Part 12

Walking up and down the side streets of the Russian section one saw faces pressed against the window panes, others peering from behind the doors, while others boldly came out to view the Lieutenant Colonel's guest. Here one noticed the difference in the Russian soldier. Two distinct types, one with the predominance of Tatar blood, heavy faced and tiny eyed, as devoid of expression as a pudgy Japanese; but there was the other Russian, the man from the North, more alert looking, who grinned at you as you went by, and seemed to see something funny in it.

We next came upon a temporary tent where two hundred men were quartered in a place a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was dark inside the tent, but by the aid of a candle that probably burned with difficulty in that air, one could see rows of excelsior mattresses packed in as close together as possible on the bare ground. The place was a nightmare, and the thought of two hundred and fifty men sleeping there was incredible. What impressed one, though, was not so much the conditions in that tent, for we could see near by a new shed, intended for them, needing only a day's work to complete it, but the policy of entire sincerity on the part of the War Ministry in permitting an American correspondent to see this section of the camp.

We then came upon the Englishmen. Their quarters were just the same as the Russians, and as we later saw, equally as good as those occupied by the comparatively few Frenchmen at Doeberitz. The Germans had given them their quarters clean, and they had kept them clean. It was a relief to go among them. It was with an odd sensation, too, that an American heard these men, these prisoners of war, speak his own language. Like the Russians, those who had been sitting, sprang on to their feet, but there was no salute. There was none of the unctuous servility noticeable among the Slavs. There was no attempt to curry favor with the officers of the camp, and one admired the English tremendously for that. They had played the game of war, lost, and they were taking their medicine. Their attitude, you saw, as you looked down their line of faces, was admirable.

To my amazement the Lieutenant Colonel turned to me and said, "You can talk to these men if you like," adding, "I know now what they'll say to you."

And standing off he listened to the conversation with a smile.

"Well, boys, how do you like it here?"

"Rotten," was the answer given together.

I looked at the officer; he seemed not surprised.

"Where were you captured?" I asked a particularly boyish marine.

"At Antwerp, sir."

"Then you fellows are the new recruits that were sent over there?"

They all said, "Yes."

"How long were you drilled?"

"About two weeks, sir."

And one was struck with the pitiful side of the blunder that made the First Lord of England's Admiralty the laughing stock of military experts the world over. In America we had read and only half believed that Winston Churchill had taken five thousand young men, practically greenhorns, and thrown them into Antwerp, a mere handful compared to the German hosts. That needless sacrifice of men, that useless waste of five thousand, their number making them practically useless, came home now in another way. Every boy there--and they nearly all look like boys--could blame the high-hatted strategist of the Admiralty for their predicament. And many of them openly did.

"The grub here," said a voice from their ranks, "is swill; it's nothing but skilley, and poor stew at that. Slops, I calls it, sir."

Having tasted the "slops," I could not agree with him and put it down to his inherent animosity towards all things German. I should have said that Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office seems more the good-looking, young Englishman of the university type than German; also his accent and intonation is entirely English. I noticed that when he spoke to me, the prisoners looked at him queerly. Then I saw two of them go off into a corner of the room and begin whispering; the chances are that they decided he was an English journalist who in some miraculous way had been granted permission to enter Germany and visit the Doeberitz camp. Hope is eternal with any one who is a prisoner. As we left the room, the officer going first, this was confirmed; beckoning Dr. Roediger, the two prisoners who had been whispering said to him, "When you go to England, won't you tell them over there that we get their letters all right, but that we're afraid the Germans are not going to let us have our parcels?"

Dr. Roediger asked them what they meant.

"Why, the folks write us that they are going to send us packages as Christmas presents--tobacco and things a chap can't get here. Now it would be a rotten Christmas if a chap didn't get those, wouldn't it? Can't you help us?"

Dr. Roediger assured them if any packages came they would be delivered, but the prisoners seemed to doubt this, and when we left them their faces fell. As we were going out, one of them whispered to me, "See if you can get us our Christmas packages, won't you?"

