TOMMY IN GERMANY
One day the world will be flooded with some of the most dramatic, horrible, and romantic of narratives—the life-stories of the British soldiers captured in the early days of the war, their gross ill-treatment, their escapes, and attempts at escape. I claim to be the only unofficial neutral with any large amount of eye-witness, hand-to-hand knowledge of those poor men in Germany.
One of the most difficult tasks I assumed during the war was the personal and unconducted investigation of British prisoners of war. The visitor is only allowed to talk with prisoners when visiting camps under the supervision of a guide. My tramps on foot all over Germany gave me valuable information on this as on other matters.
My task was facilitated by the Germany policy of showing the hated British captives to as many people as possible; thus the 30,000 men have been scattered into at least 600 prison camps. In the depleted state of the German Army it is not easy to find efficient guards for so many establishments. Prisoners are constantly being moved about. They are conveyed ostentatiously and shown at railway stations en route, where until recently they were allowed to be spat upon by the public, and were given coffee into which the public were allowed to spit. These are but a few of the slights and abominations heaped upon them. Much of it is quite unprintable.
Many a night did I lie awake in Berlin cogitating how to get into touch with some of these men. I learned something on a previous visit in 1914, when I saw the British prisoners at one of the camps. At that time it was impossible to get into conversation with them. They were efficiently and continually guarded by comparatively active soldiers.
On this occasion I came across my first British prisoner quite by accident, and, as so often happens in life, difficult problems settle themselves automatically. In nothing that I write shall I give any indication of the whereabouts of the sixty prisoners with whom I conversed privately, but there can be no harm in my mentioning the whereabouts of my public visit, which took place in one of the regular neutral "Cook's tours" of the prisoners in Germany.
The strain of my work in so suspicious a place as Berlin, the constant care required to guard one's expressions, and the anxiety as to whether one was being watched or not got on my nerves sometimes, and one Sunday I determined to take a day off and go into the country with another neutral friend. There, by accident, I came across my first private specimen of Tommy in Germany.
We were looking about for a decent Gasthaus in which to get something to eat when we saw a notice high up in large type on a wall outside an old farmhouse building, which read:—
Jeder Verkehr der Zivilbevolkerung mit den
Kriegsgefangenen ist STRENG VERBOTEN,
"Any intercourse of the civil population with the prisoners of war is strictly forbidden."