[From Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim]

VIII BARBED WIRE SICKNESS

I HAD been interned in June, but it was only two months later, at Wakefield, that I realized what had happened. Proust in A la Recherche du temps perdu gives a very lucid explanation of the difference between knowing a luct and realizing it ; the intellect knows that some event has happened, but it may be very long after that that event is emotionally apprehended, realized. For a long time I had simply considered I was living under abnormal circumstances, was passing through an interruption of any normal existence which I would soon take up again, but now it dawned on me that the abnormal had become the permanent; the normal. One must remember that there was absolutely no limit to be foreseen to the duration of the war and of my imprisonment, nor could one know to what one would then return, if one lived to return to anything. It was gradually becoming clear that the old order of things had passed away, and that what had been, what one had left, would never be found again. The past was dead, the future, if there should be a future, was a blank, there was nothing left but the present, and my present was the life of a prisoner. I realized my situation and I realized as if it had been quite new to me that it was horrible and that I detested it. But it is very difficult to explain why it was horrible, if it is comparatively easy to explain - as I have already begun to do in the preceding chapter - where its horror did not lie. [78]It did not lie in the fact of being caged in behind barbed wire. Speaking for myself, I find that one got used to that fact pretty soon and that it ceased to worry one. It became a matter of habit, one took it for granted. The world ceased at the barbed wire, and what lay outside it might as well have belonged to a different planet. A monk gets used to limiting his world to the precincts of his monastery, an invalid to those of his sickroom, a prisoner to those of his prison. It is not an easy resignation, but it dies not present an insurmount­able difficulty. Nor was the horror due to the treatment of the prisoners by their warders. Naturally this was what the prisoners' thoughts dwelt on most, or at least what they complained about most bitterly and most frequently, just as schoolboys will attribute all their ills to the masters.And these men of mature age were indeed being treated, restricted, and punished for offences like schoolboys. There were doubtless many quite unnecessary hardships; but there again - one got used to them. To me, at any rate, their absurdity was much more vivid than their cruelty. It was all so grotesque You could not pass through the barbed wire from one camp to another without the accompaniment or bayonets - that portly suburban watchmaker had suddenly become so alarmingly dangerous that his every step had to be guarded by heavily armed soldiers day and night. The censorship was grotesque : the prisoners there had nothing of any interest to write to anybody, and what could it matter what anyone wrote to them, but one must not allude to the war nor criticize conditions in the camp. Anything except 'I hope this finds you as it leaves me ' was fraught with danger, it appeared. The 'parades' were grotesque, at which twice daily the men were assembled before their huts to be counted. There was one quite amiable old captain who could never count right. He pointed his finger at each head in turn and hopefully announced a wrong number.[79]The 'captain' corrected him most respectfully : ` Twenty-one, sir' (for heaven's sake don't forget the 'sir') and the poor man :started again. First there had been too few, now there were too many, and in the end he accepted the proposed number and passed on to a similar performance at the next hut. There were fifteen such huts in our camp whose inmates had thus to be counted twice daily while the war lasted. It was grotesque to have to sit in the dark after to p.m. ; it was altogether grotesque to treat grown-up men as children and civilians as captured soldiers. But all that was just part of a military system which was - as a rule - executed by its servants without particular malice and ill-will. It was not any more amusing or less ridiculous for that man to have to count us than for us to be counted, for the guards to have to stand and to shout 'Number ten (or whatever it was) and alls well ' every half-hour during the night than for us to be woken by their hoarse and warlike cries. I think the censor must have thought his job pretty absurd, and I don't imagine that the man with the bayonet who prevented me from endangering the safety of the realm during my passage between barbed wires of different labels felt particularly heroic. I did not see that their lot was very much happier than ours and I could not bear them any grudge. The whole thing was an abomination, a neo-barbarism. Originally there had been some sense in it : the Government had interned those whom they knew to be, or believed to be, dangerous, and they had to be guarded. But later on, as a result of press-campaigns, of nervousness, of some people's vindictiveness or else by way of reprisal (this excuse was, of course, adopted by both sides) they had laid their hands on many thousands whom they knew to be perfectly harmless people of a type which in all previous European wars had been left alone.'To be interned or segregated for their own safety ' they had declared. Then why not have sent them to sonne remote part of the country to live in ? That was done in France where the treatment was much more varied : better in some cases, very much worse in others. Why separate them from their wives and children ? Why, in short, deliver them to the military authorities and treat them as prisoners of war ? There was no justification for all this, but there was a reason : it was much the simplest thing to do. There were so many more important matters to think about for government and governed ; compulsory service had come, everyone had to put up with compulsion in some form or other, it was war. The civilian prisoners were an uncomfortable sideshow and, at a time when numbers were everything, not important enough to bother about. That is, I imagine, what the governments of all the various fatherlands really felt about the matter. What did twenty or thirty thousand men matter when one counted in millions ! So one put them in barbed wire cages and forgot about them.

