§ 1

Since my return, so many people have asked me whether prisoners of war had any idea of the turn affairs were taking during the autumn, that it would be as well to state here exactly what our sources of information were. There were only two papers printed in English, the Anti-Northcliffe Times and the Continental Times. The former I never saw, and it cannot have had a very large circulation. But the Continental Times, which appeared three times a week, was to be found in every room in the camp. It was the most mendacious chronicle. It was printed at Berlin, and was published solely for British prisoners of war; a more foolish production can hardly{223} be imagined. Its views, political and military, changed with each day’s tidings, and its chief object was to impress on British prisoners the relative innocence of Germany and perfidy of the Entente. But it was so badly done that it can never have achieved its ends. It was far too violent, and so obviously partial. Its only interesting features were the reproductions from the English weeklies of articles by men like Ivor Brown and Bertrand Russell; once they even paid me the doubtful honour of a quotation, a tribute considerably enhanced by the appearance of the poem under the name of Siegfried Sassoon.

But no one took the Continental Times seriously, and the paper that we relied on for our news was the Frankfurter Zeitung, the representative organ of the Rhine towns. There were two issues daily. The morning one contained the Alliance communiqués, and the evening one the Entente. Like all other German papers, it was under the strictest censorship of the military bureaucrats,{224} but it maintained nevertheless an extraordinary impartiality. It rarely indulged in heroics, and except for a little “hot air” on March 22nd it kept its head remarkably well. It is, of course, the most moderate paper in the country, and the Berliner Tageblatt is considerably more hectic. But the Frankfurter Zeitung was, certainly during the period of my captivity, more restrained than any British daily publication. It can be most fittingly compared, in tone though not in politics, with our sixpenny weekly papers whose appeal is to the educated classes.

From this paper we could get a pretty fair idea of how things were going; but even without the paper we should have been prepared for the debacle of November. For we could see what the papers do not show—and that is the psychology of the people. For so long their hopes had been buoyed up by the expectations of immediate victories in the field; they had been told that the March offensive would most surely bring{225} them this peace; and on this belief had rested their entire faith. For this they had maintained a war that was crippling them. They had endured sufferings greater than those of either France or England. Their casualties had been colossal, the civilian population had been starved. But yet they had hung on, because they had been told that victory would bring them peace; and then Foch attacked; their expectations were overthrown; the Entente were still fresh and ready to fight. There was talk of unlimited resources, and Germany was faced with the prospect of a long and harassing war that could end only in exhaustion and reverse; and that the German people were not prepared to endure.

For there will always come a point at which the individual will refuse to have his interests sacrificed for a collective abstraction with which he has not identified himself. Mankind in the mass has neither mind nor memory, and can be swayed and blinded by a clever politician; it can be led to the{226} brink of folly without realising what road it follows. Collectively it is capable of injustice which in an individual it would never countenance; but sooner or later the collective emotion yields before the personal demand, and the individual asks himself, “Why am I doing this? Am I benefiting from it; and if I am not benefiting from it, who is?” For, of course, by even the most successful war the position of the individual is not improved. The indemnities and confiscations that the treaty brings never cover the expenses and privations previously entailed. And collective honour is perishable stuff. But as long as the war is successful, the politicians are able to persuade the people that they are actually gaining something from it. They can say, “We have got this island and that; here our frontier has been pushed forwards, and in return for that small concession, look, behold an indemnity.” And because mankind has neither mind nor memory it is prepared to forget the millions of pounds{227} that had to be spent first, and the quantity of blood that had to be spilt.

That is when the war is successful; but when defeat looms near, whatever the courtly ministers may urge, the individual will contrast in his own mind the ravages, that another two years of warfare will entail, with the possible emoluments that may lie at the end of them. He will say to himself, “It is reasonable to expect that, by fighting for another two years, we may eventually get better terms than we should get now, if we signed a peace. But to me personally, is the difference sufficient to warrant the sufferings of a protracted war?” And the answer, as often as not, is “No.” That is, as far as one can judge, the sort of argument that presented itself to the individual German in the weeks following Foch’s resumption of the attack. And in determining the forces that went to the framing of that “no,” the most important thing to realise is that Germany was actually starving.