Christmas in a place like that....

Drawn up outside another of the unpainted sheds, we saw two men whose appearance instantly contrasted with the half slouch of those about them.

"You're a regular, aren't you?" I asked a tall, powerfully built man who wore the chevrons of a sergeant.

"Yes," he replied. "The boys here are just new recruits."

I caught the sympathy in his voice when he spoke of "the boys." His very manner, his stiff, unyielding, soldierly bearing, made me understand better than ever before what Kipling meant when he called the British soldier a king. More than ever one marveled at the system that takes men out of the London gutters and transforms them into regulars, into a sergeant who could stand amid the humiliation of that prison camp and not once forget that he was a soldier of England. That single man was one of the greatest tributes to the regular army of England that I have ever seen.

I found myself talking to a browned, deep-chested sailor, whose red insignia told me he was a gunner's mate.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, surprised, not knowing how a man from a war ship could have been made a prisoner.

"I was with one of the English naval guns at Antwerp," he said. Then he made his complaint. It was different from the way the younger men had talked, based on a different thing, a different way of thinking; in fact, his one way--the question of discipline.

"The Germans expect me to keep good discipline here. I try to, but if they would feed us a little better, it would be easier. Every so often the lads kick on the grub."

"It isn't really bad," I said to him. "I tasted some of it."

His manner was earnest. I knew he was sincere.

"Well," he said, "I can bear up under it, but with some of the lads here it is pretty hard. They are used to better."

"But," I argued, "they can't expect what they get at home, can they?"

He agreed with this himself, but persisted, "If they'd give us better grub, I could give them better discipline."

It seemed to be the thing that concerned him most.

As we went along talking to these English people, one heard all kind of stories. There was the marine, who, when he was captured, had seven pounds, and in ten weeks he had spent it all but one mark, buying himself little luxuries at the camp; now he was wondering what he was going to do with his money nearly all gone. There was another marine who, when I asked him why he had enlisted, did not say, "Because my country needed me," but rather, "Because I thought it would be a bit of a lark, you know." There was another fellow who had a grouch because the Germans would not let him write long letters home.

"Yes, that's the fellow," Lieutenant Colonel Alberti commented. "The first day he was here, he wrote an eighteen-page letter. The officer in charge of the camp has to read every letter sent out by the prisoners. For the first few days these fellows had nothing else to do but to sit down and write. You can imagine the result. We were inundated with letters, so we had to put a limit on them. You see they all have to be translated. Now they are allowed to write every so often."

The camp at Doeberitz Road only opened my eyes a little. Two days later I was watching the gray shape of a Zeppelin soaring two thousand meters above our motor, as we hurried down the Kaiser Wilhelm Road towards Zossen. This time a good friend had gone to General von Lowenfeld, the Commander of Berlin, and from him had been secured the exceptional privilege to take photographs in the prison camp at Zossen.

If my first sight of Doeberitz was sinister, Zossen was farce. As our motor drew up before a gate similar to Doeberitz, we were put into a light mood by the spectacle of a baggy, red-trousered Frenchman balancing himself on a little box and nailing a gap in the wall of his own prison. He was busy nailing a strand of barbed wire to a post and near him stood another Frenchman, who looked up at him, poked him in the ribs with his stick when the sentry wasn't looking, and made faces like a mischievous boy. The humor of the situation was not out of the picture, so we afterwards learned, for the Zossen camp has a surprisingly good time of it. A handsome white-haired baron, who spoke excellent English, and who was introduced to us as the Lieutenant Baron von Maltzahn, was as genial as the spirits of the prisoners. With Captain von Stutterheim, who has charge of the Weinberger section of the huge camp, they made an escort that was willing to do everything possible to show us every detail of Zossen. One quickly saw that the Captain and the Baron, who was the aide of the General in Command of the Zossen garrison, were proud of the camp.

