes to me of his treatment in Germany: ”Consideration was extended in even greater measure to others, yet not one has opened his mouth to record it. It makes one loathe one's fellow-men.” I quote this because I am sure that neither side must expect fairness of statement from men so long exposed to so depressing and often petty a constraint.
After all, when we see the war bias of the man who has not suffered at all, a calm regard for both sides of the case can scarcely be expected from those who for wasted years have been too often exposed to hards.h.i.+p, petty tyranny and a kind of barbed annoyance.
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