Insel pp256-292 Douglas (part 3)

In the time that I've not been reading newspapers any more, and have to pick up snippets of reports from here and there, I feel as though I am locked up in a pitch-black cellar. One hears undefinable sounds everywhere, and thinks that the door to freedom is opening up somewhere, but everything is delusion, the darkness becomes more oppressive than ever. It would be better if there were no newspapers in the Camp. I don't still feel I'm a human being any more, there's no taste to tobacco, my heart's thumping away all the time, then I'm hungry, then I'm freezing, I can scarcely concentrate enough to read any more. Herr von Beyerheim does manage to work very busily in his studio during the day, but he too is on edge and grumpy like everyone else. There has been quarrelling in the Drama Club, with the result that rehearsal have been cancelled, [p. 257] Bohltsmann doesn't want to conduct the orchestra any more. Everything is just giving up. Pastor Farbig's 'Bird of Sorrow' is not so easy to drive off. — Even the Camp Lantern (its last article was entitled "Quousque tandem?")^ⁱ has fizzled out, its hitherto director can be seen either grimly propping up his mop of curly hair and brooding on a tree stump, or running around at the gallop conversing with himself. — Yes, this time next year we'll all be back home, says one mans to the other, but doesn't believe it himself any more — Men are becoming more and more one-sided. Because they want their radishes and lettuces to do well, they wish for good weather, without thinking what a good English harvest will have to mean for this country and the lengthening of the War. Everywhere in London's open gardens, potatoes are being planted; the Royal Family eats only black bread, and that's what they show the starving nation on a photograph. The butchers of Chicago are, however, doing good business, by sending their notorious corned beef over here as horsemeat delicacies. Everything is being put on ration, all display counters are already mock-ups. We know this from a few of the English wives of German prisoners who are living in guest-houses in Douglas and every now and again get in under supervision to see their husbands. The seagulls, too, have become so hungry that they fly around in the Camp, screeching, and spreading their dirt everywhere.

Bethmann-Hollweg said in the Reichstag: "England and France do not want peace, and for that reason we do not disclose our terms." Whereupon Asquith retorted: "I have read the Chancellor's remark only with deep regret." A good thing, that Germany is not stretching its hand out again as at Christmas. "Just let them all come", up till now was the English motto; now it is Germany's!

I was reading the memoirs of Princess Radziwill.^ⁱⁱ Hideously catty and shallow. These witless dummies have been allowed carry themselves through life as though they were in a sedan chair! [p. 258]

Honolulu is breaking with Germany — who's next? Oh dear, I've forgotten Nicaragua. These tiny States ought not to be forgotten, like Liechtenstein was by Prussia in 1866.^ⁱⁱⁱ

The beginning of summer! The days are once more getting shorter, but time is not. Today I joined Hörns and went out with a group of agricultural workers, who are paid a wage of thirty pfennigs a day by Mr "Sly-ham". This is the second time in two years that I have been allowed to leave the barbed-wire fortress for a few hours. We marched through Occham,^{^iv} a run-down spot, which stands in stark contrast to the Governor's Residence. It was hot, although still only early morning. The sun was a burning piece of pale-yellow charcoal, the sky an immense baking oven, the earth a round brown loaf of bread; it rose, swelled out and grew. The old sixty-year-old soldiers, who had already fought in India, Sudan and South Africa, sweated and groaned, and would have preferred it better if we carried their 'bundooks' for them. Hay was being brought in, it had a bitter smell. The cabbages were already forming up firm round heads, shafts of yellow rose up from the earth, probably sugar beet, while the flowers on the potatoes looked as though swarms of white and purple butterflies had landed on them. Fields of oats lay in silver-green strips. So it was that we came to the farm, where vegetable beds and potato fields had been laid out for Mr. Cunningham and were being tended. That could only be the product of German enthusiasm for work, staying power and industriousness. I climbed through a vast cliff-field down to the sea, from which giant boulders rose up, as on Capri. I wanted to soothe my rheumatism in the sunshine. Sultry summer's heat lay like a voluptuous [p. 259] cloud on the languid opalescent sea. The gulls flew screeching greedily away over my head, they have their breeding ground here. The coast of Scotland rose up on the horizon. It made me remember that an old homeland lay there as well, inaccessible like the other, that my forebears had been permitted to live there and have a say in the wild history of their country, that one of them was a famous poet, whose Thistle and Rose^{^v} is known to almost every Englishman; he knew also what ideal is and how reality is obtained.

At four o'clock we got back on the road home. There was no singing this time, the men were tired, through work and hunger. We went past a merry-go-round, now left to its own devices, went past closed hotels, went past shops with their curtains drawn down. We came across haggard old men, women and children, women who now had to do the hard work, with their husbands being at the Front. Standing there also were the English wives waiting for their husbands in our column. But the men are strictly forbidden from stepping out of the line to greet them. But one father paid no attention, took his children on his arm and kissed them to his heart's content, while the passengers on the waiting horse-tram looked on in curiosity. High above us, on the cliff edge, we could already see the sentinel towers and the barbed-wire entanglements, things which we can no longer imagine the world to be free of. Soon we passed into the narrow precinct of our existence, into an atmosphere oppressively drenched with the laments and hopes of long years of waiting. — Dr. Schmidt came up to me with the latest news: Russia has begun separate peace negotiations with Germany. For this reason, in the evening we drank [p. 260] a bottle of rubbishy wine to mark the approach of the dove of peace with the olive-branch in its mouth.^{^vi}

Amongst the fifteen arrivals transferred to here yesterday from Knockaloe, there was sadly once more no Rodenhaus. Herr von Beyerheim invited his new table neighbour round for coffee, since we are glad to see a new face. He introduced himself as Herr Tischer, and wore a big black footmuff of a war-beard and had bright, incorruptible eyes. Once he had reported to us how miserable things now looked to be in the gigantic camp of Knockaloe, where he said fifteen men had already died of typhus fever, he expatiated very interestingly on distant journeys and a visit to the Samaritan Community on Mount Garizim, where the chief priest was said to be a descendant of Aaron. This anti-Jewish Community, he said, still possessed a Pentateuch Roll from 730 B.C. Herr Tischer had also lived for a long time in Canada, and knew a great deal about political economy and the American-Canadian Customs Union. He further said, when the war theme did crop up, that the Government of William II did insofar also bear guilt for the War as it had allowed Caprivi to rip up the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia,^{^vii} and had looked on as the alliance between Russia and France and the agreement between France and England had united into that terrible ring which the German nation was now again compelled to smash with its last drop of blood. How was she supposed to prop herself up on such crutches as Italy, Austria-Hungary and Turkey! He thought that the end of the tale would be [p. 261] the removal of the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgers, just as the Romanovs would never regain the throne. These were completely new beliefs we were hearing, but absolutely comprehensible. I then still had two questions to put, which evoked only an indulgent smile from Herr Tischer: "How do the English manage to make great political speeches in front of the statue of Joan of Orleans in Paris, speeches to her, their arch-hated enemy, whom they condemned in one of the most infamous trials in the history of the world to suffer death at the stake; where precisely do the Protestant English get the courage, more Chauvinistic than the French and more Catholic than the Pope, to erect a statue to her, inscribed Sancta Johanna^{^viii}"? Where does Mr. Balfour, the Foreign Minister, get the brazen face to give big patriotic speeches in America, at the grave of George Washington, England's most embittered enemy, the man more hated in England than Hannibal in Rome, about joining together in a brotherhood to defend freedom and civilisation? Is history not man's memory of the past, or has the War blown this out, too? — The last man to come into the room was von Br., the world circumnavigator, who gave us a lecture about Prussian non-commissioned officers, the backbone of the army, and of the splendid knee-bend exercises we could learn from them. On that afternoon, one's intellectual replenishment achieved a zenith.

