The Prisoners of Mainz

by Alec Waugh

As it was, it was bad enough. For myself I never stayed in the room one moment more than I could help. And often in the evenings after the doors had been shut, I used to walk up and down the cold stone corridor with Barron; we would do anything to get away from the room. It was the only way to preserve our balance.

And here in its psychological aspect lies, I think, the true meaning of captivity; for in the bare recital of incidents there must be always a savour of the soulless. The conditions of life are only really important in as far as they form a framework for personality. It is the individual that counts, and the real meaning of eight months’ imprisonment does not lie in their political or sociological aspect, but in the effect that they have on character. For each person they had a different message, each person was touched in a different way. Probably through the mind of each individual flitted the same recurring moods, modified and altered by the demands of each particular temperament, but still the moods were the same fingers playing upon different strings.

And for me, at any rate, the mood that recurred most frequently was one of a grey depression, mixed with a profound sense of the futility of human effort. Confinement inspires morbidity very quickly, and some of us used to take an almost savage delight in wrenching down the few frail bulwarks of an ultimate belief. From certain quotations we derived an exultant satisfaction.

“Pleasure of life what is’t? the good hours of an ague.”

We used to croon the words over to ourselves and endeavour to arrive at some stoic standpoint from which we could completely objectify ourselves and our ambitions.

The wearisome sameness of the days, the monotony of the faces, the unchanged landscape, the intolerable talk about the war, all these tended to produce an effect of complete and utter depression. This was far and away our worst enemy: whole days were drenched in an incurable melancholia. The continual presence of sentries and barbed wire flung before us a perpetual symbol of the intelligence fettered by the values of the phenomenal world. Life resolved itself into a picture of eternal serfdom: sometimes the body was enslaved, sometimes the mind, but there was always some bar to Freedom. It was all so much “heaving at a moveless latch.” Purposeless and irrevocable.

It is easy enough to laugh at it all now. But then it was a very real trial. Those doubts and uncertainties, which at some time or another assail all men, and with a great many form a silent background or framework for the events of their mournful odyssey, were with us continually present; and however gloomy a view one may take of the universe, one wishes to be able to escape from it at times. And the only remedy was work.

Indeed confinement must have been a very real ordeal to those whose temperaments were not self-sufficient, and who depended on the outside world for their amusements and distractions. It has been said times without number that the dreamer loses half the pleasure of life, and that he lies bound up by his own fantasies and wayward creations: that he has no eyes for what Pater has called “the continual stir and motion of a comely human life.” Well, Pater wrote that of Attic culture, of the light-hearted world that is reflected in the pages of the Lysis, and perhaps modern life presents none too comely an aspect. Certainly in place of “stir and motion” we have bustle and excitement, a clumsy fumbling after sensation. Perhaps the dreamer has not lost so very much, and he does at any rate carry his own world with him: he is self-sufficient; within the sure citadel of his own soul he can always find those pleasures which alone have any claim to permanence. Flaubert is always the same, behind barbed wire as in the shadow of a Wessex garden: the change of environment makes no difference there.

But on those who preferred action to contemplation, prison life bore very heavily, and there was something rather pathetic in the various attempts that were made to fight against the growth of listlessness and apathy. To begin with, of course, every one entered his name on the roll of the Future Career Society; no one took less than three classes; there was a general rush to attain knowledge which lasted about three weeks.

After that, life resolved itself for a great many into a laborious effort to kill time, and here the Germans showed their commercial instincts. The Kantine authorities catered for this hunger for novelty, and from sure knowledge of the depression of markets gauged the exact moment when each particular craze would begin to ebb.