ENGINEER OF THE “HITACHI MARU.”
Carlsruhe Kriegsgefangenenlager being what was known as a Distribution Camp, there was a continual coming and going of officers. Here we had no continuing city. An occasional prisoner might linger on—as if entirely overlooked and forgotten—for a year or even two; in the majority of cases, however, the stay only extended for a few weeks, sometimes merely a few days. On three consecutive weeks the cast for one of our plays was removed almost en bloc. Friendships were formed overnight, to be violently disrupted by departure on the morrow. In our little world was a complete epitome of life.
One afternoon in early March there arrived in camp a cartload of trunks and sea-chests bearing strange hieroglyphics, with a rumour that these would be followed by the officers of various nationality, including Japanese, captured from the ships sunk by the notorious German cruiser Wolf.
Two days later they arrived, sailormen from the seven seas, British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, so that the next morning their blue suits and brown boots gave the salon d’appel the appearance of a mercantile marine office when a crew is signing on. Some of the Captains, grizzled and weather-beaten, had an easy gait, a quiet laying down of the foot, which inevitably suggested the bridge or the moving decks of ships; different entirely from the more formal military stride. Some of them were doubtless glad to stretch their legs, having been cruising in the piratical Wolf for a year or fifteen months.
The Japanese officers made me very heartily welcome to their hut, on a shelf in which I noticed immediately on my entry a little statue of Buddha. While I sketched some of these placid, not readily fathomable faces, I heard, in broken English, the tragic story of the broken life of their Captain, the Commander of the Hitachi Maru.
The Captain had intended suicide from the time he lost his vessel—thirteen of her crew were killed in the fight—and simply awaited his opportunity. This came to him in the darkness and amid the floes of Iceland, when the Wolf, with fangs red with blood, was running back for Kiel.
Engineer Lieut.-Commander K. Shiraishi, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is speaking, his immobile face—so that I may complete my sketch—as rigid as that of the little Buddha which I can see behind him. He has shared a berth with the Captain, and tells me that on the night of his disappearance he left the cabin, “and he come not back.” He had slipped quietly overboard—“in the dark and among the ice”—thus embarking on a final voyage, new and strange.
“All night we hear the ice grinding past the ship,” said my Lieut.-Commander, without the flicker of an eyelid. “In the dark—and among the ice!”
Returning to my hut, by a literary coincidence not uncommon, I opened Joseph Conrad, and read in “Il Conde”: “He put the tip of his finger on a spot close under his breast-bone, the very spot of the human body where a Japanese gentleman begins the operation of the Harakiri, which is a form of suicide following upon dishonour, upon an intolerable outrage to the delicacy of one’s feelings.”
Captain Meadows, of the Tarantella, the first steamer sunk by the Wolf, was a man of Herculean build, and quite apparently, and as befitted the skipper of a ship named as his was, he had led the German Commander something of a dance. Every morning, until he was caught in the act, the Captain used to empty the water from his bath into the sea, and with it a bottle giving the bearings of the Wolf, and some account of her depredations. Even when the time came that two or three German sailors flung themselves suddenly upon him, he succeeded in “mailing his letter,” and when he received a vehement reprimand he made retort that if the Commander thought it necessary to shout even louder he might use his megaphone!
CAPTAIN OF THE “TARANTELLA.”
The Wolf apparently employed a hydroplane with great effect in locating her prey, and in evading capture. The Captain of the Matunga showed me a snapshot—from which I made a sketch—of the last moments of his sinking ship.
However unwillingly officers may have come to Carlsruhe, there was always a certain loathness to leave for another camp, on the principle, doubtless, that it is better to “bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” There was something hugely diverting in the tenacity with which prisoners clung to whatever shred of office or appointment they could lay claim to. The members of the Cabinet cannot be more reluctant to leave hold of their portfolios than were the Gefangenen to pack up their portmanteaux.
A SERBIAN OFFICER PRISONER OF WAR
One officer was Secretary for the English section; another was Assistant Secretary, while there were a number of Committeemen whose labours were not over-arduous. Two or three of us attended to the distribution of food to the needy; two or three to the doling out of clothing to the nude. Then there were the masters of music; pianists, violinists, and at least one ’cellist; the dramatic entertainers under the “O.C. Theatres”; and a group of choristers who in chapel every Sunday evening at evensong did lustily raise their voices in “Magnificat” and “Nunc Dimittis”; partly, it must be confessed, that the Lord might let His servants remain in peace!
A REHEARSAL.
A Debating Society was formed, whose primary object, when the secrets of men’s hearts are laid bare, will probably prove to have been the providing of permanencies for the President and the Secretary. At these meetings, by the way, we gravely discussed problems so original as the Reconstitution of the Lords; the Influence of the Press; Classical or Modern Education in Public Schools; and with equal gravity on a more irresponsible evening the profound question, “Should bald heads be buttered?” To the best of my recollection we arrived at the conclusion that they should at least be boiled.
