[From Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim]

XI SOME MEN AND THEIR STORIES

[110]WHEN I think back and try to recall my fellow-prisoners of three years at Wakefield I see a grey, anonymous mass from which gradually emerge the figures of those with whom I came into closer personal contact and others distinguished by some degree of originality. Of these last there were far fewer than there had been in Knock­aloe. At Wakefield the men were mainly of one class ; class-distinctions there were minute enough to be unreal, they were artificially created ; Wakefield was almost entirely bourgeois, and whatever the good qualities of the bourgeois may be, originality or picturesqueness is emphatically not amongst them. Most interesting characters of Knockaloe had belonged to 'the people ' and that was only present in very reduced numbers at Wake­field. I cannot say that any member of it I knew was in any way out of the ordinary, and I doubt if I would recognize the face of any one of the stewards, barbers, etc., which it consisted o£ Maybe that is due to the fact that at Wakefield they had again become a distinct class : wage-earners in the service of employers, and that therefore one got to know them no better than one would have done in everyday life. They were as a rule thor­oughly convinced of their (very real) indispensability and anything but pleasant. There probably were some amongst the colonials who would have been worth knowing, but they belonged to the distant and disdainful South and I never rnet them. [111]Our own camp had but.a few pseudo-exotics, men who bore Spanish or Dutch names because they had tried to reach Germany with false passports. They had been discovered and imprisoned, but they naturally stuck to their fiction. I felt a good deal of sympathy for all those who had been arrested on ships after a long voyage, amongst other reasons probably because I am a very bad sailor. The worst case I heard of was that of two Austrian officers who arrived one day - God knows why - in our civilian midst. They had escaped, after years of imprisonment and under the greatest hardships, from Siberia and reached a Chinese port. There they had procured themselves false passports and taken service as stewards on a neutral steamer. They voyaged round half the world, passed ever so many ports under British control, and were finally fetched off their boat at the first English port by smiling and courteous military officials and imprisoned once more ! That was the British system, and I heard of many such cases ; the British authorities at all ports were perfectly aware of the identity of such people, but they let them pass unhindered until they reached England or the nearest controlled port on their route. Meanwhile these men had gone through all the agonies of fear of detection repeatedly and were all the more furious to discover at the end that they had been tricked all the time. A real cat and mouse game it was. Such had been the fate of, for instance, Mr. Muller of Java, who was not as Dutch as his papers. He had journeyed thence via the controls of Singapore, Colombo, Aden, until Port Said, where the British thought he'd better come off. Fortunately for him, he was of a cheerful disposition, stout, rubicund, fair-bearded, and content to drown his sorrows ; but I remember another Mephistophelian man who never ceased to tremble with rage, and with malaria, poor thing.[112] Besides these, far-travelled but teutonic, there were a few of genuine foreign extraction : Turkish subjects. Besides Sabri the boxer, already mentioned, there were two Turkish Jews, uncle and nephew. Both were very handsome, of the real flashy Levantine breed so frequent in Paris. They were released after some months in a very remarkable manner. Like all the Jews of Salonika, they had come there from Spain at the time of the Inquisition and all these people's language is to this day Spanish, a Spanish of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Heaven knows how it was all managed, but they were set free at the instigation of the Spanish ambassador - surely the first case in which the Spanish Government has claimed such infidels as subjects ! I felt rather sore about this, for being of the same extraction I should have received the same treatment, but no Spanish grandee came to my rescue.

Amongst the Hungarians there were two very good professional violinists and one very strange young man, tall, dark, and very quiet, who also played a good deal. He shut himself off from people more and more as time passed by and would hardly answer when spoken to. And then a day came when he was removed to the hospital in a great hurry, religious mania suddenly burst through his enforced calm ; he was, he declared, Jesus Christ and would therefore tear off all his clothes. He was taken away from the hospital a few hours later, and that was the last I ever heard or saw of him. There were some pleasant figures amongst the actors. A Viennese youth in our camp was the leading lady of society comedies or dramas ; he is one of the few I have met again later in life, when I found him holding a high position in a bank in Vienna and married to an extremely pretty woman who looked not at all unlike him in some of his great stage-parts, which he then did not seem to care to be reminded of. Some of the best actors were former army officers. [113]There was one captain, born to be an aide-de-camp or gentleman-at-arms, so distinguished and full of tact was he. And all parts of similar character he played to perfection. When I last heard of him he was a maitre de plaisir at an aristocratic German spa, a most suitable post for him, and very popular in that capacity. Another. man who had been a lieutenant and bore a well-known military name, appeared almost like one of the caricatures of the stiff, brainless, monocled, and haw-hawing Prussian lieutenants to be found in the German comic papers of pre-war times, but he turned out to be a quite astonishingly gifted actor, equally at ease in comic and in serious parts. Of all the amateurs there he was the only one who ought to have become a professional actor and who would have made a success of it ; I heard, however, that he got himself mixed up with one of the new semi-military organizations, though one was not quite certain of this.