But it was a crime against twenty or thirty thousand human beings, a crime against human personality and that was what one felt. No one person in particular was responsible for it-who, indeed, was ever responsible for anything in the war if one went deep enough into the matter ? Should one 'hate' the commandant who obeyed orders, or the War Office (that very ugly building) or that abstract, the British nation ? Apparently some people could hate abstractions. ` The only good German is a dead German ' was a phrase some paper 'hanging the Kaiser ' in 1918) remarked that in 1914. all the different countries and governments 'had slithered into war,' and in just the same way they had slithered into their internment policy as I very clearly realized from the very beginning. [81]Thus it was not the fact of being imprisoned which was horrible, for as I have explained imprisonment per se is no more than restriction of movement and that one gets used to in time. What was horrible was that one had ceased to be an individual and had become a number. One ceased to be oneself, an individual free to act and responsible for his actions and for his actions alone. What I mean when I say 'I suddenly realized what had happened,' is that I realized that I was no longer I, an entity, but a small particle of a whole, of an undesired community, called The Camp. Some man I do not even know by sight transgresses some regulation or other and the camp is punished for it, I am punished for it - for I am no longer I. He is found outside his but after 10 p.m. without valid excuse and I am forbidden to write letters for a week or to receive parcels. I may be as perfect a sample of what the ideal interned civilian should be, but that won't help xrae at all, I am at the mercy of what any other of the fifteen hundred ex-individuals here may see fit to do or ro omit, besides depending on ever possible freaks of temper of those in authority. That loss of personal responsibility is the first horrible feature of internment life and it is extremely demoralizing in the long run, for it kills one's sense of responsibility in the end. If I am responsible for everybody else's deeds, well then, everybody else is responsible for mine, and not I in particular; and what I do can be no more my fault than what anybody else does if I am equally punished for one or the other. I don't commit a crime : the camp does. All education from the tenderest age on tries to implant that sense of personal responsibility in the mind of human beings (even in that of doffs and cats, internment life undoes what education has built up in years of struggle, or rather in many centuries of effort.

[82]It will be said that this is not peculiar to internment life and that it is one of the most striking and general effects of war. I am absolutely of that opinion, and it bears out what I said about the powers responsible for internment : the effect of war is to create an abnormal state in which no one can be honestly considered responsible for his actions. Is a private responsible - no, he obeys somebody's orders who obeys somebody else's orders until you come to a figurehead who does not know the orders given because they are details far beneath his personal consideration - and so no one is responsible, but anyone may be punished if things go wrong. No, this consequence of the war-spirit is not peculiar to internment camps, what is peculiar to them is, however, the fact that the prisoners there are incessantly and without a minute's respite in that position of helpless interdependency ; there is no leave, there is no 'behind the line,' there is no dismissal. They share this particular horror of war in an aggravated form.

But there are plenty of other horrors peculiar to their state alone, just as there are plenty of others peculiar to those who suffered from the war in a different way from theirs. Most of the interned would, had they been free, have seen active service ; through being interned they were spared all danger, all the terrors that fell to the lot of the soldiers. To my mind the lot of the soldier was infinitely the worse of the two, for I do not pretend to be a hero and I have a very deep-rooted prejudice against bloodshed, but many of my fellow-prisoners thought differently. There were in all countries very many prisoners who tried to escape in order to fight, just as there certainly were many soldiers who preferred being taken prisoners. [83]There is no sense in comparing the disadvantages of one state with those of the other, more particularly if you only know one of the two by personal experience, and my object is to speak only of those I have known, and which have, I think, remained unfamiliar to the general public.

Soldiers led a dangerous and terrible life, prisoners led a helpless and senseless one. Soldiers fought, they were active, they had an aim. They were protecting their country, they were trying to achieve an object, they felt (the great majority felt this, I think) that they were doing something indispensable and very praiseworthy, and all was done to strengthen that conviction in them. The interned civilians were doing nothing, were completely useless. They were quite passive, they suffered in their way, but their suffering was of no use to anybody, nor were they glorified for it. They were quite helpless and quite superfluous, their existence was utterly aimless, their lives perfectly futile. That sense of complete futility is the second great horror of internment life. One day these men had been torn from their homes, from their occupations and interests and put in a cage for no purpose but to wait months, a year, many years, till the end of their lives-who knew-until war should be over. There to do what they pleased, provided it was of no earthly use to anybody. The British, of course, could not allow anything that might help the Germans, the Germans interdicted all work of any kind as it might be helpful to the British. They were there with no object whatsoever in view, they just had to wait and wait and wait.

