Chapter Seventeen
Grünkow
He was a tall, well built man of about thirty but looked older, which is not surprising in a Brandenburg Russian prisoner. He had the pale, dusty hair and, complexion of so many Slavs and spoke with soft, sibilant tones. A smile easily spread across his face although he had far less to smile about than we of the Lord’s Anointed. He lodged with Giller, Delap, Rooney, Charles Hanson and myself in a smallish barrack room in some degree of privacy and comfort. In the midst of our Luccullan feasts concocted from our Red Cross parcels Grünkow starved with quiet dignity on his meagre rations and hard biscuits. Sometimes we were troubled with conscience and either passed some of our hoarded food tins on to our Russian ally or invited him to dinner.
Grünkow had been a shipping clerk in Odessa and could speak German passably but was completely bewildered by the English language - at least as spoken by his room-mates. Judging by the occasional look of puzzlement in his pale grey eyes, the antics of the English as a race must have given him cause for speculation. Besides the inevitable Russian peaked uniform cap with its lozenge shaped metal badge, Grünkow wore the Russian uniform blouse buttoned at the shoulder and close fitting round the neck. These short shirts, as indeed they were, hung outside the trousers and were clasped by a heavy brass-buckled belt round the waist. He wore riding breeches and high Russian boots and always contrived to look smart. Although we failed to recognise it at the time I can now see from this time-distance that Bolshevism was abroad amongst the Russians of Brandenburg camp. Perrin was undoubtedly the earliest of the commissar but I don’t think Grünkow was in any degree swayed by the doctrine. If anything he was probably a Trotskyist. He gave us little clue to his politics, or in fact, to anything within his life. I have never known a more self-effacing person, yet few people have left such an imprint on my memory as that Russian soldier-prisoner away back in 1917. I have seen him standing by his bunk in that barrack room, with his gaze on something I couldn't see and a smile on his face as if someone was talking to him. The gaze wasn't vacant and Grünkow wasn’t mad. He was the personification of gentleness and courage and fine manners. We admired Grünkow greatly as indeed we admired many of the Russians. They seemed to be cast in three distinct psychological types; firstly the ox-like, brutish slav who seemed scarcely able to reason; then higher up the intellectual scale came the clever, cunning and ruthless type who automatically developed into a sort of political dynamite. As it were across from this type but on an equally intelligent level we found the clever but utterly philosophical characters whose ethical standards I have rarely seemed equalled. There were six Russian doctors and a number of Russian orderlies who had volunteered to stay on in captivity to tend the sick in Brandenburg. Not only their own poor people but all of us in that place owed much to those doctors whose vary names I forget but whose philosophy, diligence and unselfish work I shall never cease to admire.
We gave Grünkow what was left of our rations when we left him at the end of the war. It was the end of our war; with Russia in ruins no-one could foretell where lay the end of his war. He shook our hands and smiled and wished us auf wedersehan, blessing us with that smile of his. I wonder what happened to that lonely man from Odessa?
Chapter Eighteen
DRUMMING UP
The work of we people lucky enough to be permanently employed on the camp staff was not so onerous as to deny us a considerable amount of time to ourselves. As we subsisted almost entirely on our food parcels it followed that we had to do our own cooking. We no longer fought like wild beasts over the swill tubs, moreover our numbers were very greatly reduced, first by the departure of the Sassnitz contingent and later by a commando composed mainly of apprentices who went off into a far off forest and were lost to us for the remainder of the war.
It might have been suggested, in a more ably administered brotherhood that the entire food parcels of the camp should be pooled and a regular corps of cooks empanelled for the purpose of producing the best meals with the minimum expenditure of raw materials. I am glad to say that our brotherhood was entirely devoid of that sort of bright individual, that mode planner who ends up by getting a grip on the lives of the community and slowly strangling it. Most of us were sailors; and sailors distrust that sort of organizing which smacks to them either of the Board of Trade or Admiralty Regulation. Our parcels were our personal links with home, our personal property, only to be shared with friends because they were your friends; we surrendered them to no central office run by political bosses.