That this is so, a certain portion of the{228} Press has, during the last month, attempted to deny; and it is rumoured that the armies of occupation have found the German towns well stocked with food. If this last report is true, I do not profess to be able to explain it; but of one thing there can be no doubt, while we were prisoners in Mainz the German people there were not merely hungry, they were starving. It is true that meat was obtainable in restaurants, but only at a price so high as to be well beyond the means of even the moderately wealthy. A dinner, consisting of a plate of soup and a plate of meat and vegetables, would in places cost as much as twelve to fifteen marks, and the majority of men and women had to exist entirely on their rations. Of many of the necessaries of life it was impossible to get enough, especially in the case of butter and milk and cheese. Of meat there was very little, and flour could only be bought at an exorbitant price. The bread ration was small, and eggs were rarely obtainable. Potatoes alone were plentiful, and two years{229} of such a diet had considerably lowered the nation’s vitality.

In times of sickness this weakness produced heavy fatalities, especially among the children. A German father even went to the lengths of offering an English officer a hundred marks for a shilling packet of chocolate to give to his son who was sick. And all the children born during the last two years are miserably weak and puny; some of them even having no nails on their toes and fingers.

“You are not a father, so you will not understand,” a German soldier said to me. “But it is a most terrible thing to watch, as I have watched during the last four years, a little boy growing weaker and paler month after month; and I can tell you that when I look at my little boy, all that I want is that this war should end, I do not care how.”

And it is only natural that the individual parent should feel like this, and I do not think that in England we quite realise all that Germany has suffered. I remember{230} one morning after the signing of the armistice that some small boys of about seven years old climbed up the outside of the citadel, and asked us for some food. We gave them a few biscuits; they were very hard and dry, but I have never seen such excitement and joy on a child’s face before. It was a most pathetic sight. A child of that age cannot feign an emotion, and those children were absolutely starving.

And the knowledge that this was so must have had a very saddening effect on the German soldier at the front. For one of the very few consolations that were granted to a British soldier in the line was the certainty that his wife and family were well and safe. But the German soldier must have been faced continually with the thought that, whatever sufferings he might himself endure, he could not protect those he loved from the hunger that was crushing them, and for him those long cold nights and lonely watches must have been unrelieved by any gleam of hope.{231}

It is not natural that any nation should bear such hardships for an instant longer than they appeared absolutely needful, and when it became quite clear that the Entente had not only survived the March offensive, but had emerged from it with undiminished powers, the Germans began to agitate for an instant peace. At the beginning they were not aware of their weakness in the field, and when the first armistice note was sent the terms expected were very light.

“We shall probably have to evacuate France and Belgium,” they said, “and perhaps Italy and Palestine. That’s all the guarantee that will be required.”

And at this point, as far as we could gather, there was very little animosity against the Kaiser.

“Of course,” they said, “this sort of thing must not happen again. We shall have to tie him down a good deal. Ministers will have to be responsible to the Reichstag and not to him. That should ensure us.”

There was hardly any talk of a republic.{232}

But when the Austrian and Bulgarian armies crumpled up, and Foch began to threaten invasion from every side, it was as if a sort of panic seized the Germans. They felt that they must have an armistice at any cost, and were terribly afraid it would not be granted them. They thought that the French would demand revenge for every indignity and injustice they had suffered in 1871; and when they realised that the Entente was not prepared to treat with the Kaiser, they clamoured for his abdication. It was an ignoble business. Even the Frankfurter Zeitung joined in the tumult. There was a general terror which gave birth to the revolution.
§ 2

The revolutionists arrived at Mainz on Friday, November 8th, and the first intimation we received of their presence was the arrival on morning parade of the German adjutant in a civilian suit. He had apparently spent the previous evening at K?ln,{233} where all officers had been advised either to leave the town as speedily as possible, or else change into mufti. This gallant officer did both, and for the first time since we were captured, we were dismissed without an appel.

During the whole of that day the camp was possessed of rumours. At any moment we were told the revolutionaries might present themselves before the gates; we should be in their hands; our whiskered sentries would have neither the power nor the inclination to protect us. Thoughts of Bolshevism worked disquietingly within our minds; we pictured a sanguinary contest between the military and socialist parties, and we were a little nervous lest the caprice of the moment should ally us with one or other of the warring parties. The town was clearly under the power of the Red Flag. German officers were not allowed in the streets in u............