One saw at once that to all exterior appearances Weinberger camp was just like Doeberitz. There were the same dirt center street, same side streets, the same rows of unpainted sheds. But there was a difference that we later saw. At Doeberitz, as far as the eye can see, the flat land stretches away unrelieved only here and there by trees, but this Weinberger section of the Zossen camp is set down in a pine forest, as the Captain boasted, "One of the healthiest places near Berlin." Here, although the same number of men live in a shed--two hundred and fifty--they seem cleaner, which is because here they are mostly Frenchmen, although, to our delight, we later found a streetful of their black allies, the Turcos. At Zossen, too, I found a few Russians and Belgian civilians, although in Belgium, as I came to know, civilians and soldiers are synonymous--both firing upon the Germans. As we walked up the street, we were surprised at the few German soldiers.

"We don't need so many," the Baron explained to me. "Eighty guard, eight thousand prisoners. That's only one per cent., you see. And then over there," and he pointed to a tall wooden scaffolding, "we are going to have a searchlight on that, and another on the other side of the camp, so if everything happens to go wrong with the electric plant we can sweep the searchlights on the camp streets. Also in case of a disturbance we are going to have some rapid firers and a big gun. Over there, now," and he led me towards the fences, triple fences of barbed wire, "one of those wires on the inner fence--you see the soldiers and prisoners are protected from it by the outer wires--one of those wires is charged heavily with electricity, so that anybody trying to escape will be electrocuted. The prisoners have been warned."

As we continued on up the street, we were impressed by the number of Frenchmen. Everywhere one saw the baggy red trousers and the Baron told us that they were all prisoners from Maubeuge and Rheims. I noticed that squads of Frenchmen were marching up and down in command of a corporal and extending their ranks to go through the military setting-up drill. They seemed to move with a jaunty air, which contrasted with their nondescript appearance, and which spoke wonders for their spirit.

"They weren't like that at Doeberitz," I said to Captain Stutterheim. "There everybody slouched around. Here they have some life. How do you explain it?"

The Captain didn't know. "They are taken the best of care of. They have plenty of money. We give them all the privileges we can and they seem to have made up their minds to enjoy themselves."

Whereupon one decided that this marked difference in the spirit of the two camps was due to the fact that here they were nearly all Frenchmen, ready to enjoy life no matter where they were.

"Yesterday," remarked the Captain, "there were 6000 marks sent in the mail for these prisoners, and last week we had a day when 9000 marks were received. We are careful to do everything we can to make them comfortable; for instance, the French Catholics have streets to themselves; so have the Protestants. We also separate the Russians and the Poles. We have to be very careful to keep the Turcos in a street of their own. They don't like the French, now, since they've heard that a Holy War has been decreed in Constantinople."

Eating is one of the best things the Germans do, so it did not surprise me when the Captain led the way to the prisoners' kitchen. It looked the same as at Doeberitz, only here the huge cauldrons were filled with a whitish semi-liquid substance that made you wonder, until the cook explained that it was rice. I was deciding that the prisoners were fed more substantially over at Doeberitz, when the Captain remarked, "We have many Catholics here, you know, and to-day is Friday, so we give them rice instead of a meat stew." He went on to explain that the men received a pound and a half of bread every third day, as well as receiving the sausage and soup diet of Doeberitz. The men were doing things, not slouching around. They were either making little articles or playing games. I saw them weaving slippers of straw and cutting out things with pocket knives; in one corner of the room a bit of gay color met the eye. A soldier was making paper flowers. In poor French I asked him what the flowers were for.

"They are for the chapel altar," he replied with dancing eyes.

I turned to the Captain. "What! Have you got a chapel here for these fellows?"

"You will soon see it," he said. "They built the altar themselves, and among the captured soldiers are three French priests."