Cooking was definitely of the pic-nic species, or to be more exact, savouring strongly of the Gypsy life. I believe it was the naval men who set the style with their invariable gift for extemporisation. Most of the cooking, except in the most bitter weather, was done out of doors on the clean, yellow sand of the camp. The stoves, or ‘drumming-up cans’ were fashioned from biscuit tins or paint drums. A square hole was cut at the lower part of one side to induce draught and above the hole the sides of the tin or drum were pierced in a horizontal plane with a series of holes. Through these holes were passed short lengths of stout fencing wire, about 1/8th inch in diameter and therefore strong enough to support a pot. The fire was lit in the lower part of the can with the square hole usually facing the wind. Thus, with a cooking pot protected by the sides of the drumming-up can from cooling wind, potatoes and the like could be boiled with remarkable little fire.
For those people who were on camp staff and who had therefore very little chance of getting their hands on anything which was to be found in the outside world, the business of finding potatoes, fresh vegetables and fuel was liable to be difficult. However there are always some commercial minded people who pop up even in the middle of an enemy country in a first class war, can be relied on to get the wheels of trade moving. With us the local merchant adventurers were certain Russian, often of probable Semitic origin, who worked on farms or in the town. In exchange for our ration of black bread (one daily whack equalled seven potatoes At the par rate of exchange) or certain tinned foods or even clothing, a regular trade in potatoes, fresh greens and wood fuel were smuggled under the noses of the Germans and often, I believe, with their connivance. Nor was the traffic confined to food, I acquired a very fine pair of skates ( for the pond was frozen a foot thick in winter) for two tins of corned beef, and a violin for tin of corned beef and an army ration.
Ordinarily we formed ourselves into messes of three or four persons and took it in turns to do the cooking. Sometimes a particularly gifted chef would have longer spells at the cooking job than his mates, simply because he liked it, and usually the feeding in those messes was the envy of all the others. We all had our particular strong point when it came our turn to be cook of the mess. Mine was definitely curry and rice. I had been brought up on it and have always loved its palate-tingling savouriness but I liked it strong and my curries often shook up the delicate throttles of the English lads and left them sweating and panting for breath. There were no facilities and as no-one started any protest meetings against my Oriental hanky-panky with the cooking pots I can only hope they too acquired the taste.
Cooking in the depth of winter when the mercury in the thermometer used to creep down into its little bulb was not without complications. Only the very hardiest could stand the strain of sitting on his haunches in the snow trying to persuade a small wood fire to warm up a pan of stew. Most of us, by dint of fixing hoops of fencing wire round the large, cylindrical slow combustion stoves in the barrack huts, managed to festoon these stoves with cooking pots. A considerable amount of heat was required to cook by this process and this could only be obtained by constant stoking with firewood supplied clandestinely by our Russian traders. Often the stoves were kept red hot when dinner was cooking and it is a tribute to German fire protection measures in building construction that the whole she-bang didn't go up in flames.
This stoking up sometimes led to some rare old hi-jinks in the naval men’s barrack room. In the cold gloom of a central European winter it was no doubt an excellent form of safety valve for the pent-up feelings of men out off from the merest shadow of their former active lives. They were nearly all destroyer men; Nestor, Nomad, Tipperary, Turbulent, were their ships and Jolly Tars certainly were these men. Drumming-up time naturally congregated a small crowd of mess cooks round the big stoves; theirs was a big barrack room and heated by a very hippopotamus of a stove about five feet high and three feet in diameter. Festooned with steaming pans of potatoes, soup and stew and often enough glowing with a subdued red glow it gave a somewhat infernal atmosphere to the place.
Then without warning someone would trill a bosun’s pipe (normally hidden from prying German eyes) and a hoarse voice would bellow ‘action stations’!
I only ventured once to intrude on ‘action stations' and that only because I knew the chaps and realised that normally they were nice cheery lads and not really raving maniacs. A German postern armed with a rifle was also present on one occasion when ‘action stations' sounded - and he fled for his life.
