[From Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim]

VII. BARBED WIRE AIR

THE process of adaptation to new and difficult surroundings had taken up the first weeks in Knockaloe, the repetition of that process in Wakefield took me many months. Possibly one had already lost some of one's elasticity, but in my case this new adaptation was in itself more difficult because I was entirely out of sympathy with my new surroundings. Knockaloe in its early days, which were the days I knew there, was restless, seething, and anarchical ; it was very rough but it was also very alive and stimulating ; it was dynamic. Wakefield had settled into a routine long before I knew it and that routine continued in endless monotony for ever after ; it was static. Wakefield in fact was dead. Dostoiïevski in his marvellous memories of his life as a prisoner in Siberia calls the prison 'a house of the dead,' and no better term could be found for Wakefield. That book describes its atmosphere most admirably, and even most of the characters depicted are images of Wakefield prisoners ; like causes led to like results.

Wakefield was an extremely orderly place, as orderly, monotonous and drab as a lower middle-class suburb, but it was a suburb without a city, and its inhabitants suburbanites out of work. Everything was organized, everything ordered. The huts had captains, the captains a chief­captain, and he an adjutant with so little sense of humour that he actually signed himself Adjutant L. and wished to be addressed by his ridiculous title. [69]There were committees for everything, and nearly everyone was a member of one or the other or had some sort of post in the P.O. or the kitchen department or God knows what, and they all took themselves and their activities most seriously. Nearly all took part or desired to take part in the government and administration of this place where there was nothing to govern, as the real governing powers were outside the camp, and there was little enough to administer. It was and became ever more an administration which served no purpose except that of giving its participants a feeling of their own importance, it was full of corruption and protectionism. If anyone benefited by it, it was the real administration of the camp, the British military in command. Whenever in later life people asked one what that existence had been like their first question was invariably : 'Were you treated well ? ' It would have been difficult to make them understand that the treatment by the military authorities (which their question referred to) was really a very minor matter once the fact of imprisonment had been accepted. There was so very little of it. Soldiers kept guard to prevent prisoners escaping,officers counted their heads twice daily, anonymous authorities issued orders which were mostly restrictive and irritating, and that was all. During my stay in Wakefield there were three or four different commandants, but I cannot say that I noticed any difference whatsoever in the treatment of the prisoners. Very likely things were different in other camps or in other countries ; I don't wish to make any general statement, and I believe that all general statements about no matter what aspect of the war are nonsensical. I am not prepared to say what British treatment of prisoners of war or of interned civilians was - fair, correct, brutal, inhuman, indifferent - I can only speak of my own experience and that was that the treatment of prisoners was standardized and carried out according to War or Home Office rules and regulations. [70]Either these left no room for personal initiative or else no advantage was taken of existing possibilities, but certainly there was no personal contact between prisoners and gaolers and therefore no like or dislike. The prisoners, of course, professed hatred of their oppressors, but it was really half-hearted and none too sincere, just part of that prescribed hatred of the enemy which had become universal. A prisoners' camp is in many ways similar to a school, and schoolboys do not hate the legislators of compulsory education, but their masters or fellows, and what they suffer most from are not the restrictions of their state but the treatment meted out to them by the other boys. When I look back on the years spent in camp, from 1915 to 1918, I cannot recall a single instance of cruelty or of kindness to me from officers or soldiers. Many of the orders enforced were, I consider, cruel, and many more were quite absurd, but that was the fault of the system, not of the men who might as well have been machines set going. The system was cruel as must be all systems which do not aim at justice ; it did not treat or profess to treat people according to their deserts, it was guided by entirely different considerations. The Germans in England, the foreigners of enemy nations in all countries, must not be allowed to join the belligerent forces of their countries of origin and they must not be allowed to endanger the safety of the countries they happened to have been in when war broke out. They were therefore rounded up and locked away in camps because that was the easiest way of dealing with the problem. As a sop to certain qualms of conscience (for thousands of these prisoners had friends who knew them as harmless or likeable people) each government gave out that they were only following the enemies' example. [71]That sufficed as an explanation of anything during the war, and that fact I consider the worst aspect of war mentality. That two wrongs do make a right became the accepted moral t caching of all nations, and reprisals a term which excused any crime. And if it happened that one party had no knowledge of what the other really had done, it acted on rumours. In no previous European war had enemy civilians been interned ; in 1914 every country interned them and every country gave out that the measure adopted was one of reprisal for similar treatment of their own subjects. The way prisoners were treated varied on that same principle of reprisals. When prisoners at Wakefield complained to the neutral representative who sometimes visited the camp of insufficient nourishment they were told that the 'number of calories ' had been reduced to correspond to that given to British prisoners in Germany, and the British there were no doubt told the same tale. If a French city was bombarded by German aeroplanes and women and children killed, then the French bombarded a German city (or more if possible), killing German women and children, and everyone (not quite everyone, to be just) applauded them. No considerations of humanity need deter the governments or fighting forces of the nations from any measure whatsoever, and they did not ; but it was always better to convince one's own people that the enemies had been the first to employ any particularly nauseous weapon and that your side was merely taking reprisals. During the war no one could ascertain the truth of such a statement and after the war no one would care.

That, in short, was the origin and the reason of the cruelty of the system of treatment; its absurdity was due to the red tape and utter lack of comprehension inherent in all administrative measures and intensified by the war spirit prevalent. [72]In this, however, the system of treatment of prisoners did not vary in principle from the system of treatment of the nation's own subjects. The first were bundled into camps, the latter into the armies ; both to be ruled by systems and regulations, both to be treated as numbers, both to suffer from reprisals for deeds and actions on which they had not been consulted. And as the war progressed, restrictions and coercion gradually enslaved all the civilian population as well, until all the world seemed to lie under the shadow of the words Es ist verboten, once supposed to be the true and exclusive expression of Prussianism.

