The Better Germany in War Time Part 14

NEUTRAL CAMPS.

Even in neutral internment camps, though there the initial hostility is absent, misery and bitterness may become very great. The following cable from Rotterdam appeared in the _Daily Telegraph_ of June 13, 1918:

Interned Britishers here are intensely interested in the British-German Conference at the Hague, in the hope that it may result in their repatriation. This is especially the case at Groningen, where the men of the Royal Naval Division, who have been interned since October, 1914, are getting desperate. The June number of the camp magazine had two blank pages, which the editor explains have been censored out because they contained an account of the recent "hunger demonstration" and "a moderate record of the general feeling of the camp."

It is in the internment camps everywhere, rather than in the fighting line, that bitterness sinks into the soul. It will not be remedied by more bitterness. But if the suffering of these men's stagnant years helps to strengthen a universal resolve for peace it will not have been a useless suffering. And peace means understanding by each of the good in the other.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: Many older men (even those over seventy) were subsequently interned.]

[Footnote 14: There were 35,000 Germans in Paris alone in 1870, but though expelled from the Department of the Seine, they were not interned.]

[Footnote 15: This was emphasised by the German authorities.

See, for instance, Israel Cohen, "The Ruhleben Prison Camp," pp.

21-24.]

[Footnote 16: Cf. pp. 216, 218, etc.]

[Footnote 17: "In this camp, as is usual where civilians are detained, the atmosphere is one of depression."-Mr. Jackson on a civilian camp at Senne, Sept. 11, 1915.]

[Footnote 18: "Overseer" seems to be a translation of the German "Obermann," and represents, I think, the captain of a barrack.]

[Footnote 19: The second list represents members of the Camp Committee (see further p. 99).]

[Footnote 20: "Barrack" is no doubt meant.]

[Footnote 21: There are a large number of men interned at Ruhleben who are technically British subjects by reason of their having been born in British territory of naturalised British subjects, but who have spent practically all their lives in Germany.]

[Footnote 22: Cf. the report on Knockaloe (May, 1916) on p.

114.]

[Footnote 23: The original barrack captains were chosen, as an informant of mine writes, "in a hurry, when things were chaotic." Dissatisfaction was felt with their action, or inaction, and a "Camp Committee" was formed of newly elected representatives of the different barracks, which was, as it were, to supervise the captains (overseers). The arrangement was scarcely likely to work, and did not. The election, moreover, seems to have been but partial.]

[Footnote 24: Cf. p. 115.]

[Footnote 25: One of the difficulties at Newbury was the absence of light.]

[Footnote 26: A very useful account of Ruhleben is given by Israel Cohen in "The Ruhleben Prison Camp." In reading such accounts one must always, however, remember that to complete the picture we ought to be able to read accounts written by interned German civilians of their experiences on this side. Such a consideration should be obvious, but in war the obvious and reasonable are too often vehemently rejected as "unpatriotic"!]

[Footnote 27: For the mental difference between the civilian and the military prisoner see page 84.]

[Footnote 28: Compare the letter written by Oscar Levy, M.D., from Murren, Switzerland, which appeared in the _Manchester Guardian_ of Sept. 4, 1916: "That such grave cases exist the letters I have been receiving from both sides prove without doubt." That was _two years ago_.]

[Footnote 29: The earlier reports of the International Red Cross covered very little of this ground. (See footnote, p. 9.)]

[Footnote 30: Compare Report on Ruhleben, June 3, 1915 (p. 94).]

[Footnote 31: A case is in my mind where a man lost wife and two children thus. I shall never forget my task of trying to allay his misery and his bitterness.]

III.

PRISONERS IN PREVIOUS WARS.

SOME PREVIOUS RECORDS.

The suffering of prisoners has been great enough, G.o.d knows, yet if we are to help the future we must try to see even this, amongst the other terrible facts, in its proper perspective. The imprisonment of resident enemy nationals has certainly been a most unfortunate step backwards-unfortunate even if we regard it as inevitable.[32] Yet we must recognise that far more solicitude has been shown as to prisoners than was the case in most earlier wars, and this though prisoners have never been taken on so large a scale, and though there has probably never been greater embitterment. It will be useful to cite a few previous records.

NAPOLEONIC WARS.

I quote once more from Dr. Spaight's work, where much information may be found in a condensed form. "A hundred years ago, England, while she prayed in her national liturgy for all prisoners and captives, had no compunction about confining the French prisoners of war in noisome hulks and feeding them on weevily biscuits, salt junk and jury rum, which sowed the seed for a plentiful harvest of scurvy, dysentery and typhus."

("War Rights on Land," p. 265.)

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.

