("Don't strain your talent or you'll do nothing gracefully. The boor won't pass for a gallant gentleman, no matter what he does.")
The Germans, at different times in their history, have conquered the French and humbly looked up to and imitated them. Generally speaking, they study and try to understand the French, and their own intellectuality and idealism are things French-men might be expected to like or, at any rate, be interested in. Yet it is one of history's or geography's ironies that the Frenchman goes on his way, neither knowing nor wanting to know the blond beasts over the Rhine—"Jamais un lourdaud quoiqu'il fasse" . . the young sculptor must have smiled when he tacked that verse on the wall of his prison!
Ruhleben is a race-track on the outskirts of Berlin, and a detention
camp for English civilians. This is quite another sort of menagerie.
You can imagine the different kinds of Englishmen who would be caught in
Germany by the storm—luxurious invalids taking the waters at
Baden-Baden; Gold Coast negro roust-abouts from rusty British tramps at
Hamburg; agents, manufacturers, professors, librarians, officers from
Channel boats, students of music and philosophy.
All these luckless civilians—four thousand of them—had been herded together in the stables, paddock, and stands of the Ruhleben track. The place was not as suited for a prison as the high land of Zossen, the stalls with their four bunks were dismal enough, and the lofts overhead, with little light and ventilation, still worse.
Some had suffered, semi-invalids, for instance, unable to get along with the prison rations, but the interesting thing about Ruhleben was not its discomfort, but the remarkable fashion in which the prisoners had contrived to make the best of a bad matter.
The musicians had their instruments sent in and organized an orchestra. The professors began to lecture and teach until now there was a sort of university, with some fifty different classes in the long room under the grand stand. And on the evening when we had the privilege of visiting Ruhleben it was to see a dramatic society present Bernard Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion."
The play began at six o'clock, for the camp lights are out at nine, and it was in the dusk of another one of Berlin's rainy days, after slithering through the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete apartment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab swung to the right, lurched down the lane of mud, and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben. Inside was a sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen— professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons, men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with a Thermos bottle, and crisp "Right you are!"—a good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic cross-section of the London streets, drifting about here in the German mud.
There were still a few minutes before the play began, and we walked through some of the barracks with the commandant, a tall, bronzed officer of middle age, with gracious manners, one of those Olympian Germans who resemble their English cousins of the same class. Each barrack had its captain, and over these was a camp-captain—formerly an English merchant of Berlin—who went with us on our rounds.
The stables were crowded with bunks and men—like a cattleship forecastle. One young man, fulfilling doubtless his English ritual of "dressing for dinner," was punctiliously shaving, although it was now practically dark; in another corner the devotee of some system of how to get strong and how to stay so, stripped to the skin, was slowly and with solemn precision raising and lowering a pair of light dumb-bells. Some saluted as private soldiers would; some bowed almost as to a friend, with a cheery "Guten Abend, Herr Baron!" There seemed, indeed, to be a very pleasant relation between this gentleman soldier and his gentlemen prisoners, and the camp-captain, lagging behind, told how one evening when they had sung "Elijah," the men had stood up and given three English cheers for the commandant, while his wife, who had come to hear the performance, stood beside him laughing and wiping her eyes.
As you get closer to war you more frequently run across such things. The fighting men kill ruthlessly, because that, they think, is the way to get their business over. But for the most part they kill without hate. For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms you must go back to the men who are not fighting, to the overdriven and underexercised journalists, sizzling and thundering in their swivel-chairs.