The Prisoners of Mainz

by Alec Waugh

From these expenditures it will follow that life at Mainz was not quite so cheap as might be imagined. And we were unfortunate in being captured at a time when the value of a mark was very high. For, thanks to the business instincts of our German bankers, a cheque for three pounds was worth only sixty marks.

Myself I do not pretend to understand bimetallism, rate of exchange, or any of the other commercial problems that regulate the value of money. But the equivalent of the sixty marks paid monthly by Messrs. Cox to the German Government appeared in our pass-books at that time as £2 10s. 6d.; and as at our end we had to pay £3 for the same number of marks, one is driven to assume that the intermediary German firm was making a profit of about sixteen per cent. on every cheque drawn; a basis on which we would all like to run a bank.

The result both of the rushes to the Kantine and the succeeding rushes to the Paymaster’s office was the distinguishing feature of our daily routine—Queues. For the first impression of a stranger entering the citadel would have been of a sequence of trailing lines receding from open doors. Every department had its own particular queue. There was the queue outside the library, an insignificant affair owing to the thinly lined shelves; the queue outside the tin store for those who had parcels, and the two main streams of humanity, the queue from the Kantine, and the queue from the Paymaster’s office. These two last were in a continual state of flux, a ceaseless ebb and flow; the moment that they seemed likely to be engulfed within the welcoming portals there would be another meeting of the ways, more applicants would arrive, and the human rivers would overflow their banks. To any one who enjoyed this pastime, life was prodigal of entertainment. He could flit from one dissipation to another. But to the majority it was a tedious business, and the art of “queuing” began.

For an art it certainly was. As the master of finance is always watching the rise and fall of the markets, so that he shall know the exact moment at which to buy or to sell; so the master queuist would bide, waiting for that moment when the stream would be at its lowest ebb, and when he might safely attach himself to its interests. The cowardly might enrol themselves stolidly at an early hour, and shifting forward slowly, almost imperceptibly, they would eventually reach the doors. For them there was in queuing neither colour nor excitement. It was a dead level.

But for the artist in queues it was altogether different. He hazarded much. He had to work out whether or not it would really pay him to get to the door of the Kantine an hour before it was due to open. If he waited till later on in the day, he might manage to take advantage of some quiet lull, and gain his ends after a paltry thirty minutes’ wait. But, if he did, there was always the chance that when he did arrive the article he had desired would be no longer there. The whole stock of liver paste might have been exhausted. An appalling contingency. All these considerations had to be weighed.

And with regard to the Paymaster’s office there were attached notable risks. At noon every day the gates were closed, and consequently at about half-past eleven the applicants ceased to arrive. Nobody cares to wait thirty minutes and then have the doors shut upon him; and it was here that the genius of the queuist was most in evidence.

At half-past eleven he would look at the queue: there were fifteen people waiting: would those fifteen people be able to draw their cheques in time? and in cases like this a mere average of time was valueless. In queuing, as everywhere else, all standards were relative. Because on one day twenty people had drawn their money in as many minutes, it did not follow that on another fifteen would draw theirs in an hour. Nationalities had to be taken into consideration. Those twenty men were probably Irishmen. But if there were ten kilts outside the gate, even when the hands of the clock stood only at a quarter-past eleven, the great queuist would turn away. He knew that to each of those ten Scotsmen the Paymaster would have to explain the theory of exchange in indifferent English, which would not be understood, and that the Paymaster would then have to try and gather the drift of a Scotsman’s logic in a language he had not heard before, and that for each individual applicant an interpreter would have to be summoned.

Queuing, if refined to an art, required a great deal more than the merely neutral quality of patience.