‘Action stations' was a drill. Call it a caricature of a drill if you like, but these men whose normal working lives had been one long drill or evolution followed by another had to have their drill period, even if it was only in fun. And like all such exercises it had to come ‘straight off the ice’. So the Senior man, a destroyer cox’n, would sound off without the slightest vestige of warning. The top tier of bunks instantly became the bridge, manned by helmsman, lookout and signalmen (with a hoist of ‘smalls’ rigged up over a nail in the roof ridge). The top door of the stove became the breech of a 4” gun; the bottom door became a furnace door in the boiler room. The pandemonium was terrific. The lookouts ‘spotted’ enemy ships at every point of the compass. The ‘Captain’ howled down an imaginary voice pipe for more speed. The signalmen received rude imaginary signals from the flagship and were told to send even ruder ones back. The gun’s crew slammed in billets of firewood into the top door of the stove to simulate shells while the stokers rammed fuel in at the bottom until the chimney pipe was red hot and almost transparent while the draught hurled flames out of the top of the stack.
There was no recognised end to these drills but they invariably ended in a gale of laughter; not just ordinary polite laughter which the average comedian commands but the helpless, intoxicating howls of unsubduable laughter, roaring from brazen throats of men used to hailing the fore-top in a gale of wind. The gun’s crew would slowly keel over, holding their ribs as they rolled on the floor. The men on the ‘bridge’ would succumb to the gale of unleashed feelings and lying on their backs, shake the bunk racks with their guffaws. The whole storm would flow outward like a tide of bawling merriment until the very onlookers in the far corners of the hut would be infected and laugh and laugh until they could laugh no more and sat up to wipe the tears from their eyes and caress their aching ribs. It may be considered incredibly stupid when looked at coldly, but it was a fine example of the almost incredible joy which men can manufacture by making his own fun.
Chapter Nineteen
Yacht Sailing
They were model yachts of course. When, as a newcomer to Brandenburg I used to gaze through the wire of the compound fence at the little models flitting across the rippled surface of the lake in the camp was bewildered as to how their owners came by them. They were beautiful things, exquisitely finished and some would have fetched many pounds in a London store. I was amazed to learn that they had all been made in the camp from all manner of scrap, although the paints and varnishes necessarily came from ‘outside’ through the usual channels of illicit trade. The hulls of the craft were usually of soft wood, hollowed out by burning with a red hot iron followed by the patient application of a razor-sharp knife. The keel plates came from food tins and the lead to form the bulb keels was melted out of the joints. Sails were invariably made from linen shirt-laps and many a Brandenburg yachtsman has gone through the winter with a cold stern so that his new model could have a fine suit of sails when spring melted the lake ice.
The yachts varied in size but generally speaking measured about twelve inches for and aft. Occasionally a record breaker would take the water but these were usually built by some enthusiast anxious to try his hand at improving ship design. One such enthusiast was a large Swede. He was a ship's carpenter and had been indiscreet enough to sign aboard a British ship in war time. He had an idea that he could build a three masted schooner which could beat the pants off anything on the lake. In profile the craft he took down to the water's edge one summer evening was a lovely thing, but her sailing qualities proved disappointing. ‘Chips’ rigged and re-rigged her, trying everything from ‘Blue Nose’ rig to that of a rakish nineteenth century Gold Coast Slaver but still she proved an uncertain bet in a race. The clever tradesman, who had turned out such & beautifully finished job had fallen down on a point which had tripped up better ship designers than he in the early days of sailing clippers for he had made the ‘entrance’ of the bows slightly concave. The schooner could indeed beat the pants off everything in light airs; in what seemed a flat calm she would ‘ghost’ across the smooth water ruffling it ever so slightly by a ripple from her stern while the rest of the boats were hunting for a breeze, but in a breeze she would bury her nose in the water and fill her jibs full of it and do other horrible things. Chips saw his mistake and promptly went to the other extreme by designing a thing that looked like a skimming dish. But he never produced such lovely little sailors as his arch competitor, the Chief Officer of the BRUSSELLS. This tubby little man’s craft were simple, Bermuda rigged things, beautifully finished, which sat on the water like swans and sailed like the famous ‘Shamrocks’ that Sir Thomas Lipton spent his millions on.
