§ 1
within a few weeks, however, the arrival of a parcel had ceased to be an affair of momentous import. we could look on bully beef and maconochies with comparative unconcern. the contents of each parcel varied only in such incidentals as sugar, chocolate, and packets of whole rice. the framework was the same, a solid enough construction, but one that as a continuous diet proved ineffably tedious. to begin with, we tried to make our meals more interesting with improvised puddings. we mixed a certain number of different ingredients into a bowl of water, beat them up into a paste, and then baked them in a tepid oven. the result was usually stodgy and quite{130} tasteless. personal vanity prevented us from confessing this, and night after night we struggled through these lukewarm, unpalatable dishes. how long this would have gone on i do not know; when the end came it came very suddenly.
one evening there was a lecture in connection with the pitt league, and it was rumoured that colonel westcott was going to speak. and colonel westcott’s speeches were such that no one would willingly miss. he had always ready some new panacea, some fresh catchword. as long as he remained passive he was infinitely entertaining.
“we must go to this,” said evans, and with some alarm i noticed that of the five other members of our mess, four were preparing to move seating accommodation.
“that’s all very jolly,” i said, “but who’s going to cook the dinner?”
the answer came back with a startling unanimity.
“you.”
“but look here,” i began to protest,{131} “you know what i am at these things. i’ve never cooked a dinner before.”
“time you began then.”
and i was left standing before an empty stove. there remained only one other member of our mess, my friend barron, who spent the greater part of his day asleep. i woke him up.
“barron,” i said, “we’ve got to cook the dinner.”
he blinked up through sleep-laden eyes.
“but, my dear alec....”
“it’s no good,” i said sternly. “if we want anything to eat, and i most certainly do, we’ve got to cook it ourselves.”
slowly barron rose from his seat.
“well,” he said, “what have you got?”
“there’s a tin of bully, some beans, half a maconochie, we can make a stew of that.”
the stew was the work of a second. we mixed it all up with water, scattered some salt on the top, and left it to boil.
“and now the pudding,” i said.
this proved a more difficult matter. there{132} was no rice left, and we had used the last of the turban packets.
“archie,” i said, “we’ll have to invent one.”
for five minutes we argued about the ingredients. hodges wanted to give it a fish-flavour by adding a tin of salmon and shrimp paste.
“there’s been no taste to the beastly thing for the last six days,” he protested. “it might just as well taste of that as nothing.”
finally, however, we decided on what we euphemistically dubbed a chocolate soufflé. first of all we spread a handkerchief flat on the table, and sprinkled over it a little cornflour. we then took a packet of cocoa.
“how much shall i upset?” i asked.
we read the directions on the outside, but on the subject of chocolate soufflés the manufacturers were sadly reticent. so as there was no clear guide, we used the entire packet.
the mixture now seemed to demand some{133} moisture, so we poured a little warm water on it, and tried to knead it into a dough. but it did not work: a brown paste adhered to our fingers; nothing more.
“it won’t bind,” said barron. “we must put some butter with it.”
“we’ve got no butter.”
“oh, well, then, try some beef-dripping.”
so the next ingredient was half a tin of dripping, and as regards appearances it certainly had excellent results. a few minutes’ hard kneading produced an admirable dough. but when we sucked our fingers afterwards, the flavour was anything but that of chocolate. it had a thick and greasy taste.
“alec,” said hodges, “this dripping’s ruined it.”
“your idea,” i said cheerfully.
for a moment he looked fierce, then returned to the matter in hand.
“something’s got to be done,” he said; “we’ve got to swamp that dripping somehow.”{134}
“what about some treacle?” i hazarded. “we drew some this afternoon.”
and within a minute the bulk of our pudding was further increased by an entire tin of treacle, and whatever its taste after that, it was certainly not of dripping.
“that’s about enough, isn’t it?” i said.
“well, you know,” said archie thoughtfully, “i don’t really think it would be harmed by some salmon and shrimp. after all, it would help to counterbalance the dripping.”
but already i had begun to wrap the handkerchief round the brown sticky ball. when it was firmly incased and knotted, we lowered it into a small saucepan, put it on the oven, and waited for the wanderers’ return.
they came back as usual with a great clatter of feet, expressing their hunger in the most forcible terms.