And, strange as it may appear, impossible as it appeared in the first few months, one gets used even to that. One gets used to it because time is a mirage. Time passes slowly when days are full of activities, that is to say after a few very varied days a long time seems to have passed. If you are travelling aboard seeing many cities, sights, people, in a few weeks it will seem to you as if you had travelled for months ; if, on the other hand, you spend the same number of days in great monotony, let us say lying on the sands and gazing at the sea, time will seem to have passed very quickly. And if you get the incredible sameness and monotony of a prisoner's life, what happens is not so much that time seems short (a day may seem endless) but that you lose all count, all sensation of time. Time stands still. Days, weeks, months, years, all these artificial divisions follow each other in endless monotony, time has ceased to have any signification ; where there is no aim, no object,, no sense, there is no time. One gives in, one surrenders, one's will is broken. All is prescribed, regulated, inevitable. All is senseless and hopeless, but one no longer realizes it. Only contrast and change create sensation, monotony kills it. Such monotony is a state very near death and very near that of Nirvana ; it is the most unnatural state one can be in while still alive - but it is, to some natures at least, paradoxical as it may sound, a state as near complete happiness as one can obtain. But such happiness is for monks and nuns, and if you have ever been near it you will distinguish its reflection in their calm faces.

For that happiness is not for you in a prisoners' camp. You recognize its possibility, but you cannot approach it - for you are not alone. And that is the horror of horrors of that life, the one which not only does not lessen with time, but goes on increasing, and the one no one can imagine who has not been through it : you are never alone. Not by day, not by night, not for an hour, not for a second, day after day, year after year. During the war the term maladie du fil de fer barbele, barbed­wire sickness, became a recognized medical designation under which were grouped all sorts of mental symptoms observed in prisoners of war ; but it is not the barbed wire which is their cause, it is the monstrous, enforced, incessant community which inevitably breeds the malady. [85]There is nothing like it to be found anywhere else. Monks retire to their cells, soldiers have their days or weeks off ; here it continues for ever, and the longer it continues the more you suffer from it. No privacy, no possibility of being alone, no possibility of finding quietude. ' It is inhuman, cruel and dreadful to force people to live in closest community for years ; it becomes almost unbearable when that community is abnormally composed like that of a prisoners' camp. There are no women, no children, there is no old age and next to no youth there, there is just a casual rabble of men forced to be inseparable. Try to imagine-though it is impossible really to understand without having experienced it­what it means, never to be alone and never to know quiet, not for a minute, and to continue thus for years, and you will begin to wonder that there was no general outbreak of insanity, that there yet remained a difference between lunacy and barbed-wire nerves. The space allotted to a prisoner in a but was exactly six feet by four (a coffin is six feet by two) ; besides that there was a space set aside for meals, etc., at the end of the hut, which just held the tables and necessary number of chairs. In your own ` space ' you were as far removed from the next man as you can be in the hut, and that is a few feet. Nearly all people enclosed their space as time went on, converting it into a cubicle for one or possibly for more, but even then you naturally heard every sound through the thin rnatchboards which formed the partitions. You heard, in fact, every single noise in the hut, heard people talking, laughing, quarrelling, reading the paper aloud, practising the violin or some other instrument (often several at it at the same time), and they in their turn heard every word you spoke, every movement you made. [86]And if you could have got used to the noise there was the vibration, which I (round quite impossible ever to get accustomed to, for the floor consisted of thin, badly joined boards laid on rafters, and whenever anyone walked in the but or moved a chair it set up vibration right through the hut. At night you heard the breathing, snoring or whis­pering of thirty men (there is an incredible variety of such noises) ; same talked in their sleep, and every half (or was it quarter ?) hour you heard the guards cry out to each other and your ears followed the sound right round the camp. No one could stand staying in the but for long ; one soon developed a habit of rushing out every ten minutes or so. That habit became so much of a second nature that I found it very difficult to get rid of again in later years. One rushed round, one walked or ran round the camp a hundred times a day, one walked across it or between the huts by way of change, and wherever you went there wire people just in front of you, just behind you, just beside you or just coming towards you, and they were always the same people. You could not talk to a friend without being overheard, you could not make a movement that was not watched. The control exercised by the prisoners over each other was infinitely more irritating and galling than the superficial outside control. No one escaped the effects of such an existence. Its most inevitable results were of two kinds. There were the men who sank into an unlimited mutual intimacy based on mutual contempt. They lost all reserve, all sense of decency, they let themselves go altogether and gave up all that makes life in common tolerable to civilized men. They became what one calls beastly, though I don't know what beasts really behave in such a manner. I will say that there were not very many of these at Wakefield, from all accounts they must have harmed the majority in the Knockaloe of the last years of war. The second effect produced by the conditions was far more general, in fact, I knew no one who escaped it altogether, and it can be described by the one word hatred. There was hatred of everyone against his neighbours, there was hatred of almost all against almost all. It is that atmosphere of irrational general hatred which is so astonishingly rendered in Dostoievski's memories of the House of the Dead. People in all countries talked a great deal about their hatred of the enemy, but it was mostly talk, you cannot hate an abstraction ; people with whom you do not come into contact are abstractions. In the same v~-ay the mechanic­:vlly repeated professions of hatred against the British hl}icers or guards or against the Government or the whole cation (as well as all the other allied nations, of coursel, was little more than a convention. Of course, the men I-clt bitter, but they did not hate ; it was merely the same incredible pressure of what was supposed to be public opinion which forced people in England to express their hatred of anybody or anything German, and Germans their hatred of anybody or anything British which also affected the prisoners. Such hate I consider entirely unreal, for though it was purely accidental on which side :a country fought in the end, it became automatica}ly 'hated' by one side and 'loved ' by the other when it had taken its stand, and it is a well-known fact that the soldiers of all nations who were almost the only people to come into contact with the enemy did very little hating indeed as compared to the violent pseudo-emotions of the people at home. The real reason of this universally professed hatred was, of course, that it made people feel that they were 'doing their bit' to help their country. One case I heard of while at Wakefield is a very good instance of how that hatred was constituted. A man here wished to leave the camp and work on a farm (in spite of the German Government's prohibition of such activities). [88]He was married to an English girl, the daughter of a country squire, and she asked all the farmers on the estate whether they would take him. Each one said he would be only too pleased, workers being terribly scarce, of course, but he was forced to refuse. He himself did not mind having a German, particularly that German he knew very well, but he could not have him on account of the terrible hatred of all other farmers against the Germans. That is what each one said and what each one believed all the others' state of mind to be.

