“The Homeland”
While we were thus making effort to entertain ourselves within the camp, outside in the Fest Theatre in Carlsruhe there was a performance, for the benefit of the Eighth War Loan, of “The Homeland,” a war vision by Leo Sternburg. A translation of this appeared in the Continental Times, a ridiculous and half-illiterate propaganda sheet which we could receive thrice weekly at a cost of 2.70 marks per month.
The scene is the battlefield. Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, moves amid the dead men that lie about. The dawn is coming up the skies. Soldiers of the Medical Corps carry stretchers to and fro. Occasionally the mutter of the distant battle rolls over the scene.
The Wandering Jew laments that he has been unable to find extinction even in this welter of the world war. A dying soldier greets him as a messenger from the Homeland:
Give me your hand—that hand from home. They have not left me to die alone in a strange land. They have sent me greetings.
Ahasuerus: No, no!
Soldier: Your hand——
Ahasuerus: You have it. It is well. The most homeless of men stands before thee—he is as homeless as thou.
Soldier: As I! I who die for home—I homeless!
Ahasuerus: Thou art in error. The homeland would not die for thee.
The Wandering Jew goes on to speak of apathy among the people, and reminds the soldier that “not only arms win victories to-day. The war of all men against all men has been unloosed. War against the woman and the child. War against fields and forests and farm and house. Peaceful labour turns to battle. The metal of the church bells fights. The seed fights as it falls into the furrow. Money marches in ranks.... But ... men eat and sleep and wax fat. They hear of the death of millions, and say: ‘Yes, yes.’ Gods that descend before their very eyes, and the wonders of a heroism half divine, no longer move their senses—no sacrifice can stir them out of their daily rut. They have but one care to trouble them—it is that you might return greater than when you set forth.”
Soldier (emphatically, to the men of the Medical Corps): Away! away! I would die of life and not of death.... Let me lie down beside mine enemy, he that hath endured what I have endured, he, as a comrade that understands me.
Ahasuerus: Come, thou mayst deem thyself blest in that thou diest so that thou mayst not behold a race of lesser men. Ye have grown beyond human compass in the fires of your time, your heads would strike the ceilings in your little chambers.
Ultimately, however, new troops enter, and one of these gives reassurance to the dying man.
Second Soldier: Property hath converted itself into armies, and the joy of riches means only the capacity to give.... Coffers and chests fly open. Countesses bring their silver, the legacy of famous ancestors, the old maid-servant her hoarded wage. The widow gives up her golden chain, the last love gift of her dead mate; the merchant his gains, and the old peasants the walnut tree in whose shadow they played as children.... The whole land becomes a mighty armoury ... they hammer, hammer, hammer, day and night.
Dying Soldier: Do you not hear the thunder of Wieland’s hammer? The ringing armour of the Valkyries? Do you not hear the hoof-beats of their stallions?
Second Soldier: Yea, rivers and fields, mountains and woods dream anew their German dreams.... Silently the women offer up their beauty ... the park of roses becomes the potato patch. The savant is his own servant. The mother can no longer mother her child. Work puts out the torch of love ... but all bear this ... they bear it for the sake of the blood which flowed for their sake.
Soldier: I die ... I die happy.
[He dies.]
Ahasuerus: O Fate! This moment outweighs all my two thousand years of torment. I am reconciled with my sorrow, in that the centuries have spared me to behold the mighty heroism of this people.
[Curtain.]
ONE OF OUR ORCHESTRA.
ENGINEER OF THE “HITACHI MARU.”
V
Victims of the “Wolf”
Carlsruhe Kriegsgefangenenlager being what was known as a Distribution Camp, there was a continual coming and going of officers. Here we had no continuing city. An occasional prisoner might linger on—as if entirely overlooked and forgotten—for a year or even two; in the majority of cases, however, the stay only extended for a few weeks, sometimes merely a few days. On three consecutive weeks the cast for one of our plays was removed almost en bloc. Friendships were formed overnight, to be violently disrupted by departure on the morrow. In our little world was a complete epitome of life.
One afternoon in early March there arrived in camp a cartload of trunks and sea-chests bearing strange hieroglyphics, with a rumour that these would be followed by the officers of various nationality, including Japanese, captured from the ships sunk by the notorious German cruiser Wolf.
Two days later they arrived, sailormen from the seven seas, British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, so that the next morning their blue suits and brown boots gave the salon d’appel the appearance of a mercantile marine office when a crew is signing on. Some of the Captains, grizzled and weather-beaten, had an easy gait, a quiet laying down of the foot, which inevitably suggested the bridge or the moving decks of ships; different entirely from the more formal military stride. Some of them were doubtless glad to stretch their legs, having been cruising in the piratical Wolf for a year or fifteen months.
The Japanese officers made me very heartily welcome to their hut, on a shelf in which I noticed immediately on my entry a little statue of Buddha. While I sketched some of these placid, not readily fathomable faces, I heard, in broken English, the tragic story of the broken life of their Captain, the Commander of the Hitachi Maru.
The Captain had intended suicide from the time he lost his vessel—thirteen of her crew were killed in the fight—and simply awaited his opportunity. This came to him in the darkness and amid the floes of Iceland, when the Wolf, with fangs red with blood, was running back for Kiel.
Engineer Lieut.-Commander K. Shiraishi, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is speaking, his immobile face—so that I may complete my sketch—as rigid as that of the little Buddha which I can see behind him. He has shared a berth with the Captain, and tells me that on the night of his disappearance he left the cabin, “and he come not back.” He had slipped quietly overboard—“in the dark and among the ice”—thus embarking on a final voyage, new and strange.
“All night we hear the ice grinding past the ship,” said my Lieut.-Commander, without the flicker of an eyelid. “In the dark—and among the ice!”
Returning to my hut, by a literary coincidence not uncommon, I opened Joseph Conrad, and read in “Il Conde”: “He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breast-bone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operation of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one’s feelings.”
Captain Meadows, of the Tarantella, the first steamer sunk by the Wolf, was a man of Herculean build, and quite apparently, and as befitted the skipper of a ship named as his was, he had led the German Commander something of a dance. Every morning, until he was caught in the act, the Captain used to empty the water from his bath into the sea, and with it a bottle giving the bearings of the Wolf, and some account of her depredations. Even when the time came that two or three German sailors flung themselves suddenly upon him, he succeeded in “mailing his letter,” and when he received a vehement reprimand he made retort that if the Commander thought it necessary to shout even louder he might use his megaphone!
CAPTAIN OF THE “TARANTELLA.”
The Wolf apparently employed a hydroplane with great effect in locating her prey, and in evading capture. The Captain of the Matunga showed me a snapshot—from which I made a sketch—of the last moments of his sinking ship.