There was a good deal of variety among the small but select crowd of 'Northern nobles' and I don't think any one of them was quite dull, probably because they had seen a good deal of the world and were, in many cases, of cosmopolitan parentage. Some few were very wealthy, the others had had to earn their livings and amongst these a number had chosen curious professions. One Prussian grandee had been jiu-jitsu instructor to the London Police for instance, and was a most remarkable looking man with a fantastically shaped nose very like that adopted by actors in the part of Cyrano de Bergerac; he was quite unassuming and had charming manners. That might indeed have been said about most of them, though there were a few notable exceptions, but they passed for conceited and standoffish all the same. The majority of the others could not look on them or treat them as similar and ordinary human beings ; they stood in awe

of them or loathed them, admired or despised them for what they were supposed to be, without regard to what they really were. And really they differed a good deal amongst themselves. One was very much an adventurer of the type one might meet at the Monte Carlo of pre­war times, and as he was none too sure of himself, he was aggressive and disdainful ; but he was rather an amusing character really, with a slight whiff of the race-course and the gambling den about him. Another, elder man, who had, I believe, been in the, diplomatic service, had spent many years in China. He had become a connoisseur of Chinese art and a fervent admirer of the culture and refinement of the Mandarins ; he was a bon-vivant and a gourmet and had learned a good deal of Eastern cunning. Of course, he loathed the camp and what he considered the barbaric denseness of its inhabitants, but his sentiments were hidden behind a mask of cordial joviality and he was far more popular than any of his peers. In the first after­war years he established himself as a marchand-amateur (a tactful and untranslatable French term) of Chinese works of art, and did very well, I believe. By this time he may have returned to his ' spiritual home.' There were others who did not possess his diplomatic gifts ; one in particular, very well born and related to all sorts of royalty, was a very difficult customer. People in the camp he just ignored, with a very few exceptions, but he was always having terrific rows with the military authorities ; he seemed to be in a continuous state of over­wrought excitement, and was certainly one of those who suffered most from his condition and environment. He was and is still, I suppose, a big landowner and very rich. One of his very few friends was much of the same type, only his was the frigid variety. He had been a governor or some such thing in an African colony, was married to an Englishwoman and would have been quite in his proper atmosphere in the most conservative of clubs around St. James's. [115]Always perfectly dressed, he held himself very straight and seemed frozen and unbending. Whether he was what he seemed I cannot say, for he was one of the few I never got to know. To their group might be added one rather pathetic elderly man who lived in the West Camp. I suppose he cannot have been above fifty, as he was interned, but he seemed more like seventy with his grey beard and trembling hands. He had lived many years in England and married an English­woman, and he was of the type which would be respected and highly considered at Bournemouth or Cheltenham. He was fidgety and finikin, and camp life was to him a continuous series of shocks. The West Camp shocked him beyond endurance and he left it after what he considered a dreadful scandal. There was a man in his but in every way his opposite and who could not bear him. He was a doctor of philosophy, and his chief interest was literature. He was a wild, shaggy and bushy-looking creature, something between Francois Villon and a youngish Bernard Shaw. Needless to say, he was considered a wild eccentric and was extremely unpopular. What happened was that he appeared one night before the unfortunate aged grand-seigneur entirely naked, shook him roughly by the shoulder and shouted at him ' Kneel and adore the beauty of the body masculine ! ' It must have been quite a hideous sight, at any rate it was too much for his victim, who quite failed to see the humorous side of the incident. He complained bitterly, there was quite a row, and he left the West for the North, and, as he explained with tremulous dignity, the company of his peers. I hope they managed to avoid wounding his susceptibilities, but I am afraid they thought him a frightful old bore.