Yesterday, scorching heat; outside today, the foghorns are howling out, and it is so cold that we had to light the paraffin stove.

Our latest camp acquisition, which is raising much talk, is a huge man, seventy years old, and deaf, a former German officer who through his marriage in England rose to be the King of Steel Springs. With valet and private secretary, he arranged to rent three rooms from Mr Sly-ham at a cost of 300 pounds (6000 marks). He wears a new suit every day and even in [p. 262] this heat light-coloured gloves, and exchanges no word with anybody; which further heightens the standing of his noblesse amongst this incarcerated middle class. Another new release to us is one-eyed Herr Krineché from Paris, who wears an actual hair net and comes hurtling along at a furious pace, with his walking-stick swinging high (he doesn't seem to have been imprisoned long). We annoy him by shouting over to him: "Bonjour, Monsieur Olala",^{^ix} because he speaks only French.

We've just all seen the Death Ship setting out to sea with the corpse on board of the Commandant-in-Chief of Knockaloe, who suffered a stroke just at the right time, while he was there carrying out a camp inspection. It's to be hoped that on his last journey he'll meet up with a German U-boat!

Just delivered from Alexandra Palace is Professor Linder, the painter from Cairo. He reports that the Commandant-in-Chief there, Froward Walker, has also died (all these deaths of prison-guard heroes!). In the evening, Herr von Beyerheim received the death certificate of his former batman, who had fallen in Galicia, and who had later been his manservant. He sent a thousand marks to the dead man's sister, who thanked him for it, and sent him back a photograph of the good fellow. I have placed a garland of flowers around it.

We went to Dr. Wartemberger's lecture, and sat in the front row. He himself stood on a table in front of a desk, which was much too high, with a glass of water on it, and a candle. The thick lenses of his spectacles glinted ('Emil, don't frown so angrily',^{^x} somebody shouted over to him), and he told us about his ride from Lima, over the mountains to the sources of the River Amazon.

Herr von Beyerheim was just sitting sticking postage stamps into the album for his son, when the Times, this messenger of misfortune,[p. 263] was brought in. As it happened, Herr von Beyerheim just had to the bad luck to find a sales notice for his house in Chichester. He is tremendously shocked at learning that his English wife, to whom before he was taken captive he had assigned all his possessions, was now wanting behind his back to sell off his art collections at rock-bottom prices. In this way, the worries and disappointments do not cease, and the mood is becoming increasingly gloomy. Other news in the paper: San Domingo has declared war on Germany, Japan is enraged about Wilson's note to China, that Northcliffe,^{^xi} the very greatest newspaper hue-and-cry instigator known to the world, has gone to America as the Representative of Great Britain, without himself being a minister or similar; and that further, all Argentine newspapers have been bought up by England (to be turned into news-rags baiting everything German); so we see how opinion can indeed be bought. No news has come out of Spain for two days because of a military revolt there. In Greece, the Allies have simply confiscated the harvest. Pogroms have broken out in Leeds,^{^xii} much manslaughter and looting of foodstuffs. Renewed rioting and attacks on the police in Dublin. The labour representative, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, whose passport was granted only grudgingly by the Government here, was, when he was all set to go, attacked by sailors — in all probability bought by the Government — with clubs and revolvers, and had to, despite having a passport, remain in England.^{^xiii} And lest we forget: one [p. 264] wing of the Bank of England was hit in the recent Zeppelin raid, some six hundred dead and wounded. But what does that matter, so long as the bars of gold remain amongst the 'unscathed'.^{^xiv}

In the neighbouring hut, where Herr Zeise from Rangoon is living, the 'Lower Weser'^{^xv} boozing club is back again, going full-tilt, and Bohltsmann plays student songs on his violin; for this reason it was only with great difficulty that I could talk to Herr Tischer. You can believe it, we didn't discuss the 'Immortality of the May bug', which is how the man of the masses dismisses any conversion going beyond his horizon, but we did discuss the transmigration of souls. This was because death, which for many years in its most fearsome form has ruled over the world, guides one's thoughts to ponder more on the sense of that world. Herr Tischer the Wise said on this topic that the Talmudist Isaac Luria Ashkenazi^{^xvi} had uttered the following abominality concerning the question of the soul. In a human body it was not only the one soul which repeated its life on earth, but many souls simultaneously unite with one body to move towards transformation. The purpose of union like this was, he said, to support each other in the atonement of guilt, for which reason they suffered the new transformation. A truly Talmudic figment of the mind. Tischer's own opinion was by contrast that we are all only God's exhalations. Every breath that proceeds from God, he said, was a new life, one that feels itself, that lives itself — and it is only alive in the 'becoming'. And so we always 'become' new shapes, until our animality is conquered and we can live in a spiritual æther, which we at the present only can only presage. I asked, why then were the destinies of life so varied, practically all of them painful, and most of them unfair. To this Herr Tischer answered that the doctrine of the transmigration of the souls [p. 265], of which incidentally both Goethe and Lessing were convinced, denoted the corrective element in the fate of the individual, that everyone should experience in life things that were the necessary consequence of earlier life, a kind of intellectual causality chain, as it were. The reproach, he said, applied to God for not having made man strong enough, and in this way man's sin had become hereditary. This universal guilt, he continued, which occurred in variation in almost all nations, and was found in the concept of original sin and the doctrine of redemption, which also formed the bulwark of the early Christian sects, whence it re-emerged in Dostoyevsky, gave every creature, since one creature is obliged to the other, its three-dimensional viewpoint in the sum of things. Everybody at first is defendant-in-court, to be blamed for the whole run of the world, but everybody is claimant as well, sufferer because of the way the world has gone; and thirdly, everyone is judge over both. This three-dimensional viewpoint, he said, represented the 'prodigy of justice'. Strindberg said: "Hush! Do not criticise destiny. The inexplicable will one day be explicable, we are not living in Paradise as yet." And so it says in the New Testament: "For here have we no continuing city but we seek one to come."^{^xvii}

I went on later to speak about this with Professor Hinze, the avowed atheist; instead of bread, he gave me a stone; but not the philosophers' stone, because he said: "The soul is only a quality of matter raised to a particularly high power, like the alcohol content of matter; the world, however, is an infinite combination of otherwise scattered atoms combined by their own weight, and death is nothing more than a process of chemical decomposition."

Before going to bed, I went out once more on to the field, around which during the day our life has circled for years. Light was still on in a few tents, a dog barked in the distance. The night sky was moonless, only the stars twinkled, there was the red planet Mars, who for a long time now has been governing time,^{^xviii} over there Saturn,^{^xix} the star I was born under. The northern horizon swam in the pale light of northern [p. 266] summer nights; deep below the surf lapped against the cliffs in eternal repetition.

The brothers and sisters of the Queens of England and Spain, the Battenbergs and the Tecks, must, by order of Parliament, if they wish to retain their possessions and perquisites, discard their German names; the next thing will be to order the monarch to renounce his family name, an imposition that even the most humble citizen would not allow himself to be told to do.^{^xx}

To bring a bit of movement for once into the Drama and Orchestra Societies, a football match between the two of them was held on the field. The parties looked very comical indeed, Schneider as centre forward for the Drama team, Bohltsmann as central-forward [sic] for the musicians' team. Punters, on this occasion, had already opened up their betting stalls again, which carries a prison sentence, but every now and again a sergeant comes along collects his bribe money, and so Meine Tante, deine Tante^{^xxi} continues unabated. It took an hour for the first ball to get into the net.