That, then, was the law under which one lived, unchangeable for the time being as a law of nature, and therefore accepted after a short resistance as something inevitable. That law had its executants, and they again were accepted as inevitable. I maintain that after a time they ceased to trouble the prisoners (until some new change for the worse occurred) and that they really gave very little thought to them. Unconsciously they classed them with other necessary evils : cold, disease, death, bereavement, which one deplores but takes for granted. They represented the peculiar form in which war affected prisoners, and war itself was a fact, a sort of unending earthquake from which there was no escape.

This long digression is intended to clear up a misconception of the essential character of life in internment camps shared by everyone I have ever met who had had no personal experience of it. They believe that the interned had 'a good time' (comparatively) when they were 'treated well ' and 'a bad time' when they were 'treated badly.' But if bad treatment might have aggravated and good treatment eased the prisoner's lot, neither one nor the other could change its essentials or even modify them to any considerable extent. The evil was inherent in the system and in the way that system affected and changed the prisoners.[73]When people asked me whether I had been badly treated I truthfully said 'No,' but when they continued and said :'Then you didn't have too bad a time' - which seemed the only logical conclusion - the answer should have been 'I had an awful time,' or perhaps, in my own case, 'I had what you would consider an awful time.' But that would have led to lengthy explanations and one was as disinclined to talk much of one's experiences as were the soldiers back from the front. Things are different now, twelve years have passed, and one has gained sufficient distance for dispassionate judgement. That, I think, explains the great number of war books written lately and the great success of many of them : the writers feel that they can now write the truth (as it appears to them, for there is no absolute truth and no general truth in such matters) and the public is eager to learn the truth, having realized that what they were told about the war while it was in progress or shortly after it was over bore but a faint resemblance to any sort of truth. The whole problem of prisoners of war and their treatment was a secondary consideration in all countries while all energies were directed towards winning the war, and the fate and treatment of interned civilians again was but a small and none too important part of that problem, yet a good deal of space was given to it in the papers and in parliamentary discussions. There were two main sides to it ; the British public wished to know how their men were being treated in enemy countries, to be reassured about their fate, and to urge the Government to do all in its power to improve their lot. That was the one side ; the other was the question of how enemy prisoners were being treated in Britain, and that could not be separated from the first. I do not know how near the truth were the statements about conditions and treatment of British prisoners abroad, but I do know that the picture of conditions and treatment of prisoners in British internment camps given to the public was extremely fanciful. [74]That whole question had become part of the vast system of propaganda attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Lord Northcliffe. The main idea never varied : British prisoners abroad were being treated abominably, German prisoners in England were being treated with foolish generosity. The latter was, to be just, frequently denied in parliament by members of the government, but this made no difference whatsoever to the continuation of the press campaign against that supposed scandal. There were very few days when the more sensational papers (we got all the English papers, but no foreign ones) did not contain a paragraph under the (invariable) heading : 'Our pampered Huns 'and the statements they contained were not mere travesties of truth but simply fantasies. I have read descriptions of dinners (including full menu) which never took place, of prisoners disporting themselves on a golf-course which never existed, of strange happenings between prisoners and women friends who visited them, when in reality officers and soldiers on guard were present on all such occasions, and there were countless other inventions which I have forgotten. Wakefield was their favourite aim of attack, being a 'privileged ' camp, together with Donnington Hall which was an officers' camp. There is no need to speak of the impression these accounts made on the minds of the prisoners, but the impression produced on the British public was, of course, such as was desired : they were perhaps wildly angry with the Government, but at the same time not displeased with such a show of characteristically British magnanimity, and any possible sympathy they might have felt with the prisoners was killed outright. [75]How far that propaganda impressed the neutrals, which was always one of its main aims, I do not know, but my own opinion is that at least the European neutral powers ceased to be impressed by any propaganda of either side after a very few months and got bored with the absolutely contradictory statements screamed at them day after day. But as far as the British public went that question was settled. One must remember what a small minority reads the better-class of papers which did not join in that particular chorus and how vast a majority the others. The millions knew the truth as they thought : German prisoners in England, interned civilians in particular, were not only treated well, but with quixotic generosity, whereas the treatment . of British prisoners in Germany was cruel and barbarous. And all the time the real truth which: was never told them was that the treatment in both countries was as nearly identical as circumstances allowed, that both sides were continually receiving reports about the camps from neutral observers and hastened to adjust the conditions they controlled to those reported frown the other side. Exceptions to this rule there may have been, there were probably remote camps seldom or possibly never visited by neutrals, and - as we had cause to know - these neutral inspections remained very much on the surface, but such details cannot change the dominating facts. What happened to the prisoners on one side happened to those on the other, and their lot was subject to a system of mutual reprisals from which the authorities dreamt as little of abstaining as - to choose a well-known example - the flying forces refrained from 'punitive expeditions.' But the British public read with horror and loathing that 'the Germans have bombarded the unfortified town of -- ' and later with satisfaction 'we have bombarded places of strategical importance behind the enemies lines' ; while the German public was given the same news in the inversed terms: Thus, as Georg Brandes had foreseen from the very beginning, [76]Truth was murdered by War and thus every day that hatred was fanned anew without which the war could not have continued.

Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received The Editor HTML© F Coakley , 2021