[116]Several of my personal friends were members of the band of the chosen few, but they had all broken away from it to lead an independent existence in non-courtly and unsung huts or even inferior camps. I would like to say that this is a species of humanity I have always found very attractive and consider very valuable to a country and to society. Aristocrats have certain ad­vantages which it is absurd to deny ; they have lived in material ease for generations, received good education, occupied a privileged position and had better oppor­tunities all the way round for centuries-in ?act, they have breeding, which is no less important in human animals than in others and achieves similar results. A certain number of pure-blooded ancestors are a great advantage ; too many mostly result in decadence. There is such a thing as a hereditarily acquired faculty of leadership beside that belonging to exceptional personalities. On the other Band, as is well-known, mongrels are usually more intelligent than pedigree animals, every medal hav­ing its reverse. If the aristocracy (in the true sense of the word) should have the advantage in physique and in character, great intelligence is not one of its usual attributes. But if an aristocrat possesses intelligence as well as his usual qualities he becomes a very valuable specimen of humanity, and one of the signs of this is that he becomes bored with the class he belongs to and branches out in some other direction. He seeks to add to himself what he has not got, which is the sign of all superior men, whereas the average continue in the con­dition they were born in, and fear, dislike, or despise what is outside their native environment. The men of sur­passing value are those who rise to lead, but also those who descend (in the social sense) to lead, because only that ' descension,' not condescension, can give them the contact with the majority or the masses every true leader in any field of activity needs. [117]They are the type of people who make the ' revolution from above,' the Mirabeaus and Tolstois of this world.

My friends there were not Mirabeaus and Tolstois, but they were very much less narrow-minded than most others, and much more inclined to take an interest in more general matters and things outside the everyday life of the camp and the chances of the war. If they were alike as far as birth went, they were very different in education and outlook on life. Count E.'s father had been a general and he himself an officer in a guard regiment attached to one of the larger courts of Southern Germany. His family was a very ancient Rhenish one, but his branch was not very wealthy, so that an army career seemed the very thing for him. But he took a violent dislike to all that is military and found life at court exceedingly boring, so he had left the army a year or so before the war and gone to the U.S.A. He had hated New York, except its east side, and moved on to Florida where he was growing oranges when war broke out He returned to Germany and got as far as Gibraltar whence he came to Wakefield. He was a cheerful young man, but as he hated stuck-up people on one side and vulgarians on the other he made but few friends. He was very fond of music, and his mother who knew this advised him to hire a piano if his 'cubicle' would hold one. His answer to this got him into trouble with the authorities, for he wrote : ' No, my cubicle will not hold a piano, but a piano would more than hold my cubicle.' Camp life got on his nerves badly, he lost his cheerfulness and became rapt up in mysticism, and after a time a convinced Rosicrucian. He made himself a picture of the cross wreathed with roses on a golden background and hung it over his bed. His very worldly original nature and this contemplative mysticism formed the oddest contrast, but he seemed much more satisfied than before. I don't think he ever quite recovered his equilibrium. [118]After the war he found himself very poor, tried all sorts of trades, married to get divorced again after a very short time, and never seemed to know where he belonged. The Baron H. was one of his very few friends and he introduced me to him. H. had been educated in a cadet-school and been a naval officer. I forget whether he had already left that service before the war or whether he had only meant to, but he had married a girl he blindly adored and who was disapproved of by the Service as she was considered of too low an extraction. There were, of course, all sorts of rules and regulations as to whom officers might or might not marry. He was a tall, emaciated, very fair man, very delicate, and in a very bad state of health. He had one fixed idea which was to return to his wife, and this influenced his health. If he were ill enough, he would be sent back, and no one could tell how far he really was ill, how far he wished to appear so, or how far his desire for sickness had become actually effective. At any rate, he walked with difficulty and the aid of a stick, looked like a ghost, and his nerves were overstrung to breaking-point. Apart from that he had exquisite manners, was very shy and retiring, of almost feminine sensitiveness, very fond of poetry, very well read, and rather sentimental. He never achieved his wish and he got more and more strange. He became convinced of his power, furthered by fasting and prayer (for he was also very religious) to enter into spiritual communication with his wife. These efforts quite exhausted him, but he was almost happy after he had found that apparent solution to his great trouble. The end of the war should have brought perfect happiness and peace to him at least, but things turned out very differently indeed. When he got back, he found that while he had held spirit-intercourse with his wife she had held very physical intercourse indeed with other men. [119] He left her, and next I heard that he had eloped with the wife of a friend of his. He did not marry her, however ; they quarrelled, and he accused her of having tried to induce him to poison his uncle, from whom he was to inherit a great fortune. Next I heard-for I never saw him again-that he had married a Japanese, then that his uncle had died-some people said under curious circum­stances, and last-that he had poisoned his wife and children, set his castle on fire and shot himself They managed to save the wife's life, but he and the children died. His was one of the very many camp tragedies I have known which reached their climax years after the war. None of the men I knew personally went mad or killed themselves while imprisoned, but a number of them did in the years following their release : they h ad survived the adaptation to camp life but they had not enough strength left for the second and quite as difficult adaptation to normal existence. None of these catastrophes was due to material difficulties.