At Herr Eicherten's place, I looked through the latest English illustrated magazines, Bystander, London News, and so on, and was struck by the flippancy of what they offered. Beyond half-naked dancing girls, and snapshots showing how 'Society', which had previously put on dances to raise money for the poor, now does so on behalf of the dependents of the dead and wounded. Also displayed were the spiteful caricatures by the Dutchman L. Raemackers^{^xxii} and Bairnsfather,^{^xxiii} e.g. German prisoners-of-war portrayed as gorillas, and given the title of 'Captured Culture'; or British prisoners dying of hunger and being spat on by German Red Cross nurses. One cartoon showed a prize-winning pig, with the comment: 'Do you recognise the similarity here with a German General? One cartoon title read: 'The new Style', and under this was a picture showing an officer on Victoria Station taking his leave from his lady-love. In earlier days, the wooer used to be going off to the countryside to play golf: today, monocled and in patent-leather boots, he's off into the man-murdering battle of the 'Great Adventure', simply to return two weeks later from the Army back into the arms of his 'truly-beloved', having bagged in the meantime at least a thousand Huns — that's war mentality gone degenerate. At least, that's the way it was shown in the cartoons.

In order to boost out the kitchen fund in the Upper Camp, a Herr Borman gave a slide show on Paris. The slides had all been taken about 1880, and the commentary was similarly dreary. I wonder whether Herr Tischer is right? Lloyd George's speech in Glasgow concluded with the words: "No peace with the Hohenzollerns". In Berlin, however, there the Cabinet is in crisis; a fellow called Erzberger^{^xxiv} wants to topple Bethmann-Holweg; General Brusilov is moving on Lemberg. Very bad harvest in Canada, break with England in the offing, if England insists on general conscription, now that almost the seventh parts of all Canadians have fallen fighting for the 'Empire'.

Hurrah! The talks between Lord Newton^{^xxv} and Genera B…..ck in The Hague have been successful in agreeing the transfer of sixteen thousand civilian internees; not back to their homeland, but across to Holland. My nose started to bleed [p. 268] from excitement and joy, when Dr. Schmidt, the successor to the 'man in the red waistcoat', informed me of that. Herr Helerburg was just reading some lascivious stuff to us from Boccaccio's Decameron, when the English Camp Medical Officer, Dr. Marshall, came into our hut, and told us how a rich lady in Douglas (Lady Raglan?)^{^xxvi} had consulted a soothsayer, who replied to her question "When would the War end?" with the words: "As true as your chauffeur is going to die on the way back home, the War will be over on the 18th or 21st of August 1917 (which is this year). On the way home, the chauffeur, who had been in perfectly good health, actually did fall dead out of his seat, and the car ran into a lamp post.

Today the anniversary of the start of the World War came in for its third repeat! This is because it has grown into so long-lasting a catastrophe, and at the same time its end and its consequences cannot yet be foreseen. For this reason Professor Hinze lectured to us yesterday in straight figures on what losses this War had brought in comparison with earlier ones in the history of mankind. If all sacrifices of war and costs of war since the beginning of the history of human culture were known, then the conscience of the world would perhaps be awakened. Appalling figures from only the last sixty years followed in his lecture like an unending dance of the dead. The Napoleonic Wars brought France a loss of blood, such as it was never able to recover from. Between 1850 and 1897, two-and-a-half million human beings died in wars. The American Civil War (1860-1865)^{^xxvii} cost forty thousand million gold marks. For this, everyone living on the earth would have needed to contribute twenty-seven marks. The Northern States lost three hundred thousand men, the Confederacy half a million. With that amount spent on war, all the slaves in the world (for whose liberation the war was ostensibly fought) [p. 269] could have had their freedom bought for them, without even the destruction of one human life. The Crimean War^{^xxviii} cost England one-and-a-half thousand million marks. Of the one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, twenty thousand of the fallen were British, twelve per cent lost in battle, eighty-eight per cent who wasted away in hospitals. The French-Italian War of 1859 claimed fifty-five thousand victims, the Prussian-Austrian War (1866) forty thousand men, the Russo-Turkish (1859) a quarter of a million; the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) cost France two hundred and ninety thousand men. Spain's war with the United States (1898) finally came to cost Spain one-and-a-half million marks. In the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and in the Chinese War of 1860 five hundred and twenty thousand lives bled away. What, however, is all that in comparison to the present-day gigantic losses, where every minute of blood-shedding is already costed up at a million marks,^{^xxix} and how sparing are they in peacetime with the budgets for cultural and social items! The Allies are said already during these three years to have sacrificed five hundred thousand million for the work of war and destruction, while the drop in production is moving into uncounted thousands of millions. The losses in human sacrifice, which ought to stand at the top of the list, are said up to now to stand at four million dead and ten million wounded and maimed on the side of the Allies. (Three Million dead and five million wounded for the losses of the Central Powers.) Can anyone comprehend these figures? — No. Will humanity learn from it? No. because humanity has lost its memory.

Utter disappointment and bitterness prevails once more in the Camp, ever since the result of the talks between Lord Newton [p. 270] and General B…..ck have become known through the Times. No mention of the sixteen thousand civilian internees who are supposed to be going to Holland, but again plenty about the exchange of officers. This is because hundreds of officers from the English aristocracy and gentry have been, ever since they were captured in 1914 at the Battle of Mons, 'languishing' for three years in German war imprisonment, lavishly furnished with money and on occasions given the privilege on their word of honour of going on pleasure outings in the enemy's territory — and only hardheartedly denied permission to go fishing in Travemünde. Lord Newton wishes to provide these officers of the Guards with the opportunity of catching fish in Scheveningen, and, in return for this, promised General B…..ck that he would exchange elite German officers from Donington Hall, where the son of Grand Admiral Tirpitz^{^xxx} is being kept prisoner. About the masses of imprisoned lesser men, neither of the two Governments cares a fig; the fact that university lecturers and artists of rank are amongst them doesn't cut any ice. Finally, the thousands upon thousands of civilians illegally interned against the law of all nations are not in the slightest bit valued. Ruhleben has no prominent Englishmen, yet the mere twenty-six thousand Germans in Knockaloe are allowed to perish from abdominal typhus, or some other thing, to break up stone for roads, or to repair the sewers of Governor Lord Raglan's residence.^{^xxxi} Short and (far from) sweet: only one hundred seriously-ill German civilian internees are to be exchanged (a good percentage for Ruhleben!), while the Austrians are not even mentioned. I am not alone therefore in thinking that those career officers who remain captive to War's end, must blame only themselves for this; but it is, however, also the task and duty of a Fatherland, if it already has one failure to act against its name, to wit [p. 271] the abandonment to fate of its army reservists in foreign countries, to attempt all things to lessen the burden of these men who suffer unjustly, rather than simply directing their main attention to the military on its own, and the officers therein. How long will a nation and a national army continue to accept such flagrant derelictions of justice?

"Yes, yes, these English diplomats easily pull the wool over a Prussian General's eyes," said Capt'n Korn, and scratched himself behind the ear. "When will you yourself now be getting away?", Herr Rist asks him, tongue in cheek. "When me over here and my old lady over there in Bremerhaven get to celebrate her golden wedding." "In that case, before you make a start, you'd better get yourself a calendar, tear-off, day-by-day", was Rist's retort.

