Читать книгу The Better Germany in War Time: Being Some Facts Towards Fellowship - Harold W. Picton - Страница 30

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The report already given makes it clear that very similar complaints, or (as Mr. Jackson puts it [page 16]) complaints that were “exact counterparts” as to food, have often been made on both sides. It is also plain that complaints on this score in German camps have been by no means universal. I do not in the least suppose that the food in general would be satisfying or other than dreadfully monotonous. (“Oft recht eintönig,” says Professor Stange quite frankly in his interesting pamphlet on Göttingen camp.) Loss of appetite, depression, indigestion will then in many cases produce grave physical trouble. All this may occur and does occur, without anything like a deliberate attempt at starvation. British born wives of interned Germans would sometimes, even before the reduction of rations, speak bitterly of their husbands’ needs. An anti-English journalist might have used such complaints to charge us with starvation. But even perfectly bona fide complaints need indicate only monotony, loss of robustness, and consequent physical (and mental) ills—and indeed the tragedy of these things may become terribly dark. It is, however, something very different from deliberate starvation.

In any comparison between the two sides it is only fair to take into account the special difficulties of the German case. The number of prisoners in Germany by August, 1915, was probably over one million. This is an enormous figure. While Great Britain and her Allies have tried to prevent food from reaching Germany, the drain upon the German food stock has continually grown as the number of prisoners has increased. By the end of 1917 this famished country had to support probably more than two million extra persons. The French Press long ago frankly regarded this as one of the means of helping towards the starving out of Germany, while in an American cartoon the Russian prisoners were figured as an enormous beast with its head in a cupboard labelled “Germany’s Food Supply.” These are considerations for the fair-minded, and it is for them to recall that as soon as there was in our own case a menace of food shortage, there was also what might in official language be described as a complete revision of the prisoners’ rations. The prisoners’ own language would very likely describe it differently. We can scarcely be surprised at sad and even very bitter words at times from prisoners’ wives.

That prisoners themselves are, however, sometimes able to envisage the difficulties is indicated by the following extract from a Daily News interview with a corporal repatriated from Münster. He commented on the fact that some men were the recipients of more parcels than they needed, while others got none. The interview continues:

You see, without regular parcels from home a man simply starves at a camp like Münster. If the Germans had the food I believe they would give it, but they haven’t: they are starving themselves.[3] All they allowed us was bread and water and thin soup. The consequence is that the men who get no parcels have to go round begging from the other chaps just to keep body and soul together.

From what I saw of it, getting so much while others get nothing isn’t good for a man either. Some fellows—the stingy sort—will save up their parcels against a rainy day. Make a regular little store they will. Others—the lively sort—sell what they have over to the unlucky ones, and spend their time gambling with the few marks they make. Poor devils! You can’t blame them!

The word “starvation” has been, and is here, too freely, if very naturally, used. The remarks of Lord Newton, speaking in the House of Lords on May 31, 1916, are important in this connection:

If Lord Beresford was accurate in his assumption that prisoners of war would literally starve to death if parcels did not arrive, hundreds of thousands of prisoners would be dead already. Russian prisoners, of whom there were over a million in Germany, received no parcels at all, and if it was impossible to exist upon the food supplied by the Germans, these men would literally have died like flies. … Lord Beresford and other noble lords had been rather prone to ignore the fact that Germany was a blockaded country. It was common knowledge that there was a general scarcity of food throughout Germany, and, if the prisoners did not get as much as they ought to have, in all probability the vast majority of the German population was in a state of comparative hunger. … He could not see what advantage there was in making out that the case of our prisoners was worse than it really was, and it seemed to him little short of an act of cruelty to the relations of these unfortunate men to lead them to suppose that our men were not only in a state of misery, but in a state of starvation.—(Morning Post, June 1, 1916).

There is no question either that nerve strain and monotony accentuate the critical attitude towards food. Here is an extract from Mr. Jackson’s report on Senne (September 11, 1915): “There were some complaints, as usual, in regard to the food. I had arrived in the camp just after the midday meal was served, and while some of the men said that the meat had been bad, and they wished that I had an opportunity to taste it, others said that the meat had been particularly good, because the officers had heard that I was coming. None of them knew that I had actually eaten a plate of their soup and had found it excellent, both palatable and nutritious, and that my visit to this particular camp had not been announced in advance. The menu for the day had been made out at the beginning of the week, and could not have been changed after my presence in the camp was known, and I had a bowl of the soup which was left over after the prisoners had been served.” (Miscel. 19 [1915], page 41.)

It is sometimes forgotten that complaints as to food are frequent in all institutions, schools, colleges, workhouses, hospitals, etc. I have before me a recent letter from an Englishman in a consumptive sanatorium in his own country: “I exist as best I can, and the less said about it the better. I am no better, and only glad that I am not worse. I at least don’t feel so ill as I did a week ago, although I have lost 3½ lbs. since then. The food is atrocious, and my appetite small. The fellows here buy quite two-thirds of what they eat, otherwise they too would lose in weight. No good comes of making complaints … nothing is ever done.” Things may be so, I am not a great believer in institutions, but certainly independent investigation is needed to warrant any conclusion. The same I feel to be the case as to complaints of feeding, whether in British or German camps.

Each side, too, is also unreasonably certain of its own justice and of the injustice of the others. Thus the Social Democrat, Herr Stücklen, speaking in the Reichstag debate of June 6, 1916, said: “I have received a letter about the treatment of our prisoners in France which says, ‘If pigs were so fed by us they would go on hunger strike.’ But I do not wish our Government to exercise reprisals, which, after all, could only hit the innocent.” [Cambridge Magazine, August 26, 1916, Supplement “Prisoners.” An important supplement for those who wish to get a glimpse (it is no more than a glimpse) of recriminations made by others as to treatment of prisoners.] It is odd how exactly the same phrases occur on both sides. Thus a private at Döberitz, according to the unknown American journalist referred to on pages 5 and 25, relieved his feelings as to the German food with the words: “I ’ad a sow. And even she wouldn’t eat skilly.”

To suit the tastes of all the different nationalities would at any time be difficult; under war conditions it is impossible. Professor Stange relates how the hostess of some Russian working prisoners thought to give them a specially good meal of meat. The result, however, was less bulky than a soup, and the Russian comment on this occasion was, “Mother good, eating not good.” (“Das Gefangenen-Lager in Göttingen,” page 9.)