A French Captain, who in civil life was a wine merchant, gave a lecture on the wines and vineyards of France, the designing of a series of drawings and maps illustrative of which permitted me to pass out of my captivity for a spell, and wander in the pleasant region of the Gironde.
These were our only feasible ways of escape at Carlsruhe. A bird might flutter past the window of my chamber with a sharp little flight of song. At once I was out and away with it, not necessarily to the magnificences and splendours, but perhaps to almost penurious patches and spaces on the outskirts of the dour old town of my nativity, where pavement and grass-plot touch, and where, amid the lamp-posts and the telegraph poles, there are familiar trees to be recognized and loved—where, indeed, one may lift to the lips and kiss the hem of Nature’s somewhat bedraggled skirt. And still—“You can’t get out!” said the starling.
One morning, lying alongside him in my cot, I remarked to a fellow-prisoner, “You look very happy.” To which, being well versed in the Scriptures, he immediately retorted, “I am happy in all things saving these bonds!”
It is not good for man to be alone, but doubtless Gefangenen had a little too much of the gregarious—one felt a recurring need for some seclusion deeper than the common captivity. Such a place of retirement I ultimately discovered, not in the chapel, but in the more mundane environment of our tiny theatre, crawling mouse-like into a crevice between one of the sidewings and the wall. Here I was safe from even those who made their casual entrances and exits. Here also could I read to the plaintive accompaniment of M. Calvi’s violin busy on a Vieuxtemps “Air Varié,” or of M. Lazarri rehearsing a vocal number for Saturday evening’s concert—could indeed afford time to cheer and encourage these kindly artistes at the close of each piece by muffled applause from a hidden but not entirely anonymous audience.
At one corner of my narrow cell was a portion of a window giving on to the quadrangle, so that by raising an occasional eye I could see how our little world was wagging. To the rear was part of a set scene showing a lurid and blood-red sun setting over the waters, even in which primitive art there was the suggestion of many sunsets that I have seen; many that I yet hope to see.
Even in this quiet retreat, however, one could not count on being entirely free from faction and fight. On an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon, an English aviator at the piano and a French officer with a violin have fallen into feud over a matter of musical precedence, and within a few feet of each other are playing at the same time entirely different tunes, and that with vehemence and vindictiveness. The pianist, firmly planted on the piano stool, where he has spent most of the day, passes without pause or punctuation from Chopin to ragtime and from ragtime to absolute incoherence.
The Frenchman sits on a form with his back to the wall—literally and metaphorically—and vents his spleen on the catgut. I stand it for full fifteen minutes by my watch, and then, going quietly into the empty chapel and leaving the door sufficiently ajar, I open the organ, pull out all the stops, brace my knees against the swell pedals, and so burst into a sort of Grand Chœur in G.
When I emerged the Frenchman had fled and calm was once more settling upon the piano keys. Blessed are the peacemakers!
Our piano was ultimately a “baby” grand, though its tone was less infantile than suggestive of that of an old roué. Indeed, there was little grand about it, except that there was so little “upright.”
Early next morning I discovered the French violinist in the court taking a variety of exercise, running, circling on the horizontal bar, and jumping over the forms and seats, in an effort doubtless to keep the muscles and sinews of his body as taut as his fiddle-strings.
There was one respect in which we could quite legitimately claim to be having a stirring time in camp, and that was as regards our ceaseless culinary operations. Recurrently as cook it was one’s duty to see that the members of one’s mess did not perish of starvation, surfeit, or ptomaine poisoning. Frequently with inadequate means as regards fuel, so that I have suggested to an officer endeavouring to thaw tinned sausage over burning paper that he might try Thermogene! Personally I achieved something of repute—or disrepute—for two dishes of my own contriving, one a mock Scottish haggis, and the other what I am afraid was little more than a mockery of English plum-pudding.
It was through no reflection on our cooking, however, but simply for the reduction of a steadily increasing embonpoint that one of our number undertook a voluntary five days’ fast. Besides being under ordinary conditions extremely good-natured by day, X had a mirthful habit of laughing in his sleep, the only case in a considerable experience of somnambulistic phenomena among soldiers during the war which I have yet encountered.
In the early hours of the final morning of his fast he indeed laughed, but in a minor key, just a ghost of a guffaw, with a very apparent and pathetic tendency to merge into a sob. That morning he finished his fast and his breakfast almost simultaneously. In order that he should break the glad tidings gently, so to speak, to his famished and clamant stomach, we had specially reserved for him a tin of rice and milk, very happily designated “Amity.” This was followed up later in the day by a handful of stewed prunes, and he was soon once more in his right mind, if not so essentially clothed upon. He had, in fact, dropped just about one stone in weight in these five days of fasting.
There was a suggestion that after the war some of us would be qualified to publish a cookery book: “Mrs. Beeton Beaten!”
TWICE WOUNDED