THE BETTER GERMANY
IN WAR TIME
Being some Facts towards Fellowship.
BY
HAROLD PICTON.
THE NATIONAL LABOUR PRESS, LIMITED,
Manchester and London.
TO THE
BRITISH AND THE GERMAN PEOPLES
AND
IN MEMORY OF
MY MOTHER
WHO KNEW AND LOVED
THEM BOTH.
“Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is Hell.”—A Dream of John Ball.
“Either we are all citizens of the same city and war between us, a civil war, a monstrous iniquity to be forgotten, as soon as it may bring in peace; or else there is no city and no home for man in the universe, but only an everlasting conflict between creatures that have nothing in common and no place where they can together be at rest.”—Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 11, 1915.
“He had to be extremely careful, said Lord Newton at Knutsford last Saturday, because if he made any statement which did not accuse the Germans of brutality he was denounced by many people as pro-German.”—Common Sense, April 20, 1918.
“Des faits de ce genre méritent dêtre mis en evidence. Il faudrait, dans ce déchaînement d’horreurs et de haines, insister sur les quelques traits capables d’adoucir les âmes.”—La Guerre vue d’une Ambulance par L’Abbé Félix Klein.
“Hate as a policy is either inadequate to deal with the crimes (real and invented) of our enemies, or, if adequate, so recoils on the hater that he himself becomes ruined as a moral agent.”—G. Jarvis Smith, M.C. (late Chaplain at the Western Front). Nation, Nov. 2, 1918.
“The belief at home that the individual enemy is an incurable barbarian is simply wrong ...”—Second-Lieut. A. R. Williams, killed in action August, 1917.
“I will go on fighting as long as it is necessary to get a decision in this war.... But I will not hate Germans to the order of any bloody politician; and the first thing I shall do after I am free will be to go to Germany and create all the ties I can with German life.”—J. H. Keeling (B.E.F., December, 1915).
CONTENTS
FOREWORD[1]
One kind of German has been too often described, and not infrequently invented. I propose here to describe the other German. At a military hospital a lady visitor said to the wounded soldiers: “We’ve had lots of books and tales of horror; why don’t some of you fellows prepare a book of the good deeds of the enemy?” There was a slight pause. “Ah,” said one of the soldiers, “that would be a golden book.” Very imperfectly, and in spite of all the barriers raised by war passions, I have tried to collect some of the materials already to hand for such a book.
In any quarrel it is difficult to recognise that there is good in one’s opponent. Yet in order that any strife may be wisely settled, this recognition is plainly necessary. Mere enmity, without recognition of good, belongs to primitive barbarism. It was against the foolish unpracticality of this older barbarism (not surely only against its wickedness) that Christ protested in the words, “But I say unto you, love your enemies.” He saw around him the folly and unenlightenment of the perpetual feud. I have collected the testimonies that are in the following pages because such facts seem to me to need wider recognition, if we are ever to gain an outlook upon a fairer and a truer world.
If my desire for peace has anywhere shown itself unduly, or in a way irritating to others, I ask forgiveness. Whenever peace is made, the world will need a peace built on all the facts of human nature. I have tried to give here some of those which war passions inevitably obscure. That is the whole of my task.
HAROLD PICTON.
September, 1918.
Footnotes:
[1] With the exception of a few minor insertions the whole of this book was compiled, and the preface written, before Peace came. It seemed, however, that it might only be harmful if published then. I, therefore, kept the book back, but, as the wording expressed my feeling as I wrote, I have left it unchanged.
The Better Germany in War Time
I.
MILITARY PRISONERS.
The cases of bad treatment of prisoners in Germany have been made known very widely. No one, I imagine, can wish to defend bad treatment of prisoners anywhere (even of criminal prisoners), and such a horrible state of things as that of Wittenberg during the typhus epidemic is a disgrace to human nature.
But Mr. Lithgow Osborne says: “My whole impression of the camp authorities at Wittenberg was utterly unlike that which I have received in every other camp I have visited in Germany.” (Miscel. 16, 1916, p. 6). I propose to give some account of these other camps. I shall not exclude adverse criticism, but as the public have heard little but such criticism, I do not think it will be unfair to deal in these pages more fully with the favourable reports.