If I should have prophesied calm happiness in store for the Baron H.,I should have predicted a most venturesome future to the Freiherr von K. But there again I may have been wrong, only I have not the slightest notion of what has become of that entertaining youth. He was quite a boy, nineteen, I believe, and had an elder brother in another camp whom he hardly ever saw. They had nothing to say to each other, the elder being a quiet, ordinary person, and the younger very much of a Bohem-ian. Their father had been an officer and belonged to a famous family, some of whom had come over to England with George I. Perhaps that had attracted him to England ; anyway, he had come to live there and married the daughter of his landlady or, at any rate, someone of that description.[120] They seem to have had very little money, lived in Brixton or thereabouts, and apparently let their children grow up quite wild. They either went to some local board-school or else to no school at all, and I don't believe the parents had ever troubled about them in after-life. The elder went into some sort of office and settled down, but the younger remained wild. He was a very curious sort of boy, as might, indeed, have been expected. He had decided to become a painter, but as he never had the money for a regular training he had worked as an aid to a stage scene­painter and lived on God knows what expedients. He was a picturesque figure, tall and lanky with long hair untidily overhanging his brow and clothes either too large or too small for him, generally covered with stains of many colours. He was quite uneducated naturally, had lived his life in various slums, spoke English with a Cockney accent and no German at all until he learnt a little in camp. I don't know how he ever got there, for he certainly was not a gentleman according to the ten­shilling standard ; it is doubtful whether many people would have considered him one according to the more usual standards. His 'peers,' at any rate, avoided him, but he avoided them at least as anxiously, and tie language he used with regard to them was very spicy. He lived in the South Camp, the only one where he could have existed at all, and if he had any friends they were stewards or colonials, but I don't think he was friends with anybody much. He didn't care a hang what others thought about him and called them all 'a lot of stinking skunks.' His language was very dirty and so was he, but that did not prevent him from having what the French call tres grand air with his small, well-shaped head, defiant eyes, rather regal nose, and long, thin, perfectly shaped, and extremely unwashed hands. [121]He worked quite hard-which very few people did-for he did all the stage-scenery for his camp and painted a good many pictures besides. These were bought by the colonials and painted to their order : negro girls in a state of great undress in flamboyantly tropical scenery. They and other fantasies he did for his own pleasure would certainly have been unanimously refused by all the academies of the world, but just as he had unmistakable traces of the grand seigneur under a slum covering, so his pictures had traces of real genius under their slap-dash clumsiness. In fact, the whole boy was a crying example of tragic waste, and his moodiness was due to the fact that he sometimes dimly realized this. Mostly, however, he got drunk in his spare time or played cards. There was some row about drugs in the South Camp, which was kept very dark by all concerned and by the authorities, and he was supposed to be the chief culprit. He grinned when I asked him about this and did not deny it, but he would tell me nothing about it. We were quite good friends though ; he came to see me sometimes and shook his head over my drawings, but he always asked me to come round and criticize his own works of art which was by no means easy. Rarely have I met anyone so utterly lonely and Without roots in family, class, or country. I suppose he was sent to Germany after the war (I never understood ~vhy he was not considered a British subject, having been born in England), but, if so, he did not stay there, for some years ago a friend of mine came across him in New York. He was then a step-dancer in a fifth-rate cabaret.