Here is a description of the state of things in the Confederate internment camp at Andersonville during the American Civil War, which, after all, did not happen so very long ago. "Over 30,000 prisoners were cooped up in a narrow s.p.a.ce; there was no shelter from the sun or cold but what the men could improvise for themselves; every possible disease was rampant; the prisoners were largely naked; the dead were pitched into a ditch and covered with quicklime; the smell of the dreadful stockade extended for two miles.... The state of affairs was known, or might have been known, at Richmond, for Colonel Chandler, inspector-general of the Confederate army, inspected the camp, and reported upon its administration in no halting terms. 'It is a place,'

he said, 'the horrors of which it is difficult to describe-it is a disgrace to civilisation.'"

Of the prisoners returning from the South, Whitman writes: "The sight is worse than any sight of battlefield or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest. There was (as a sample) one large boat load of several hundreds-and out of the whole number only three individuals were able to walk from the boat. Can those be _men_-those little, livid, brown, ash-streaked, monkey-looking dwarfs?" (_Cambridge Magazine_, August 26, 1916, Supplement "Prisoners," p. iv.) In spite of such appalling horrors (worse than the atrocities of rage and fear and drink) the North and South became reconciled, and with the pa.s.sing of war bitterness pa.s.sed too. The South was hard pressed, supplies often ran out, and there was indifference at Richmond. And so the military bullies often got the upper hand, and their appet.i.te for bullying grew with what it fed on.

The North refused all exchanges. "The prisoners at Richmond, Belle-Isle, and Andersonville were the p.a.w.ns in a great match, and had to be sacrificed to the rigour of the game." (Spaight, _l.c._, p. 270.)

FRANCO-GERMAN WAR, 1870.

In the Franco-German War of 1870 terrible hards.h.i.+ps were endured by prisoners on both sides. The winter transport to Germany in open trucks led to scenes of indescribable misery for the French prisoners, who arrived sometimes "frozen to the boards in their own filth." German prisoners at Pau had for six days only bread and water till English and German ladies took pity on them. Faidherbe's prisoners had no fire, no blankets and insufficient food in a cold of sixteen degrees. Things now are at least better than that.

RUSSO-j.a.pANESE WAR, 1904.

The j.a.panese seem to have behaved remarkably well to their Russian prisoners in the Russo-j.a.panese War. But even here there was a food problem. The j.a.panese food did not suit the Russian soldier, and Sir Ian Hamilton was told by Russian prisoners going South that they felt hungry again half an hour after eating their ration of rice. The j.a.panese have usually been held up as models for their treatment of prisoners, yet, for all that, Professor Ariga admits that in Manchuria the prisoners were _in many cases badly fed, badly housed and insufficiently clothed_.

We know that this involves great misery, suffering and mortality, yet we are, quite rightly, very far from considering the j.a.panese as barbarians. We are ready to consider their difficulties. Were we, however, fighting j.a.pan, we should not be so ready.

BOER WAR.

There is plenty of evidence of good treatment of prisoners on both sides during the Boer War. It is in these days strange to find the German General Staff historian quoted in defence of the British treatment of prisoners. They behaved, he wrote, "as perfect gentlemen towards the prisoners." "The testimony of a responsible writer of this kind," says Dr. Spaight, "is more valuable than the catch-penny stories of British inhumanity which flooded the Press of Europe at the time of the war."

"One is surprised to find such a writer as M. Arthur Desjardins lending his authority to back the uninformed newspaper abuse, and ascribing the brutality of the British Army (which he presumes) to the fact that 'a certain number of its soldiers, accustomed to fighting away from Europe, have not the least notion of the laws and customs of war obtaining among civilised nations'." (Spaight, _l.c._, p. 275.) Dr. Spaight's comments on such outbursts is: "There was a popular demand [in Europe] at the time for denunciation of England, the hotter the better, and the writers were too good journalists not to suit their output to the popular taste." I will not spoil the rather rich humour of these extracts by any remarks of my own.

Undoubtedly the Boers usually behaved well. Undoubtedly, too, there were some bad lapses. A Free State commandant was, for instance, convicted of putting prisoners in the firing line and driving starving prisoners on foot with a mounted commando. Such things, however, were very far from being the rule. During the guerilla warfare treatment depended entirely on the local commandants. The stripping of prisoners before they were turned adrift was often carried out, "and there is some force in De Wet's contention that the seizure was justified by the British practice of removing or burning all the clothes left in the farms and even taking the hides out of the tanning tubs and cutting them in pieces." In some cases starving, unarmed and practically naked men were abandoned far from any white settlement. What is and what is not allowable in war seems so largely a matter of "military necessity" that the layman is reluctant to comment, for, in the last resort, it is only the _needlessly_ barbarous that is condemned in war.

CONCENTRATION CAMPS.