The gentle-natured Herr Fortkammer came out all flustered from the Guard-Room, where he had been called to answer the telephone. Everybody gathered around him in a circle when he came back, pale from his conversation: "Just imagine this: my wife tells me that my old father, who has been living in England for thirty-six years, has died in Knockaloe. In exchange for that, his only son [sic] has been locked away in Ruhleben. My wife had news by telephone today, and travelled to Knockaloe; when she stepped into the miserable hospital there, my father was already in the throes of his death, and couldn't speak. Quarter of an hour later, a sergeant came into the room where my father lay dying, and said to my wife: "Your time's up." Despite desperate pleading, she was led out, and just when she had left the Camp, a soldier shouted out after her: "Hey, hey! you can come back now; he's dead."

We were all as deeply affected as he was, but what can we do? Nothing at all, not even comfort him. Capt'n Korn said, he had read in the newspaper that in Ruhleben two interned brothers were allowed on their word of honour to go to Hamburg [p. 272] and English officers allowed out to England to go to their dying relatives. Yet another example of how treatment differs for Germans and for Englishmen.

Three years of World War! How do things look today? In one hundred and sixty-five weeks, thousands have died each day. Countless thousands of millions have been spent on war material. Half of Europe turned into a battle field, all oceans deserted. The War has brought two-fold change to mankind, progressive brutalisation and deep internalisation, together with wanton destruction and very great willingness to make sacrifices. Serbia, Montenegro, Belgium and one third of Rumania have lost their independence. In Russia organised anarchy prevails: a strong man is needed there; Kerensky is only a puppet paid for by the Entente, the discharged swaggerer Brusilov grumbles and is afraid of Siberia, his successor Kornilov is a similar braggart and is reaching out for military dictatorship. The Ukraine declares itself independent; Finland, with German help, has fallen away, the former autocrat is to be banished to Siberia. Italy runs for the eleventh time bleeding against the granite walls of the Alps, which separate it from Trieste, which is being successfully attacked by our air force. Venizelos,^{^xxxii} the arch-demagogue and the Cleon^{^xxxiii} of present-day Greece, is back in Athens and declares: "Hellas is a crowned republic, long live the Entente, which is stuffing my pockets!" In the meantime ghastly things are happening in Thessaloniki.^{^xxxiv} Mutinies of the allied armies under the supreme command of the Sultan's 'beautiful' seraglio in Constantinople, and each day prison transports of mutineers arrive in chains in Malta. The rest die in epidemics. Fires were laid at all corners of the city, hundreds of thousands are homeless. — And how are things progressing in la douce France? It has torn itself to pieces in its raging thirst for revenge, it cannot [p. 273] reconquer its most valuable provinces. Millions of shells are turning these provinces into wasteland. And how loudly perfidious Albion, this hydra,^{^xxxv} is now really gasping out for the first time, reeling beneath blows of German rifle-butts. Finally it's come round to them to do things for themselves, these moneybags, cricket players and dandies! — India won't send them any more soldiers; Australia can't send soldiers; New Zealand has been bled dry; South Africa wants its independence; Ireland wants to be a republic; Canada wants to break away from the Empire. The English Merchant Fleet is melting away in the face of German U-boats like snow before the sun. All that beautiful stacked-away gold is getting scattered all over the world; the War is costing eight million pounds a day. Famine, too, is on its way, the workers are becoming rebellious. China, Siam, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti are grinning and scooping up that beautiful money they get for declaring war on Germany. In Spain, an anti-monarchy revolution is under preparation; Holland is between the devil and the deep blue sea. Norway groans under the weight of its shipping losses. For a year and a half now, bread has been on ration in Sweden; poor Switzerland will freeze to death, if it can't get hold of any more coal. Germany is the only one that stands relatively best off: the future belongs to it, its sacrifices have at least not been in vain, and together with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and war-weary Turkey will climb out victorious from the world conflagration.

The youthful Pastor Farbig has been out on his rounds again, to graze his lambs. He stood on black lectern adorned with flowers, and as soon as he read on the programme that the orchestra was set to play Entry of the Guests at Wartburg from Wagner's Tannhäuser, he furrowed his brow and demanded instead Beethoven's The Heavens tell the Glory of God. Why not by preference Martin Luther's: From Deep Affliction I cry out to you?^{^xxxvi} [p. 274]

The earnestly humorous clerical gentleman, in his early thirties, spoke about young people, who must keep up their enthusiasm of youth, even in this, the fourth year of War; I hope he doesn't preach that same message again to us next year! One sailor said aloud: "What does that Holy Joe want around here? We can do without him!" But pastors chalk up every insult on the credit side with the Dear Lord.

In the evening the theatre was playing again, this time putting on Max Halbe's The Stream,^{^xxxvii} which because of its atmosphere, one of spreading gloom, was a bad choice.

When we went back to our huts, we saw a steamer of ten thousand tons slinking past us up the coast, its lights completely blackened off, in an attempt to steer clear of the open sea because of German U-boats. Not a gladdening sight for the English, seeing their ships having to hide themselves in home waters, like thieves in the night!

I am trying to put together a development tree for architecture in stone, one beginning with Sumerian building work and ending with the Rococo, which is the last independent style.

Sir Douglas Haig has sent General Pétain a best-wishes telegram for the massive defeat of the French-English autumn Offensive.^{^xxxviii}

In the afternoon, England's one and only airship, the Parseval,^{^xxxix} of the semi-rigid type, came whizzing in over the sea, and making a terrible racket. It had come, so the story went, to deliver mail to the town of Douglas, since the steamer connection had once more been interrupted. Everybody rushed out to see the ugly buzzer; von Br. and others opined: "Hell's bells! If we could only just shoot that thing down now, or make it explode, and see it fall into the sea!"

In the evening, we drank a glass of horrible wine together, in a toast [p. 275] to the regaining of Czernowitz^{^xl} and the dismissal of the Russian General Brusilov. A letter, from home, that took three months to get here, confirmed that my brother Patrick, too, has been extracted from the Lower Sixth form, and set down on the barracks drill square.

We have been discussing the latest events: the Pope has sent a peace note to all the Powers, at which the Times immediately began a lamento^{^xli} which declared Berlin and Vienna to be behind it, but the wind will probably have blown to the Vatican from the Tower of London and the Eiffel Tower. — After the Empire of the Centre has been torn to rags and tatters and destroyed by English, and now Russian, help, the President of China has been forced to declare war on the Central Powers. In reward for this, China now no longer has to pay any more compensation money to Germany for the part played by its troops at the head of the European Powers outraged by the atrocities of the Boxer Rebellion in suppressing that rebellion.^{^xlii} — The Tsar's family has been sent to Siberia. Neither England nor its King have attempted to rescue their ally.