Nearly all the yacht sailors were drawn from the merchant service. That may have been because the merchant service officers had time to kill but the navy men rarely tried their hand at the art and never came near producing a winner. There were about a couple of dozen regular members of the yacht club and on summer evenings it used to give me great pleasure to watch the racing. It was lots of fun to see precise and middle aged gentlemen, armed with long poles to guide their boats to safety when nearing the shore at speed, urging their craft on with a flow of maritime invective, while the little fleet cut V shaped ripples on the dark surface of the water.
It’s not a pastime indulged in by our European brethren. The Ruskis were plainly not interested - though sometimes Perrin and his sycophants would look on with sneering smiles, and the Germans plainly thought it just another manifestation of that national lunacy which could make men play ‘battle stations’ and cook their food on biscuit tins out of doors.
Chapter Twenty
Concert Parties
I use the plural because every nationality in Brandenburg had a concert party. Unfortunately there was only one theatre and that had been rigged up quite cleverly, by the Russians in the early days when they were the sole inhabitants. The theatre was part of one of the usual camp huts and could seat about two hundred people on hard benches. The other part of this hut was given over to Chapels, one on the lines of the Russian Orthodox Church and the other of the Roman Church. There were no objections raised to heretics using the chapels providing they accepted them as they found them and respected the outward and visible trappings of the two conflicting dogmas. But to return to the secular end of the hut .......
The theatre was provided with a low stage which we fitted with a pair of shabby draw curtains the fittings of which rattled like a skeleton on a tin roof when the curtains were drawn. In the centre of the footlights the hood of the prompter’s box reared about a foot above the boards as was the continental style in those days. A small orchestra ‘pit’ protected the players from possible onslaught by an unappreciative audience. One backcloth was provided besides a ‘room’ set. The backcloth featured a forest and appeared to have been painted on a dull day when the artist had been suffering; from a fit of deep depression. It certainly depressed us when we came to play before it, so much so that with the practical help of some of the naval men I designed and painted a ‘seaside' backcloth complete with promenade and pier (with a Belle Steamer alongside), with a turquoise sea and white clouds on a summer sky. I suppose I was really painting my last seaside holiday. I was vastly proud of it at the time and the matelots loved it. Looking back I can appreciate its crudity but to us it was a window on to a lost world - and it was a darned sight more cheerful than the gloom of that Russian forest.
The British concert party was by far the most thriving of any, probably because our bellies being full, released or fortified our other faculties for a study of the liberal arts and crafts. The fare served up by the Company was a mixture of Chatham and Pompey humour diluted with the most tear sodden melodrama I have ever heard. The action in the sentimental sketches was invariably halted while the hero (or heroine, in a voice like a gin-sodden hag) worked through a song dripping with sentimentality, each verse provided with a chorus best sung over the last pint at chucking-out time. There was an International Orchestra, but this august body, after one attempt, refused to prostitute its art by playing for the British concerts. So we Britishers in its ranks formed a small ensemble of our own. The trumpeter was not a Britisher but an American who had shipped aboard the ESMERALDAS as a cattle hand. Before Paul Nagle had been mad enough to seek adventure through the medium of steer's bedroom steward he had been a first trumpeter in a Broadway theatre, so he was a valuable acquisition for the ‘British' ensemble. According to the ways and ruling of the camp he should have gone out on commando but he preferred to stay behind the wire and keep his lip in fettle by playing the trumpet. He managed this by sympathetic co-operation of the camp hospital staff, and on special inspections by the senior medical officer, by burning 'ulcers’ in the back of his mouth with a cigarette end. He must have been one of the most remarkable cases the German Stapsartz ever saw.