No stronger contrast to him. could have been found than my friend J. He too was a baron and of a family which bore an historic name and was related to similar families all over Europe, but particularly in England. His English grandmother ruled the family ; the English language was at least as familiar to him as the German, and I imagine that he felt, if anything, more at home in an English country-house than in a German Schloss, even if there was not much to distinguish one from the other. [121]In 1914. he had just finished his studies at Oxford and gone on a trip to Canada when war broke out. Like many of the others he got no farther than Gibraltar in his attempt to reach Germany, and was sent on to Wakefield. It was a particularly cruel situation for him, as it was for all people who had sympathies and interests on both sides and had to try to suppress those conflicting with their duties ; and for him not being able to fight made at worse instead of better, for the less he could actually do for his country the less justified did he feel in harbouring any feelings of sympathy for its enemies. He had been extremely happy at Oxford and now felt he had had no right to be ; he was torn between conflicting emotions and there could be no satisfactory issue to such a conflict. Thus he had reason to be thoroughly miserable and he was, but in time he developed a quite uncanny gift for making himself very much more miser­able even than he need have been. I suppose this was a sort of self-inflicted penance, a piling up of miseries in lieu of those he escaped through taking no part in the fighting, for he would really have loathed the fighting he so ardently wished for in order to do his duty. This may seem very tortuous and involved psychology, but it is a typical example of barbed-wire psychology, of barbed-wire sickness, from :cnich, as the reader may have discovered, all the men I have described suffered in one way or another, as indeed did all the prisoners. So J. lived in a but where he liked no one, in the mast desolate part of that desolate North Camp, and spent his time re-reading two books and refusing to take any interest in. any others. One was Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm and the other, Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie. [123]These he declared were unsurpassable masterpieces and others he would be too stupid to under­stand. I suppose they held some secret message for him, easier to guess at in the second work, but he never explained this. As for his alleged stupidity that was part of his campaign of self-depreciation. Incidentally he was very English in this : he loved to appear a great deal more foolish than he was, and managed so well that most people thought him a quite extraordinarily insignificant though not unpleasant boy. That is a very great gift for a diplomat and J. intended to be one and did become one, too. He looked a very typical product of Oxford at that time, tall, fair and loose-limbed, with tweeds, flannels and accent all complete. Fate was kind to him, for he got into endless trouble, always through no fault of his own, and had as bad a time as he could have wished for. He was involved in an attempt to escape from the camp, which failed, and got into great trouble through a newspaper campaign directed against the wife of a high British official, a great friend of his mother's and a woman of his mother's age, who had come to see him. This was constructed into a love-affair (absolutely unthinkable under camp conditions between any visitor and any prisoner, as the papers well knew), and even espionage was hinted at quite openly, so that the husband's position became untenable. A truly abominable affair all round. Needless to say, J. was one of those kept imprisoned many months after the armistice, and only returned home in 1919. He has been a great success as a diplomat in many parts of the world since that time, in the U.S.A. as in Asia, and the last time I saw him was a few months ago in a London cinema where a picture of the Abyssinian coronation was shown. There amongst the other European diplomatic dignitaries he sat, looking as glum as if he was still surveying the melancholy expanse of his camp. [124]For his character has, I think, been stamped by that camp for life ; he is happiest away from Europe in the wilds. I think there is every chance that he will achieve very great distinction in his profession, but very little that he will ever enjoy life.

Varied were my friends then, and varied have been their fates. Some have slipped back to their pre-war positions and life, and probably internment has remained to them no more than a very unpleasant episode. Of such is one of my ' taxi-friends ' in whose company I spent years, and the only one of the three with whom I became friends really. It was a curious friendship, for we had no common interests and very little to say to each other, but he was most extraordinarily kind to me throughout and I got very fond of him. He was one of those very unassuming and unselfish people who are ever doing something for others and spoil them so that they get very little thanks in return. But he didn't mind that in the least and just went on being serviceable to everybody. He had his reward in being one of the few who remained almost invariably cheerful, and after the war he rejoined his family, took up his job again, and will, I hope, live happily ever after ; like another man there who was an ardent Zionist and a happy family-man before the war and is both now ;like a third friend of mine, then a young student of medicine and enthusiastic about the new truths of psycho-analysis, now a specialist of growing fame in the U.S.A. Yes, there are such, but there are the others like that son of one of the leading German politicians who committed suicide in 1920 the day before his marriage, and that very wealthy young man from Hamburg who killed himself in South America, for no tangible reasons whatsoever. [125]And God knows what has become of all the others who were but shadows to me, of all those bored and ordinary business men, the quarrelsome strategists who moved flags on maps and killed enemies with their shouting, the nice vacant young men who played tennis, the drunks who went by the general name of the 'Whale­club,' all those types found wherever there is a crowd of rnen. They remained anonymous to one and one never got to realize them as separate human entities, though one lived in their midst day and night for year after year. No more significant individually than the people one travels with in 'bus or tube and yet an infinitely more important factor in one's life than any individuals could possibly be, for they were that terribly oppressive and inescapable thousandfold monster : the crowd-master of one's destinies while the barbed wire enclosed one, no more than a vague memory once one had left it behind.

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