In the evening, Herr Tischer came round once more to see us. He had brought the latest English magazines with him, and pointed out one or two particularly eloquent caricatures. In them we saw stylishly accoutred officers, who only a short while previously might well have been sitting on school benches, as they attempted on the barracks square to teach the skill of standing to attention to their conscripted fathers, grandfathers and teachers; or [p. 276] else we saw them asking for a tip so that they could buy cigarettes, since the pay of these privates was much less than that of their sons in officers' uniform. I said I thought it was surely impossible for whippersnapper young officers to be allowed to treat a greyed and intellectually superior generation in this way. Only a born trading nation like the English are capable of turning the concept of military spirit on its head in this way. Herr von Beyerheim commented: "Those things are only caricatures, they never occur in practice, people would avoid it." But Tischer doubtfully shook his wise head and explained: "You can recognise quite correctly from these English caricatures what wonderful blossoms militarism can push forth in a trading nation, if, as now, it is in difficulty from suffering a shortage of men, or they call it now of: 'human material'. The reason for this is that all militarism, the backbone of which is indubitably discipline and respect, suspends its own preconditions in a situation where its militarism violates these original concepts, which have their roots in the family, the fundamental cell of every state system. Fathers who must salute their children, be obliged to obey them because according to military rank they their subordinates, though not according to natural ranking, turn exaggerated militarism into a caricature of itself. In doing this, the last consequence of militarism, militarism turns the natural order of things on its head, and by questioning the preconditions which form the bedrock of the authoritarian state, militarism countermines its framework, the defence of which provides the reason for its existence." Herr von Beyerheim wondered, however, whether that were not sophistry, but ultimately, as a former soldier, he would not like to enter into a position of disciplining a distinguished old schoolmaster. If nothing else, the English, through this arrogant self-caricature, showed little tact, and that would eventually exact its revenge. Where, incidentally, does the word caricature actually come from, [p. 277] I wondered, and Tischer was there with the answer straight away: from the Italian caricare, which means 'overloaded'.^{^xliii}

Wilson stated with regard to the peace note from the Pope that he wished to conclude peace with the representatives of the German people 'at any time', but he did not wish to conclude it with the Kaiser and his militaristic clique. — Coming in from their former correspondent in Berlin, the Daily Mail published the account given by a Zeppelin officer which carried the title of "City of my dreams: now you cause me sleepless nights"; this was followed by the description of a hellish attack on London. Herr von Beyerheim declared it all to be a tissue of lies: active German officers did not write for the Press.

The English Steel-Pen-Nib King, who wanders around restlessly in the Camp, has acquired a colleague in Rohst, the American Hops-King. The latter visited Herr von Beyerheim one afternoon in his studio, which really entailed a sailor, as tall as a tree, carrying him on his shoulders from the hospital and across the whole Camp, something that, as you might expect, attracted considerable attention. He spoke a non-stop combination of nasal German and English, and entertained us with his genuinely American plans. However, and wherever he could after the War, he vowed he would stymie business for those Englishmen, who, out of envy for his competition, had, during his business trip to London, ensured that he got taken in the 'Black Maria' to Alexandra Palace. He was planning to found a rival passenger line to Cunard's, as well as copying Loewe's famous pipe factory^{^xliv} in "Noo-Yark" (New York). [p. 278] He says he knows all Wall Street and Park Avenue, Kahl, Speyer, Schwab, the whole collection of Jews, and knows why the Americans had to declare war on Germany, because otherwise all the banks, in consequence of the 'War-loans' to the Allies, would have gone bust. Since that time, commercial terror had beset the United States, and all German companies had been sold for a song into American hands.

"Are the Germans also being locked up the same as they are here?" I asked, in between. "Oh yes, absolutely, because one bad example ruins common decency; even the specialist Wagner conductor, Dr. Karl Muck, the darling of the 'upper ten thousand', was not left unscathed."^{^xlv}

"Incidentally," he continued, "the Allies could not have sought themselves out a more dangerous ally than Uncle Sam; all Europe would fall into American debt slavery, and at the peace conference the bill would be presented correct, right down to the last 'continental red cent'.^{^xlvi} "You can take that as a fact from me: Business is business, and all idealism is frippery. Dry facts govern this world."

Herr von Beyerheim attempted to interest the dollar-man in valuable old masters, but to no avail. However, he did advise Beyerheim to contact James Bache and Andrew Mellon, both of them bankers and collectors, or to contact the Duveen Gallery in "Noo Yark". He said that after the War, all old art treasures would in any case be making the journey across the Atlantic. Then Baron Rohst submerged himself in dollar payments, enough to make you dizzy, and asserted that an apartment in Park Avenue cost forty thousand dollars a year, [p. 279] a single room four thousand dollars. He said, Mr Somebody-or-other had had a bath of gold and jade installed, at a cost of thirty-five thousand dollars. The expenditure of all residents in Park Avenue came to around two hundred and sixty million dollars a year. I broke in: "Then I suppose they will be paying out similarly large sums to charity." "No more than about five million dollars flow to charity from this source, the same amount as they spend there just on flowers and presents."

Then Baron Rohst told us, not without pride, by what methods certain persons had become millionaires almost overnight, from the so-called 'combines', which cornered the market for pork or grain, i.e., companies which through immense purchases created an artificial shortage, by which they were suddenly put into the position of fixing the world market price at whatever level they wished; then, against this, others came into being, 'unlawful combines', which kidnapped the children of these upstarts, and by means of secret agreements, laid their hands on large amounts of ransom money. All that was an open secret, he said.

We hung back with baited breath, when the big seaman appeared again, and loaded the heavy weight of this weighty man up on his shoulders, so he could take him up to the hospital.

Who is there still ever thinks today, when each week a battle is fought, bloodier than Sedan, and not with 'freshness and cheerfulness',^{^xlvii} but in desperate bitterness, of that small, glorious war of yesteryear? I would really like to know whether the anniversary of Sedan^{^xlviii} will still after this present War be celebrated with gymnastics and festival performances in all schools. The spring of 1916 was the last year in which Sedan was mentioned, [p. 280] no mention at all this year. The War already places itself as an abyss between two epochs or ages of man, into which all tradition sinks.

"Tradition, you long-flowing train,
Like her of female nature,
Reveals her finest radiance
Only when swirling down a stairway.
Whoever wishes to enter the upper chambers,
Where Modern Times are a-building,
Cuts off flowing train and seams,
Thinks of the goal, not of the gown."

With that I certainly don't mean the destruction of everything that our forefathers have stored up in the treasury rooms of the intellect, for things without tradition may themselves never become traditions!

Immediately after the 'Sedan Day' without song and without music, Riga was captured by the Germans. Herr Schneider asked everyone: "What's the difference between the Germans and the Russians? Well: the Germans are rigorous, but the Russians are Riga-less." — The 'good old honest Times' praised President Wilson, who pushed a thousand jailbirds into uniform and marched up with them to the Capitol. In contrast to this, the Times referred to the 'dirty band of Russian soldiers' as cowards.

On our return visit to the hospital, we found Baron Rohst, busily ministered to by Dr. Westen, in a mood of deepest depression. He was getting no mail from 'Amurrica', and was also suffering dreadfully from sciatica. Even more depressed, but with greater cause, was Georgewitsch, the Austrian Flight-Lieutenant, because nothing had come about concerning his exchange for Mr Wilson, now released in Vienna. Georgewitsch had been shot down during the capture of Lemberg and conveyed by the Russians [p. 281] to a Siberian prison camp. There in the most severe of winters he had managed to escape. But in the Gobi desert, he lost his two companions in a snowstorm, while, for himself, one of his legs was frozen up. He limped through laboriously to Peking,^{^xlix} where his leg was eventually amputated. They took him to Japan, he was not locked up, because he had come from Russian captivity; instead he was given help to cross over to America. After many adventures, he reached New York, travelling across the States. There he obtained the necessary papers, and boarded a Dutch steamer. But when he arrived in Southampton, he was arrested, and passed through various imprisonment camps. There was, however, a British MP, a Mr Wilson, imprisoned in Vienna. The English Government naturally took the greatest of pains to welcome this valuable and vociferous MP back into Westminster. They wished in return to send back Flight-Lieutenant Georgewitsch. Trusting to this, they released Mr Wilson immediately, and he for his part naturally had no more urgent a task than first of all to make it known to the world, first of all in Zurich, in words and in writing, that Austria was in rapid decline. He now sits hale and hearty in his old seat in Parliament, and stirs up hatred in the wars of words, while poor Georgewitsch lies resignedly in his bed, with his unbuckled wooden leg next to him, and tries to keep his great disappointment silent to himself. Perhaps he is comforted by the latest photographs in the London News, which show 'Dear Daddy Tsar' in prison and shovelling snow, the Tsar — a cousin of the King of England — surrounded by barbed wire and encircled with muskets and bayonets, just the same as we are on the Isle of Men.