Before the coming of the British the Russians had established an orchestra which was instrumentally unbalanced and sadly afflicted by temperamental storms amongst its players. There was a sleek young man who played first violin. I remember his violin particularly because it was the Only one I have ever seen which used mandolin worm-and-pinion tuning gear instead of the usual pegs. The young man had no doubt as to his artistic merit or his essential place as the leader of the orchestra. Like most people of his sort he always insisted on playing everything his way, a frame of mind which frequently led to hard words and, on the part of the conductor, tears of emotional frustration. That sorely tried maestro was a quiet man of ox-like mien but undoubted talent on his own instrument, the cello. There was a solid type who played a valve trombone. He churned through everything with the steady deliberation of a sausage machine and frequently arrived late at the end of a piece. The regular ‘cellist was an introvert who paid little attention to the matter in hand, rarely spoke, and while the conductor was pleading for some form of unity between the various instruments, could be heard quietly indulging in a private recital of the better known bits of Van Bean’s repertoire.
It is not surprising therefore, that such a loose-knit collection should fall to pieces under the impact of the British, not to mention the irrepressible Yankee, Paul Nagle. When the Italians began to arrive the artistic standards of' the orchestra really began to look up. The peacocking young Russian violinist was shocked to his soul-bolts when he found his countryman had surrendered the baton to Paul Nagle. and he was even more indignant when Paul told him that he could play as Paul directed him to or get himself and his comic fiddle the hell out of it. But he shut up and forthwith began to learn how to play in an orchestra under the direction of a professional. Besides the temperamental gentlemen aforesaid we collected two more ex-professionals from the Italian army who were soon fitted up with passable violins and introduced to the orchestra. A good Italian trumpeter soon joined them and an exceedingly small Italian soldier somehow acquired an exceedingly large double bass which he grunted away with in exceeding joy in his corner of the orchestra pit. A Britisher came out of his shell to stiffen up the bass side with a second cello, Britishers also provided two second violins, one of whom was myself.
In the early days of Paul Nagle's reign on the rostrum the Russian element tended to sulk but when they saw, with the coming of the artistically superior Italians that they stood a good chance of losing their places in the Pit they climbed down and played well and fell before long under the dynamic personality of the Broadway musician. But it was hard going for a bit. Nagle’s conducting was, to say the least of it, vital and his rehearsals about the liveliest meeting I have ever attended. The Italians took it all in good part; the Britishers respected his experience and felt apologetic at their own musical ignorance but the Russians were surly and as temperamental as a bunch of prima donnas. With monotonous regularity they threatened to resign. Nagle invariably told them to go right ahead, after which they calmed down. They had no intention of ceasing to be represented on the International Orchestra.
Chapter Twenty-One
SIGNED OFF
The beginning of the end came during a British concert party rehearsal one evening in November 1918. We of the orchestra were grinding our way through an uninsp1red musical number of quite appalling mushiness entitled ‘Only a Jew’. On the stage, Charlie Hanson was singing the lyric like a dog in pain when the double doors rattled open. A German soldier, his rifle still slung on his shoulder from force of habit, stood in the opening, his arms flung wide as if about to greet a long-lost brother. Others crowded behind him, obviously a bit tight.
. “Kamaraden!” he addressed us. "Liebe Kamaraden, the vor ist finish. Deutchland kaput.” He tripped over the sill and projected himself into the theatre hut with his pals behind him. They crowded in, throwing down their rifles with a glorious abandon which set up a frightful clatter and made us want to dive for cover as the things were probably still loaded. Then hell let loose. Everybody embraced everybody else (except the Russians, who probably realised that the party didn't include them) and we all surged out into the November darkness, the Germans extending life-long invitations to visit their homes and the Britishers mostly replying in bad German and lower deck English. Most of the invitations included a powerful suggestion that as we should all be going home soon we might as well leave them our tins of corned beef etc. From over across the lake came the sounds of singing and shouting from number ten and number eighty-one companies’ huts. Little figures could be seen capering about against the lights of the open doors and windows, the scene reflected weirdly in the still waters.
As we made our way round to join them, still accompanied by our ‘guards’, full or beer and bonhomie, we intercepted a crowd of men heading towards the main gate and bawling a highly coloured parody of ‘John Brown’s Body’.