“hellish hungry,” shouted evans, “and the dinner’s bound to be awful if waugh’s cooked it.”{135}
“you wait,” i said, and plumped the stew down before him. this dish, probably because it had cooked itself, was quite eatable; and there was so much of it that in the earlier days it would have formed a meal of generous proportions. and by the time we had finished it, none of us felt in the mood for any more solid fare. something delicate and appetising would have been delightful, a pêche melba perhaps, but suet ... no. and of course this rather militated against the success of the chocolate soufflé.
and to begin with, it was a little burnt. there was a large hole in the encircling handkerchief, and the bottom of the pudding was black. considering the bulk of the pudding, this had really very little effect; but it prejudiced the others, and the artist has to be so tactful with his public.
and then the pudding itself. well, if we had not had the stew first, i am sure we should have all enjoyed it; but coming as it did on the top of a heavy dinner, even barron and myself were hard driven to finish it.{136} and it was only self-respect that made us. the others took a spoonful or two and desisted. barron and i struggled manfully to the end, and were then conscious of four steely pairs of eyes. evans, who acted as a sort of mess president, was the first to speak.
“what did you two use to make this pudding?”
“oh, nothing much,” i said, in an offhand way; “a little cocoa, a little treacle, a little cornflour.” somehow i felt i could not confess to the dripping.
“but how much did you use?”
barron must be a braver man than i am, or it may have been he was still feeling a little sore because the salmon paste had not been included; at any rate he went straight to the point.
“a tin of each.”
there was a general consternation. that a whole tin of treacle, half a tin of dripping, a complete packet of cocoa, had all gone to a pudding {137}that only a third of the mess had been able to eat at all ... it was unbelievable, a gross case of misplaced trust, perfidy could go no further.
barron and myself were not popular that evening. but our peccadilloes bore fruit later. that chocolate soufflé served the purpose of a climax. from that day onward it was implicitly understood that no cook should invent recipes for puddings.
§ 2
with the regular arrival of parcels, and the consequent immunity from hunger, our life settled down into that ordered calm which would have been the constant level of our routine as long as the war lasted. and it was here that captivity weighed most heavily.
before, our routine had always been to a certain extent progressive. we had been a new camp, we had had to form societies and committees. we had a library to build up, and there was always the parcel list to add its daily incentive to enthusiasm. but there came a time, when all these wishes{138} either for books or food were satisfied, and when the individual had to depend for amusement solely on his own resources. here was the real trial of captivity.
since my return several people have said to me, “it must have been beastly living among the huns.” but that was an infliction that it required little fortitude to bear. the huns never worried us, unless we worried them. we could have exactly as much intercourse with them as we wanted, and there was no need to have anything to do with them at all. but there was no escape from the continual presence of five hundred british officers, and the continual conversation of the ten other members of the room. for not one moment was it possible to be alone. and as the evenings grew darker, the doors of the blocks were closed earlier; and by october we found ourselves shut in at six o’clock, with the prospect of a long evening in the room.
those evenings were simply appalling. we all got on each other’s nerves horribly;{139} as individuals we liked each other well enough; but it was no joke to be in the constant company of the same people, to hear the same anecdotes, the same opinions; and, owing to the limited area of common interests, talk always centred on the war. and there is no subject more wearisomely distasteful. by the end of six months’ imprisonment nearly every one had got utterly fed up with his room and the inmates of it. smith would meet brown outside the kantine, and a conversation of this sort would take place.
“my lord, brown, but my room is the absolute limit, it drives me nearly wild.”
“but, my dear man, you’ve got some topping fellows in there, there’s jones and hawkins and may.”
“i dare say, but you try living with them for a bit. you wouldn’t talk like that then.”
“oh, well,” brown would say, “you haven’t got much to grumble at; if you were in my room, now....”{140}
“but your room, brown; why, there are some tophole men there....”
and so the world went round. for indeed, however patient one is, it is impossible to live in the same room as ten other men, to eat there and sleep there, to spend half the day in their company, and not get nervy. before long we had reached that state when we quarrelled over the most trifling things—about the dinner, whether we should have bully beef or a veal loaf. the slightest inconvenience awoke resentment. all the domestic details that cause friction in the married home were with us intensified a hundredfold, because there was with us none of the real and selfless affection which alone can bridge over these difficulties. things had reached a sorry state by the time we had left; there was hardly a single officer who had a good word to say about his room. what we should have been like after another year i dread to imagine.
as it was, it was bad enough. for myself i never stayed in the room one moment more{141} 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.{142}
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{143} 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{144} 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{145} 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.