In Russia, the chaos continues. After General Kornilov, who demanded dictatorship, was declared a traitor to his country by Krensky, Kornilov destroyed all the railway lines, and pulled back to Petersburg. He was captured, and [p. 282] Russia was declared a republic, with Mr Kerensky its first president. In France, Prime Minister Ribot^{^l} was toppled and was unable to form a new government because the Socialists prevented him from doing so.

Under the title of 'Towards lasting peace', the Times printed a note which had been sent to the Government by Frederick Harrison,^{^li} and demanded that the following four points be put into law:

"A few years of these regulations being in force will show the Germans who they are, and what civilised humanity thinks of them."^{^lii}

Ever since October 1915,^{^liii} when I heard the wonderfully reconciliatory address by Dr. Lyttleton, who was of course immediately dismissed as Headmaster of Eton College, I have been able to verify the consequences of consistently fanned up hate, right up to the above note, which holds on to keeping up vindictive measures far beyond the time of war [p. 283] and does not want hatred between nations to die away. Woe betide, therefore, Europe and all nations, who permit people like Mr Harrison to be successful in having their say. It is not the conquered, but the reconciled enemy, whom one has really overcome. — In screaming contrast to the irreconcilable stance of ossified patriotism, we recently read the following in the Labour Leader:^{^liv} "The Army speaks now: you diplomats, kings and to all who pretend to act on moral principles, what good to us are declarations which only disguise secret intentions? You well cared-for, old people, who put on airs and rock yourselves around in club chairs, snarling through your false teeth; you bishops and bigwigs, who draw the swords of others; you journalists, strongest of the haters, kitted out with ink, quill and paper, to massacre the Hun! You corpulent merchants, who dine each night at the Savoy, earning fat profits from us with delivery suppliers. You wrathful clerics who stir us up to splatter blood for you, shriek out for reprisals, and deny the Son of God! You brave men in the offices of the public authorities and in war-materials supply, all of you, yes all, are no more than indolent mules, as talented and courageous as farmyard hens. We are calling out to you now, from the Army, to listen to us! It is more difficult to slaughter men than turkeys and snipes. We are fed up your tricks. You old men, who want to make history through our efforts, it is you alone, not we, who hate the Hun. You are to blame for the War: we are the ones who must bleed. And you want still more blood, still more atrocities. The enemy now has had enough, the world is sick [p. 284] to its heart. Get on with it, get to work, you idle diplomats, and make peace now, that's what we're telling you to do now."^{^lv}

Since Germany's answer to the Pope contained nothing about a desertion of Belgium, this did much to infuriate English comment.

Dr. Pemmler, the jovial Bavarian, who for a long time now has been so unjovial that the Commandant wants to transfer him out, as a disturber of the peace and harmony on this 'Island of the Blest', has got himself completely drunk on his own at night, in joy at the news that the Germans have plastered Margate, the east-coast seaside resort, with bombs,^{^lvi} the reason being that it was on the promenade at Margate that he was paraded off (three years ago!) in handcuffs, away from his young bride on his honeymoon! All his requests for release have filled up the fireplace of the Home-Office, of the American and Swiss envoys, or even before that, the waste-paper basket of the Commandant. In the middle of his noisy boozing bout, he was taken away to the 'Clink', where he will wake up to grim reality.

I found today in Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, that Goethe was of the opinion that everybody had to adapt the furnishings in their rooms to the changing tastes of the time, and not surround themselves with the furniture of past eras, because that would be as though one were running around daily in costume clothing, something that was fitting only in times of Carnival. That strikes me as being an indefensible lack of feeling for tradition. The reason is that in every day and age, certainly today as well, there are individual persons, who have sensitivity for the antiquity or the middle ages, but are people of the Renaissance, the Rococo or the Biedermeier, for whose personality an environment idiosyncratically their own is best suited. Room furnishings, that everyone chooses for themselves, ought to show only the enhanced inner being of the personality dwelling within them, because the latter, like carnival disguise, helps in the process of revealing traits of character, which otherwise remain [p. 285] shut off to the eye. How many people become genuine only when in fancy dress, and are in disguise at the everyday level?

Great excitement in the Camp once more, the reason being that the Home-Office medic had arrived "unexpectedly". It was, however, unfortunately the case that both Dr. Westen and the Committee had been able to reserve first place on the consultations list for themselves. These fine gentlemen, puffers away at tobacco and perpetual drinkers of the strongest coffee, set to bring on heart disease. Dr. Marshall said, however, that there would be only about one hundred critically-ill prisoners who would be going home, and that as long as Germany did not again raise any more last-minute difficulties. Apart from that, it emerged in the evening that the list was a list of the names of men who were being sent to internment in Holland — and on it were all the names of the Committee, with Camp Capt'n Schnader in first place on it, and, besides that, Dr. Westen's boozing companions had underhandedly been allowed to put their names down on the list, as had all those who had liberally greased Dr. Westen's palm! An understandable mood of insurrection, together with brawls, spread wide, particularly in the Upper Camp, where three thousand absolutely penniless prisoners had been made to live for years like pigs — the underground passageway has been shut off, and we'll probably finish up again having shooting. These boozing pals and flag-waving patriots, who are currently on the list for Holland, have already lost so much backbone that they have on occasion sent declarations of loyalty to the Commandant, which he, of course, with a cynical smile, reveals to the Swiss Envoy.

The English are beginning a great Offensive, and have already taken four thousand Germans prisoner, while their own losses are, as usual, 'insignificant'. On the other hand, the Times has reports of mutinies on German warships. [p. 286] According to these, the Fleet is lying 'bottled up' in the Kiel Canal, and the sailors are already have white beards.

It did nobody any good to have put their name in this unfair way on the sick list, because Germany has after all been awkward again, and has in the last moment rejected Hull as the embarkation point. In the meantime, the 'barmy professor', who speaks eight languages, has gone completely mad. He refused all food except grass, which he himself picked from the meadow, and water, which he drank with it. He did not want to go to the hospital; at night he sat on his packed-up tin suitcase and called out endlessly: "Germany's where I want to go." Today, two sergeants with two soldiers, have appeared, to take him forcibly to hospital. He, however, remained seated on his suitcase and shouted out: "That's where they want to poison me." Then four soldiers hauled him out of his tent, his bunk with him. "What a performance", he shouted out while this was going on, and brandished his metal pot, as they dragged him away. When he arrived in the hospital, and saw Dr. Westen, he fell into a fit of raving madness, at which point the latter "took care" of getting him into a prison cell. From there it will be a journey of Never-ever-see-you-again, into an English lunatic asylum.

