A great deal has been said and written on the subject of the treatment of British prisoners of war, and the general idea at the present moment is one of a succession of unparalleled brutalities and insults. That much inhumanity has been shown it is neither possible nor desirable to deny, and it is only just that those responsible should have to give an account of their actions. But it must be borne in mind that though all the instances brought forward are perfectly true and authentic, propaganda aims not at the vraie vérité, but at the establishment of an argument; and the individual instances, which have formed the foundations of this conception of inhumanity, do not present a complete picture of captivity, and should not be taken as typical of every prison camp.{117}

Of course one can only write about what one knows. Baden-Hessen is one of the more moderate provinces; and the treatment of officers is infinitely better than that of the men. But, speaking from my own experience, I can say with perfect sincerity that, from the moment when I was captured to the moment of release, I was not subjected to a single insult or a single act of brutality. I was treated with as much courtesy as I should have expected from a battalion orderly-room, and the discomforts and inconveniences of the journey were due in the main to faulty organisation. It sounds bad when one hears that a batch of prisoners were sent on a four days’ journey with rations for one day, but the corollary that the accompanying German sentries were provided with exactly the same amount of food casts a very different aspect on the case.

The starvation of prisoners has become almost an axiom, and indeed they were miserably underfed; but so was the entire{118} German people, and the custom of treating prisoners as well as civilians is confined to England. Among all continental nations it is an understood thing that on the scale of diet the enemy should come last, and in Germany there was only enough food for a bare existence.

In this respect, I believe, officers were much more fortunate than their men, and certainly they had the great advantage of a permanent address. For the men were being continually moved from one camp to another. At one time they would be working in the fields, at another in the salt mines, sometimes stopping for a couple of months, sometimes only for a few days. The result of this was that their parcels were trailing after them right across Germany. At times they would go several months without one at all, and then if they had the luck to make somewhere a prolonged sojourn, they might receive thirteen parcels within three days. Of course the men shared out their parcels as far as possible, but they were never{119} certain what was coming next, and they had many very hungry days.

With us there was none of that: we were in a permanent camp, and our parcels when once they had begun to arrive came through regularly. There were delays occasionally, especially when heavy fighting involved congestion of the railways; but eventually we received every parcel dispatched from a central committee. The only ones that did get lost were the home parcels that were sent privately. Everything sent from the Red Cross Committee, or from Harrod’s or Selfridge’s, arrived intact and in perfect condition.

As regards actual treatment, owing to the fact that officers were not made to work, there were very few occasions when physical violence was possible, cases of this sort generally occurring when men proved intractable in the factories. The only opportunities that were presented were when officers tried to get away, and the sentries availed themselves of these chances pretty generously.{120}

There were four or five attempted escapes, and on two of these occasions the officers were badly mauled by the sentries. The second time that this happened the German orderly officer put a stop to this treatment at once; but on the first occasion the officer stood by while the sentries belaboured their captive with the butts of their rifles.

The would-be Monte Cristos turned to the German officer and asked him if he considered such treatment proper for a British officer.

The German shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well,” he said, “you must expect this sort of thing if you try to escape. You ought to stop in your room.”

Before, this particular German had always been especially agreeable to us. The only possible excuse for his behaviour lies in the fact that he was very fond of the bottle, and might have been a little drunk. But however one looks at it, it was a sufficiently discreditable affair.

Of the insults and degradations to which the officers of the camp at Holzminden were{121} subjected we had no experience. The Germans adopted towards us an invariable attitude of respect that was if anything too suave. They were always profuse with promises, but it was very hard to get anything out of them.

“Oh, yes,” they would say, “we can do that easily. We will go to the General and it will be all right. Don’t worry any more about it. We’ll see to it, it will be quite simple.”

But nothing ever happened. The simplest request always managed to lose itself somewhere between the block office and the Commandant’s study; and gradually we learnt that formal applications were no use whatsoever, and that if any one wished to change from one room to another, the surest way to get there was to collect all his baggage into a heap and move there independently.

The probable cause of this was the General himself, who was one of the most arrogant and pompous little men that militarism could produce. He was the complete Prussian,{122} the Prussian of the music-hall and the Lyceum. Very small and straight, he would strut about the parade-ground clanking his spurs, or else he would stand in a pose, his cloak pulled back to reveal his Iron Cross. And he was utterly vindictive. One does not wish to misjudge any human being, but I feel sure he must have derived an acute pleasure from sitting at his window and looking down on the court, his eyes hungry for some misdemeanour on............