The French were brave; but they hated the Germans and thought that they must make war on the Germans, and they were a cruel people, guilty of many atrocities. So the Fatherland had fought to conquer the enemies who planned her destruction. A peculiar, childlike naïveté accompanied his intelligence, trained to run in certain grooves, which is the product of the German type of popular education; that trust in his superiors which comes from a diligent and efficient paternalism. He knew nothing of the atrocities which Germans were said to have committed in Belgium. The British and the French had set Belgium against Germany and Germany had to strike Belgium for playing false to her treaties. But he did think that the French were brave; only misled by their Government. And the Kaiser? His eyes lighted in a way that suggested that the Kaiser was almost a god to him. He had heard of the things that the British said against the Kaiser and they made him want to fight for his Kaiser. He was only one German—but the one was millions.
In actual learning which comes from schoolbooks, I think that he was better informed than the average Frenchman of his class; but I should say that he had thought less; that his mind was more of a hot- house product of a skilful nurseryman's hand, who knew the value of training and feeding and pruning the plant if you were to make it yield well. A kindly, willing, likable boy, peculiarly simple and unspoiled, it seemed a pity that all his life he should have to bear the brand of the Lusitania on his brow; that event which history cannot yet put in its true perspective. Other races will think of the Lusitania when they meet a German long after the Belgian atrocities are forgotten. It will endure to plague a people like the exile of the Acadians, the guillotining of innocents in the French Revolution, and the burning of the Salem witches. But he had nothing to do with it. A German admiral gave an order as a matter of policy to make an impression that his submarine campaign was succeeding and to interfere with the transport of munitions, and the Kaiser told this boy that it was right. One liked the boy, his loyalty and his courage; liked him as a human being. But one wished that he might think more. Perhaps he will one of these days, if he survives the war.
VII
How The Kaiser Leads
Only a week before I had seen wounded Germans in the freight shed at Calais; and all the prisoners that I had seen elsewhere, whether in ones or twos, brought in fresh from the front or in columns under escort, had been Germans. The sharpest contrast of all in war which the neutral may observe is seeing the men of one army which, from the other side, he had watched march into battle—armed, confident, disciplined parts of an organization, ready to sweep all before them in a charge—become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganized, rounded up like vagrants in a bread-line and surrounded by a fold of barbed wire and sentries.
Such was the lot of the nine thousand British, French, and Russians whom I saw at Döberitz, near Berlin. This was a show camp, I was told, but it suffices. Conditions at other camps might be worse; doubtless were. England treated its prisoners best, unless my information from unprejudiced observers be wrong. But Germany had enormous numbers of prisoners. A nation in her frame of mind thought only of the care of the men who could fight for her, not of those who had fought against her.
Then, the German nature is one thing and the British another. Crossing the Atlantic on the Lusitania we had a German reserve officer who was already on board when the evening editions arrived at the pier with news that England had declared war on Germany. Naturally he must become a prisoner upon his arrival at Liverpool. He was a steadfast German. When a wireless report of the German repulse at Liege came, he would not believe it. Germany had the system and Germany would win. But when he said, "I should rather be a German on board a British ship than a Briton on board a German ship, under the circumstances," his remark was significant in more ways than one.
His English fellow-passengers on that splendid liner which a German submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy. They passed the time of day with him and seemed to want to make his awkward situation easy. Yet it was apparent that he regarded their kindliness as racial weakness. Krieg ist Krieg. When Germany made war she made war.
So allowances are in order. One prison camp was like another in this sense, that it deprived a man of his liberty. It put him in jail. The British regular, who is a soldier by profession, was, in a way, in a separate class. But the others were men of civil industries and settled homes. Except during their term in the army, they went to the shop or the office every day, or tilled their farms. They were free; they had their work to occupy their minds during the day and freedom of movement when they came home in the evening. They might read the news by their firesides; they were normal human beings in civilized surroundings.
Here, they were pacing animals in a cage, commanded by two field- guns, who might walk up and down and play games and go through the daily drill under their own non-commissioned officers. It was the mental stagnation of the thing that was appalling. Think of such a lot for a man used to action in civil life—and they call war action! Think of a writer, a business man, a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, reduced to this fenced-in existence, when he had been the kind who got impatient if he had to wait for a train that was late! Shut yourself up in your own backyard with a man with a rifle watching you for twenty- four hours and see whether, if you have the brain of a mouse, prison- camp life can be made comfortable, no matter how many greasy packs of cards you have. And lousy, besides! At times one had to laugh over what Mark Twain called "the damfool human race."
Inside a cookhouse at one end of the enclosure was a row of soup- boilers. Outside was a series of railings, forming stalls for the prisoners when they lined up for meals. In the morning, some oatmeal and coffee; at noon, some cabbage soup boiled with desiccated meat and some bread; at night, more coffee and bread. How one thrived on this fare depended much upon how he liked cabbage soup. The Russians liked it. They were used to it.