Yesterday the Swiss Envoy appeared similarly "unexpectedly" in the Camp, that means that prior to this, the Envoy had had been hosted amicably by the Commandant, whereafter he betook himself to the hospital. The wrath and bitterness towards the Committee and the 'patriotic' traitors found their [p. 287] expression in a quickly drawn-up notice of grievances, which was signed by two hundred prisoners of the Lower Camp. It covered the whole state of affairs with regard to favourites and schemes, which were tolerated by the Commandant, in accordance with his maxim of divide and rule, and how the list for Holland had come into being, as well as why the 'fifty-five year olds', who according to the English White Paper should have been released to Germany exactly twelve months previously, were still having to live behind English barbed wire. Pointers were made to the need for sex and its consequent punishments, to the stone quarry and hunger-typhus epidemic in Knockaloe, nor was it concealed that in Germany civilian internees live in sanatoriums, while here terminally ill patients have to die in wretched hospitals. Also that not until yesterday did six thousand letters arrive, which had been left lying in London for six months and the news of death occurrences had not reached the people affected until half a year later, and all this in contradiction to The Hague Conference agreements in the July of the present year! (1917). The distinguished diplomat accepted this grievance notice, without replying a word to it, with the most indifferent facial expression in the world, and took himself off as quickly as possible. — In the meantime, the German Camp Capt'n had reported everything back to the Commandant and 'suggested' to him that all two hundred informers, everyone, that is, who had denigrated him to the Swiss representative, be sent in punishment to Knockaloe.

To every external misfortune there now comes also the repugnant inner discord, turning our life to hell. Injustice in any form is the most difficult for human beings to bear. Collective distress which does not unite, but disunites, is bound to lead to desperation.

A gale blew during the night, the huts shuddered, the hanging light swayed, pictures flew off the walls, the wind howled through the chinks in the flooring and the ceiling [p. 288], we had to nail up the window. A lot of tents were blown over, and the chimney on the studio came away.

And what things were happening outside our "circumscribed world"? The Germans were successful in occupying the Island of Ösel^{^lvii} in the Gulf of Riga. The Kaiser has visited the Sultan in Constantinople. Barthou^{^lviii} is demanding the return of Alsace-Lorraine. Great Italian Offensive: Udine^{^lix} has fallen. In London, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria has died, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein (1831-1917). I saw him last at the requiem for Prince Maurice of Battenberg, who had fallen in battle at Ypres on 27th October 1914. The newspaper stated that in his younger days he had been a dinner companion of the widow of Napoleon I.

Hörns, my proven companion two years of distress — yes, please write that down —, wants to do some catching up for me on the Diary, the reason being that I am confined to my camp-bed, completely crippled with rheumatism. The exhaustion of all nourishing food, together with the constant disappointment in things great and small, are, like the falling rain, wearing down body and spirit. And yet, even though I cannot move in this pit of a mattress, I feel myself freer than before, since a person tied up in bed is imprisoned only by nature, and this cancels any imprisonment on the outside. Sick is sick, no matter whether I am unable to move myself either as an emperor or an army commander, or as a civilian internee; it all amounts more or less to the same thing. So please write this for me: After one week of not being able to appear at roll-call, I was visited by Dr. Marshall, who wanted to palm off fruit salt^{^lx} off on me as a cure-all, or else have me taken into hospital. But Herr von Beyerheim [p. 289] persuaded him that I had sufficient care and quiet here. We preferred not to say anything of the seriousness of my condition, and that besides everything else I was suffering from cold sweats, shivering attacks, vomiting. Hörns and Beyerheim did the necessary rubbings, and they do what they can. Edmund softens ship's biscuits in boiling water, which, spread with margarine, I like very much. In the meantime all the songbirds have flown off free to the south. From here, they do not fly out, as they do in Germany, through Greece to Egypt, but go along the Atlantic coast to Morocco. You can't stop them from flying off over your head, only from perching on it. Things aren't going so well with my thoughts, for time and time again, especially if I am alone or cannot sleep for pain at nights, my thoughts in my brain settle on the unfairness of this civilian internment. Yes, if I had been taken prisoner of war, with weapons on me, I would not then have had any cause for complaint, but defenceless as an innocent holiday guest, without having received the right under international law of departure, deprived of entitlements and behind barbed wire, for years and long years to serve as the object of a disgraceful policy of reprisals, is a blow in the face to every modern sense of justice. "Lock up all the Huns! Help yourself to their property! Let them starve!" that's been the headline in the newspapers for years now, and comes in when they have no victories to report. In Ruhleben, the English trainers, jockeys and so on, are showered with parcels from their government, indeed it's true that the white bread they like is sent to them by express delivery from Switzerland, and at the same time the German nation is being starved by that cowardly measure, inhuman hunger-blockade. Why don't they intern the English on a Baltic islands? Yesterday I got a parcel from home with walnuts in it, but the English censor would not allow them to be delivered. One pound^{^lxi} of unpurified yellow sugar has to last us for months. [p. 290] Hörns reports that a convoy of nineteen ships along with two English cruisers has been sent to the bottom off the Shetlands by German U-boats^{^lxii} — that's probably why the enraged censor confiscated my walnuts. Sir Edward Grey's eyes have almost lost their sight, his house in Scotland, where he goes fishing for trout, has been destroyed by fire. Supplies of matches have dwindled on the Isle of Man, and from now on three men with one box of matches have to make them last a month! Yes, the times are getting darker and darker! I shall store up my last drop of hair tonic, still with me from London, for my haircut at Christmas 1917. Now, Hörns, my dear chap, please on reading the essay on India out to me. Many thanks.

Herr von Beyerheim has just been rubbing me down with what they call "embrocation", the pains have died back somewhat. I was dreaming about India during the night, and attempted to cobble together a few hobbling strophes.

The Commandant has gone away again. After three heavy blows with a stick against my door he came stumbling in and ordered Hörns to carry the paraffin stove, still lit, out of the room, telling us it could no longer be permitted to burn during the day because of shortage of material. Then he banged his stick — I was put in mind of the late Frederick William I of Prussia^{^lxiii} probably doing the same thing — on all items of furniture and said: "Too many things here." He was visibly in a bad mood, because the Swedish attaché, representing the Austrians, was another one who stuck his nose into the Camp. The latest punishment for petty little things is picking up dirty paper in the Upper Camp. Herr Herrera Montes, an elderly merchant from Mexico, who on one occasion [p. 291] had drunk one more drink than he needed, out of joy, because Udine had fallen, was sentenced by the Court Martial (!) to one month's imprisonment for insubordination, just because he did not want to pick up dirty paper. — The breeze of enthusiasm, flickering up once more in consequence of the great Offensive against Italy, blows right up to my bed. Cadorna^{^lxiv} telegraphed to the Times: "Never shall our most arrogant enemy tread the blessed soil of our Fatherland. I am filled with the greatest confidence and welcome this Offensive with satisfaction."

In the evening, Herr von Beyerheim told me that a mutiny had taken place on a German warship. This had been provoked by Haase,^{^lxv} a member in the Reichstag of the Independent Social Democrats. This was, he said, the first mutiny in Prussia in war time since the days of Frederick the Great.^{^lxvi} Then his former schoolmate, von Kühlmann, ^{^lxvii}had proclaimed: "There will never be any deal on Alsace-Lorraine. My answer to France and England is 'never, at no time'; that land will continue to be fought over until the last dog is dead, and not one centimetre of that land will be given up."