"The gates open," one of them told us. “Jerry's packed up. We’re off down to Brandenburg for a ‘run shore'.”
The crowd hurried on, men shouting and dancing as if they were already drunk. I saw Paul Nagle hesitate and then with a sibilant Broadway imprications he joined their ranks together with a few others of our troop.
Back in my own hut I found a meeting in progress. What was to happen to us now? By all the signs it seemed almost as if Jerry had no further interest in us. It was Harry Freeman’s - help yourself - walk home if you want to - if you could. Neither Delap, Giller Hanson, Rooney nor any other of our intimate circle had so far lost their heads as to join the Brandenburg spree. On second thoughts the fact that we had been dropped flat by our late jailers didn't cause a great deal of satisfaction. True their rifles had kept us in but they were not there now to keep the rioting citizenry out. We were open to the wide world and I knew then what it feels like for a prisoner to be thrown on the world after doing ‘time’ in the ordered protection of prison. It really is a most uncomfortable sensation. Grünkow was at the meeting, of course, smiling enigmatically but taking little part in the discussion.
It seemed from all the evidence from outside during the past few weeks, and from our experience within the little world of the camp, that Germany was in a pretty pickle. The influenza epidemic which hit Europe in 1918 had attacked the war potential of the Kaiser’s country so heavily as to disorganise and demoralise the whole nation - and with a disciplined people like the Germans that takes a major catastrophe. Malnutrition and lack of essential drugs were the basic troubles - the result of the British blockade. Within the camp for the past summer we had been losing prisoners – most Russian - to the extent of four a day from typhus and influenza, resulting directly from starvation. The resistance to disease of the German population was just a little higher than that of the Russian prisoners and considerably below that of most of the parcel-receiving Britishers. The German people collapsed and knowing this, hard pressed as they were, the German armies collapsed likewise. It was the policy of the Kaiser’s government which had assisted in sowing the seeds of Bolshevism in the Russian forces in order to ease the pressure on Germany’s eastern front. But the ‘cult of the oppressed’ had been filtering back into Germany from Russia during the war years and has built up an underground movement sufficiently broad fronted to enable it to grab control when the crash came. The morning after the ‘night of liberation’ we were ordered out on parade in much the usual terms by a bunch of posterns who looked a bit sheepish and more than a bit white about the gills. So did many of the prisoners. The Brandenburg spree had resulted inevitably in a first class riot, starting with broken bottles and ending with machine gun bullets. Eleven of the British prisoners were not heard from again. The parade that morning was addressed by a stranger in civilian clothes. We were told that we were now all brothers and members of a Workers’ and Soldiers’ State. We were also told that for our own benefit we should be confined to barracks until arrangements could be made to send us home. Meanwhile, of course, our brother Germans would continue the barbaric custom. of carrying rifles in case any British brother should, in his ignorance, decide to act, in what politicians of a later generation termed it, ‘unilaterally’. Then we were dismissed and were free to spend the time discussing what might happen next. Speaking meteorogically it was a lovely, crisp winter’s day, with a pleasant sun and a clear sky. Speaking psychologically it was a day of confusion. With a night of brotherly love and machine gun bullets still fresh in our memories we had been regaled with high-sounding tosh about freedom and then seen the sentries on the guard posts fingering their triggers with some slight touch of hysteria. It seemed touch and go whether we were to be included in a blood pact or a blood bath. And the red army blanket which waved in heavy folds from the flag pole over the Commandantura gave us little comfort.