the first hobby was wood-carving, an affair so hazardous that the first day numbered about ten per cent. casualties. it demanded enormous delicacy. boxes of all descriptions were on sale, on which were traced patterns of labyrinthic intricacy; one could cut photo frames, cigar boxes, paper cutters, and to accomplish this labour there were provided small knives of a razor-like sharpness, which under the influence of the{146} least overweight of pressure flew off the box at an alarming angle, to bury themselves in the palm of the other hand. it required enormous patience, and to me appeared one of the most monotonous occupations. it took hours of work to complete the smallest job.
this, of course, was not at all what the kantine wallahs desired. they wanted a hobby which would require a lot of material and very little time. wood-carving took much too long, and the profits arrived much too slowly, and so they accelerated the slump in wood-carving by the innovation of satin-tasso, which was in every way a far more noble craft.
to begin with, it gave the personality of the artist a fuller freedom. in wood-carving individual preference was hopelessly bound down by the laws of pattern. as in the cast of certain modern painters who having once conceived a “stunt,” proceed to pour the most unlikely moods into one artistic mould, the individual was a slave to shapes. against{147} this, liberty was driven to revolt, and satin-tasso provided the necessary outlet.
even here, of course, there were, it is true, laws and patterns, but there was full scope for the peculiarities of taste. the satin-tasso box had on it simply the bare outline of a picture. this one cut round with a sharp knife, and then proceeded to colour in with special paints; and in the employment of these paints any extravagance was permitted. medi?val costumes offered superb opportunities for splendour and pagan gold. across a pearl-flecked sky emerald clouds could fade into a wash of scarlet. it was truly a noble craft, and the whole business only took a few hours, which was most advantageous both for the suppliers and the supplied.
there is nothing that pleases the craftsman more than the sight of a finished article, and there is nothing that gives more pleasure to the tradesman than the swift return of gigantic profits, and both these wishes were granted. the kantine did a roaring trade{148} in satin-tasso, and the portmanteaus of the artisan grew heavy with trophies and souvenirs.
but all the same it was rather a pathetic sight to see a man of about twenty-eight, in the prime of life, sitting down every afternoon and evening, fiddling about with a piece of wood and a box of paints. he derived no pleasure from it: it merely served the purpose of a narcotic. as long as his hands were employed his brain would go to sleep, and he need no longer see the tedious procession of days that lay before him. he was symbolic in a way of the public school education that deliberately starves a boy’s intellect for the sake of his body. the type of clean-limbed britisher, that public schools produce, is all very well in its way, and is infinitely preferable to the type produced by any other system, either in england or france. of that there can be no doubt whatsoever. but the schoolmasters who adopt this line of argument, forget that they are dealing with a material refined upon{149} by the breeding of centuries. the question is not, “is the material good?” because it is. the question is, “does education make the best of this material?” and i am very certain that it does not. every man should have sufficient part in the intellectual interests of life, to be able to keep his intelligence active for eight months in surroundings that provide no physical outlets. for after all, it is the mind, or, to use pater’s phrase, “the imaginative reason” that counts.
“thank god that while the nerves decay
and muscles desiccate away,
the brain’s the hardiest part of men
and thrives till threescore years and ten.”
and it is surely a severe condemnation of any system that its average products can derive no sustenance from the contemplative side of life, that the moment they are out of the theatres, they have absolutely no resources left. it would have given me the most acute satisfaction to have been able to escort there some of the many schoolmasters who so fiercely defended themselves behind{150} the legend, “by our works ye shall judge us,” which was exactly what i tried to do.
the narrow limits of our captivity provided us with only one other craze, the last and the most decadent, for which reason, probably, it was the only one to which i succumbed—manicure. it was really a tempting lure. one evening i went to the kantine to buy a pencil, and saw a row of beautiful plush boxes, in which reposed long-handled files, and scissors, and knives; and beside these were bottles of delicate scents and polishes and powders, strangely reminiscent of amiens. the lure was too great, and forty marks went west.
from that day onwards our room was a sort of general manicuring saloon. several of us bought sets, and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. we received visitors. as our guests received treatment gratis, and the initial outlay towards the opening of the saloon was sufficiently generous, it might have been thought that our guests came out of the transaction rather well. but they paid richly{151} for their adornment in pain. we were all amateurs, and the manipulation of a pair of curved scissors requires feminine skill; no one has ever yet called me neat-fingered, and those scissors were very sharp. during the operations of our first fortnight, of all those who came to us with gay step, there were few who went away without at least one finger swathed in bandages.