At the beginning of November, Count Hertling was appointed the seventh Imperial German Chancellor.^{^lxviii}

General Smuts, the Boer General, has gone on a propaganda journey to Italy, he is already doing justice to his name.^{^lxix}

In Russia, the 'beams' are creaking with the strain,^{^lxx} the Winter Place has been stormed, and Kerensky, corrupted, took prompt flight. Lenin is preaching immediate peace with Germany. Kaiser William [p. 292] has had himself proclaimed Duke of Courland^{^lxxi} and Prince of Lithuania, while, as it seems, an archduke will become king of Poland. — In the Guild Hall, the annual banquet turned out to be pretty lean, only four courses. No Kitchener any more, nor a Russian ambassador, to hold after-dinner speeches. By contrast, Lloyd George at a dinner given in Paris declared it would not be any Italian or Frenchman, but he himself who would be the only man able "to pull the cart out of the mud".

After Kerensky and Kornilov were unsuccessful in a coup d'état between them against Petersburg, Kerensky, disguised as a sailor, went by ship to France.

i From Cicero (speech against Cataline, 63 BC): Quousque tandem, Catilina, abutere patienta nostra?' How much longer, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?

iii An uncorroborated account of one incident in 1866 is carried on a wikipedia.org posting of 3 May 2006. However, it may not even be apposite to Dunbar-Kalckreuth's remark: "During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Prince Johann II placed his soldiers at the disposal of the Confederation but only to 'defend the German territory of Tyrol'. The Prince refused to have his men fight against other Germans. The Liechtenstein contingent took up position on the Stilfse Joch in the south of Liechtenstein to defend the Liechtenstein/Austrian border against attacks by the Italians under Garibaldi. A reserve of 20 men remained in Liechtenstein. When the war ended on July 22, the army of Liechtenstein marched home to a ceremonial welcome in Vaduz. Popular legend claims that 80 men went to war but 81 came back. Apparently an Austrian liaison officer joined up with the contingent on the way back."

v Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds the footnote in German (p. 259, fn. 1): "William Dunbar, the Scottish Chaucer, [ca. 1450-ca. 1530]; with the exception of Burns the greatest national poet of Scotland. Mary Stuart was married at Dunbar Castle." One may add that the poem of which he speaks, 'The Thrissil and the Rois' (1503), was written to commemorate the wedding of James IV of Scotland to Princess Margaret Tudor of England.

vi Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds a footnote in German (p. 260, fn.1): "Of course this was a false rumour. Kerensky, bribed by England, stirred the Russians up further. Only when he had been removed, did Russia make separate peace." Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970), was head of the Russian Provisional Government, from July to October 1917.

xi Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds a footnote in German to Männerinsel (p. 263, fn.1): "A Pole by birth, he became a lord, proprietor of the Times, Daily Mail, John Bull etc.; his brother is Lord Rothermere. In 1917, he engaged on promotional propaganda journey in America, for which nothing was too extreme. Later he went mad. The editor [Horatio Bottomley, 1860-1933] of the hue-and-cry news-rag, John Bull, was sent to jail [in 1922] on charges of fraud and blackmail. — And these were leaders of 'public opinion', vox dei!"

xiii Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds a footnote in German (p. 263, fn.2): "Prime Minister in 1930, welcomed in Munich with jubilation, he, the man who even after 15 years will not return the confiscated property of the civilian internees. — Earlier on, he fought for it to be released!"

xiv The last Zeppelin raid on London took place on 19 October 1917. The Bank of England had been targeted in that year, but the Zeppelins were unable to complete their raids. Dunbar-Kalckreuth's account is therefore false. Wiki has (April 2019): "The first raid of 1917 took place on 16-17 March: five high-altitude Zeppelins encountered very strong winds, and none reached their targets. On the return flight L39 suffered an engine failure and, blown over French-held territory, was brought down in flames by ground fire. The lack of success was repeated on 23-24 May, when six Zeppelins set out to bomb London but were frustrated by a combination of high winds and thick cloud. A few bombs were dropped on Suffolk, killing one person and causing Â£599 damage."

xvi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534-92), "foremost rabbi and Jewish mystic in the community of Safed in the Galilee region of Ottoman Syria." (Wikipedia).

xix "In Renaissance astrology Saturn was associated with a gloomy, heavy, and brooding disposition. Being born under Saturn was paired with an excess of Black Bile, and hence a Melancholy disposition. In modern usage, to be saturnine was essentially equivalent to what people in the Renaissance would have understood as melancholy". See: https://sites.google.com/site/shakespeareandthespheres/saturn.

xx Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds the footnote in German (p. 266, fn.1): "And it did come to that: King George, from the House of Coburg-Gotha on his father's side, from the House of Welf (Hanover) on his mother's side, has established the new 'House of Windsor'. Windsor means 'rustling wind', and it is no more than that." The House of Windsor was signed into being on 17 July 1917.

xxii Louis Raemaekers (not Raemackers), 1869-1956: Dutch anti-German journalist and cartoon editor for the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf ('The Telegraph').

xxiii Bruce Bairnsfather (English, not Dutch), 1887-1951: artist and machine-gun officer; cartoons published in 'Fragments from France' (1917) in The Bystander magazine.

xxix Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds the footnote in German (p. 269, fn.1): "In the War of 1939/40 it has been double for England, according to reports in the Daily Mail."

xxxviii The reference here is unclear. The French Nivelle Offensive began in April 1917, and was unsuccessful. The British Third Battle of Ypres ('Passchendaele') began on 31 July 1917, and ended in success on 6 November 1917.

xxxix Made in Germany and delivered to Britain before the War began. The No 4 Parseval was on patrol duty in the summer of 1917, out from an east coast station. Whether it took mail to the Isle of Man in 1917 remains to be researched.

xlv Muck (1859-1940) was considered to be one of the greatest conductors of Wagner's works. In 1912 he became director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. "Embittered by 14 months' internment in the United States in 1918-19 as an enemy alien, he returned to Germany, where from 1922 to 1933 he conducted the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra" (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2019, on-line)

xlvii "Frisch-fromm-frölich-frei" ('fresh-devout-cheerful-free) was the motto of the German Gymnastics Association, founded in 1848. Dunbar-Kalckreuth shortens this to frisch-fröhlich 'fresh-cheerful'.

xlviii Sedan Day: 'Victory Day', to celebrate 1st September 1870, when Napoleon III and his troops were taken prisoner by Prussian troops in the Fortress of Sedan (eastern France). Celebrations were held in the German Empire on the 2nd of September, each year from 1871 to 1918; after which the festival was discontinued.

li Frederic Harrison (1831-1923), author of The German peril: forecasts, 1864-1914; reality. 1915; hope, 191-. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915.

lii Dunbar-Kalckreuth adds the note in German (p. 282, fn.1): "We could just as well prohibit all English persons for 10 years from using our world-famous spas!"

lvi Dunbar-Kalckreuth errs: the bombing of Margate (Kent) took place on 30 September 1917; Gotha bomber aircraft, not Zeppelins; many deaths.

lxii [Wiki]: A small naval battle was fought off the Shetlands on 17 October 1917, when two German light cruisers attacked convoy of coal-carrying ships and their escort. The two escorting destroyers and nine neutral Scandinavian ships were sunk. [Thus, 9 ships, not 19; 2 destroyers, not 2 cruisers; sunk by 2 German light cruisers, not by an undisclosed number of German U-Boats.]

lxxi Latvia.

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Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received The Editor © G Newton , 2019