That Red Flag brought out the irrepressible and naughty humour of the Lower Deck. During the ensuing night the Navy men got together and forfeiting shirt tails, hastily stitched them together into a long paying-off' pennant and attached a football bladder to the fly. This they hoisted stealthily by night on a pole over their barracks where it was discovered by the Germans when they took parade next morning. Collectively we were dammed by all the devils in the Marxian Calendar while a couple of sentries scrambled awkwardly up the staff to strike the offending flag. Being soldiers I don't suppose the Germans had the remotest idea what it was for but political types who are more or less self elected are naturally suspicious and terribly sensitive. It was not until the middle of December that we received our marching orders. They were read cut on parade. We were to leave next day and go to Ruhleben Camp in Potsdam. We could only take hand luggage; all else was to be left in good order. From Ruhleben we would be sent on our homeward way. The ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear a cheer – which was promptly silenced by our German brethren of this Workers and Soldiers State. It didn't take long to pack - and most of us did it several times. There was much disposing of personal property to be done, for the edict went round that, although our gaolers at Brandenburg had not been so beastly to us as they might have been, there was no case for leaving things behind for them to loot, in spite of their instructions, which our legal minds held to be invalid anyway. So we whacked out what little food we had managed to hoard to our Russian friends. Grünkow was a friend; Perrin definitely was not. Just to make things safe we helped Grünkow hide sundry tinned stuff under the floor of the hut for we didn’t put it past our German colleagues to take British Red Cross foodstuffs from any Ruski found holding it - in spite of the jolly old Socialised State and Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils.
Next day we swung out of the main gate, shabby but exultant, heads up, singing ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, a thousand strong toting kit bags and hung around with musical instruments, skates and a dozen other signs of underground trade. Many of the company had been out on Commando for months, a few for years. Some of the apprentices had been timber falling in the depths of the forest. Fresh air, good (if illicit) rations and the swing of the axe had broadened their shoulders and the sun and wind had tanned their skins. They swung along with the rest, overtopping the average and were good to see. Some were not singing. There had been German girls back in that forest and the ageless call of youth had blunted the desire to seek their homeland again. Only German single-mindedness of purpose translated through the medium of rifles backed by unrelenting orders to get the Englanders out, tore some of those lads away and broke up their first romances. The next few days are remembered only in brief flashes. Ruhleben we found to be, by our Brandenburg standards, a very centre of luxury and well ordered ease. The stables of a great racecourse had been adapted as a civilians’ interment camp and terrible were the tales that reached Britain and flared across the news headline from the prisoners of Ruhleben; Ruhleben was the very epitome of German frightfulness; Ruhleben was a name to be shuddered at. Ruhleben was about the only camp that seemed to hit the headlines in the British Press. We of Brandenburg, remembering these reports from the days when we could read the newspapers back home, took these horrors to be the natural reaction of the German Army to civilians of any nationality and reckoned that they probably hated British civilians more than most. We felt sorry for the said civilians and profoundly hoped that we would never have to taste the nastiness of Ruhleben. When we were ordered there the natural exuberance of the occasion heavily overlaid our previous fears - but what we found on arrivalthere astounded us.
There is no doubt that the prisoners of Ruhleben in the first outburst of German war hysteria were given a rough passage and even a luxury stable for bloodstock is still a stable. And when compared with the luxury probably present in the former homes of many of the prisoners ,might reasonably present a pretty grim outlook to them. However we new arrivals from Brandenburg were confronted with what was obviously a glowing example of what righteous indignation can do to a tyrannical military regime, especially when translated in the polished terms of educated people and with the amazing aplomb of that particular type of Briton. It was all very interesting and instructive. Since that time I have come across the same results time and time again, nearly always resulting from what was basically little more than self-confident bluster. Executive types have it developed to a high degree.
We only stayed one night at Ruhleben, but in that short time it impressed me as having been run with the unobtrusive efficiency of a well ordered country club. Early next morning we trooped aboard a colossally long train of cars and we noticed that this time we had been promoted to third class carriages. The one that we cadets managed to scramble into was of timber construction on steel framing and obviously of ancient vintage. It had compartments similar to the British type and was fitted with a W.C. for every three or four compartments, access being gained by a short corridor. There was no through corridor. Neither was there any water in the W.C..