But if that sort of hatred was abstract, the hatred engendered inside the camp between its inmates was terribly concrete, was, indeed, inevitable. Every man almost is full of little foibles and more or less unpleasant mannerisms which his fellow creatures smile at or mildly object to in normal, everyday life. When human beings live together, as in married or family life, these easily lead to friction. It may be that such details play a far greater part in making married life unhappy than matters considered far more serious. In Flaubert's Madame Bovary Emma finally decides to murder her husband because she can no longer bear his nasty habit of drawing his last gulp of wine at dinner through his teeth by way of cleansing them. After my experiences in camp I consider this a stroke of genius, for of such a nature are the real causes of deadly hatred where humans are forced to live together and can see no end to that enforced mode of existence,. Hundreds of such murders would have happened in camp had not fear of punishment prevented them. That may sound absurd, but human nature is absurd and it is quite irrational, and the worst tortures of camp life were due to small failings of one's fellow­creatures everlastingly in evidence, and to unimportant little tricks endlessly repeated. [89]It is not the men of bad character or morals you begin to hate, but the men who draw their soup through their teeth, clean their ears with their fingers at dinner, hiccough unavoidably when they get up from their meal (a moment awaited with trerribling fury by the others), the men with ever dirty hands, the man who will invariably make the same remark (every day, year after year) as he sits down-and who is quite an inoffensive good-natured sort of creature otherwise, the man who lisps, the man who brags, the man who has no matter what small defect or habit you happen to object to. You go on objecting quietly, for one does not quarrel about such silly trifles, and the thing gets on your nerves, becomes unbearable by the simple process of endless repetition, until you hate the cause of your torture with a deadly hatred. Thus is created an atmosphere of mutual dislike, suspiciousness, meanness, hatred, which becomes almost tangible. Desperate quarrels break out for the most improbable motives, but these motives are only apparent and the real causes lie deeper and are subconscious. Men became deadly enemies over a piece of bread claimed by both ; every suspicion of an unfair advantage due to protection of some sort, or of bribery, resulted in whole campaigns of slander, and bred new hatred between many. Such an atmosphere is thoroughly poisoned, all normal sense of proportion is lost, utterly unimportant matters assume gigantic size, and what is of real importance almost ceases to matter at all. That is what prison life of the nature here described leads people to and what it makes of them. It is not its privations, not its restrictions, not possible bad treatment by people in authority which are its worst features or its greatest dangers. Its true terror is that it has an indescribably degrading influence on tre soul of man,

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