He realises that he is hungry, he stalks in and helps himself to what he wants. If they go without, what matter? Falsehoods of every kind are freely circulated. France has been defeated; England has betrayed her; the English have seized Calais; the English have been driven into the sea; London has fallen. With the utmost duplicity every effort is made to undermine faith in the Alliance, to persuade people that England is a traitor to their cause, hoodwinking them in order to gain her own ends.
A peasant told one of our workers that she, too, had been a prisoner, and though hungry, was not otherwise ill-treated. One day when she and the other women went to get their soup the Germans, as they ladled it out, said, "There is dessert for you to-day" (the dessert being repatriation). "Yes, you are going back to France; but there is no bread there, so we don't know how you will live. You must go through Switzerland, where there is no food either. The best thing for you to do is to throw yourselves into Lake Constance."
It is by such apish tricks as these that the lot of the unhappy people is made almost intolerable.
No letters, no newspapers, no news, only a few guarded lines at rare intervals from a prisoner in Germany— is it any wonder that the strongest nerves give way, and that hysterical women creep over the frontier to France? They are alone, they are cold and hungry, and oh, how desperately they are afraid! They dare not chat together in the street, a soldier soon stops all THAT, and at any moment some pitiful unintentional offence may send them under escort into Germany.
A woman owns a foal, chance offers her an opportunity of selling it; she does so, and is sentenced to imprisonment in Germany for a year. She has sinned against an unknown or imperfectly understood law. She has no counsel to defend her; her trial, if she is honoured with one, is the hollowest mockery.
There is living in the rue St Mihiel in Bar-le-Duc, or there was in the spring of 1917, a woman who spent six months in a German prison. Her offence? A very natural one. She had heard nothing of her husband for two years; then one day a neighbour told her she had reason to believe that he was a prisoner in Germany. A hint to that effect had come in a letter. If Madame wrote to a soldier in such and such a prison he might be able to give her news of him.
The letter was written, despatched, and opened by the German censor. Now it is a crime to try and elicit information about a prisoner even if he happens to be your husband, and even if you have heard nothing of him for two long years. Madame was separated from her children and speedily found herself in a German prison—one, too, which was not reserved for French or Belgian women, but was the common prison of a large town. Here she was classed with the "drunks and disorderlies," the riff-raff, women of no character, and classed, too, with Belgian nuns and gentlewomen, many of them of the highest rank, whose offence was not that of writing letters, but of shielding, or being accused of shielding, Belgian soldiers from the Germans who were hunting them down like rats.
Compelled to wear prison clothes, to eat the miserable prison fare, work and associate with women of the worst character, many of them had been there for years, and some were serving life-sentences. Representations had been made on their behalf, but for a long time in vain. Then as a great concession they were given permission to wear their own clothes and exercise in a yard apart, but the concession was a grudging one, and when one of the nuns dared to ask for more food she was promptly transferred back again to the main building.
When the release of prisoners is being discussed round the Peace Table, it is to be hoped that the needs of these women will not be forgotten.
IV