The journey could have been tedious. The going was slow and the locomotive asthmatic. Stops for no apparent reason were frequent, but there appeared little or no other traffic moving. The journey took us two days and we noticed by the sun and pole sar that we were heading generally northwards. It could have been tedious, but I enjoyed every minute of it. When one is going home through a country which your own countrymen have reduced to suing for peace, one can relax a little and enjoy the ever changing sights of a foreign and interesting country. On that slow train we were going the right way and to see the changing scenery slowly unfolding as the cars rolled along was a joy indeed. After nearly two years of an unchanging view seen through barbed wire, the very feel of movement and the changing panorama of forest and hamlets, broad rivers and tiny torrents was an ever-changing delight. The month was December but the weather was fine. So fine in fact, that some of the madder element decided to climb out of the windows and ride on the roofs of the coaches.
In the middle of a gloomy pine forest the train jarred roughly to a halt, then backed down about half a mile along the track it had come and stopped again. The great silence of that brooding place lay like some gloomy foreboding over us. We heard distant voices on the track behind us and saw some men carrying two bodies. Two young roof-riders had been swept off by a telegraph wire crossing the route and killed. They had both been in Brandenburg since the early days. The guards ordered some stragglers back into the carriages and the long train lumbered on again behind its grossly overtaxed locomotive. Stops for food were infrequent. Only once, at midday, did we pull up at a country station and gulp down a much needed meal of hot soup. It wasn’t very good soup by normal standards – sort of a very thin gruel – but at least it was hot and satisfying. Later in the day, long past the time when we might have expected to have stopped for a meal again, we realised that this appeared to be the time when our iron rations could reasonably be broached. We had all left Brandenburg stocked up with such stuff as tea, sweetened condensed milk, bully beef and the like. The more improvident ones had already made wakes of their rations at the earliest prompting from their stomachs that food was overdue. It was significant that always the low caste, ill-disciplined ones (usually war time merchant seamen who were neither merchant nor seaman) were the types who got outside of their emergency stock without any thought for any real emergency arising, or any attempt to discipline their hunger. After two years of this sort of thing happening to virtually the same characters whenever Red Cross parcels became overdue, the more provident ones ceased to listen to the hard-luck stories of the socially undeveloped types with any degree of sympathy. Inevitably the provident ones were castigated as ‘dirty hoarders’, ‘rotten pro-German bastards’ and everything that was brutal and undemocratic. Undoubtedly the small but clear cut cross section of society, as represented by Brandenburg Kriegs gefangenlager, living within the framework of fundamental social laws but cut off physically from the greater world by the barbed wire and bayonets, provided a fine test-tube community for the study of human sociological trends. It certainly convinced me that if a socialist state is a success it needs two essential features. Wither each soul must be a perfect human being, self-disciplined and with a delicate conscience in order to detect sins against society, or the State must discipline the people so that the individual units are forcibly guided along the Party Line. The second alternative introduces the problem of who, out of the millions, is to determine what is true socialism and how far the party can be departed from, if at all. It has been said that Christianity and true socialism are analogous (in spite of the professed atheism of many of the earlier socialists). So far not one of the Socialist leaders has been strong enough, or clever enough, even to suggest that the simple Christian doctrine, shorn of dogma, should be adopted as the basic policy of the party.
There is no doubt that the discipline imparted by the upbringing usual in a good school or in the ranks of one of the better disciplined Services teaches a man a discipline of self. This sort of thing, and only this, can become an instinct which provides the basis of all actions in times of emergency and in a broader sense places a curb on improvident living which leads inevitably to whining mendicancy. We, in Brandenburg, saw this exemplified time and again. Living under the mild dictatorship of Mallett the improvident ones could not obtrude their gross habits and utter lack of self-discipline on the ‘state’ to the discomfiture of the more provident characters. In a ‘free’ democracy however, They would have had votes, and unscrupulous people ambitious for power would have had to ‘buy’ their votes. So we should have probably have pooled parcels, with a ‘cut’ for the supervisors of the pool. All clever political stuff, but would it not have been better to have started right by teaching good behaviour to the young - with a cane if necessary - and enforce it in after life - with a rope's end if necessary?
We ‘drummed up' a pot of tea, as the train jogged along, using the W.C. pan as a fireplace, and turned in as we rumbled northward towards the pole star and the Baltic. Being small I found that the luggage rack made an excellent hammock.
Part Five