At the end of the kitchen street I noticed an adjoining structure, which the Captain explained was the canteen. In there I found a wonderfully equipped little place, where all sorts of articles were for sale. Soldiers were sitting around just as farmers hang around a country store and talk. There was a gossipy air of snugness about the little place that made one think it belonged in the midst of a well fed garrison and not in a prison camp. There was a counter behind which stood a German salesman, assisted by a French interpreter, and this little canteen bore no relation whatever to the system of company stores in vogue in the mining camps of America. In other words, it was run to give the men the best possible for their money.

On a blackboard I saw chalked different prices, 10 Cigarettes for 10 Pfg., which is almost five for a cent. I saw sponges strung on a string, which convinced me that the men in the camp were doubly anxious to keep clean. I was reminded of Coney Island by a little griddle of sizzling hot dogs, which could be bought for two cents each. I saw a basket full of segments of thick German wurst, 5 cents for a piece 2 inches in diameter and 4 inches long. They even sold butter in that little store ½ lb. for 12 cents, cheaper than you can get it in America. Sides of bacon, hams and long dangling wurst hung from the ceiling, and near them a wooden aeroplane tried to fly, while below on the floor, a pair of wooden shoes waited the owner who had the necessary 45 cents. On a table in a corner I saw where the games came from, checkers and cards, absurdly cheap. They even sold beer. I remarked on this.

"It's not an intoxicating beer," the Captain explained. "It's what we call in Germany--Health Beer. It is used in cases of illness when a doctor wants to give a patient strength."

It was after we had inspected a little room which one of the French soldiers had converted into a barber shop, where one might be shaved for 10 centimes, and where if one had 50 centimes he might be tempted by a sign that read, "Latest Parisian Haircut here"; it was after we had talked with the sparkling-eyed barber, happy these days--was not money plentiful among the prisoners?--that we came upon the sculptor.

Opening a wooden door upon which was written in French that only officers might enter, the Captain bowed us into the last place that you would expect to find in a prison camp. Had the damp odor of clay not told you, you would have seen from the unfinished gray pedestal that stood by the window, that this little twelve by twelve room was a studio. There, standing beside his work, a make-shift sculptor's apron over his soiled red and blue uniform, stood a young French soldier. The Baron explained to me that in 1908 this man had won the second prize at Rome. He told me that his name was Robert L'Aryesse, and in my notebook he wrote his autograph so that I might not misspell his name. I asked him if he knew Paul Manship, the young American sculptor, who only a few years ago took the prize at Rome. At Manship's name the Frenchman's face lit up and he began eagerly to talk of the quarter where they had all lived in Italy. How was Manship? What was he doing? Oh, he had been very wonderful, that young American! The admiration of Monsieur L'Aryesse was great.

The Frenchman was so happy to hear news from an old comrade that he forgot that my command of his language was elementary and launched forth in a glowing appreciation of Manship which left me far behind.

A photographer meanwhile caught sight of the statue of a Turk standing on the shoulders of a Russian soldier with arm extended (the Baron explained it was to be used as a guidepost to the Zossen prison), and with a keen sense for a good human interest picture began to focus his camera.

M. L'Aryesse was in alarm; it would never do to take a picture. What if his friends should see it! He began wringing his hand and then nervously running his fingers through his hair. To think of such a specimen of his work being photographed and published in America. But the photographer assured him that the statue was wonderful, and in an incredibly short time a flashlight powder boomed in the room and the job was done.

From the studio we walked up to the end of the street and entered a shed where a swarm of roughly-clad prisoners divided into groups were standing around a post pulling at something. They were braiding straw. One of them exhibited a round mat made of braided straw about five inches in diameter, which, it appeared, were mats to put in the hoofs of the horses to keep out the snow.

And again you marveled at the German system, this obvious weeding out of men who knew how to braid straw and putting them to work making a winter supply for the army horses. These men were the worst type of Belgians from the Antwerp slums and from the farms. One black-haired, evil-looking fellow had two yellow bands sewn to the sleeve of his coat, the badge of their spokesman and officer.

This black-haired gentleman was known as Lulu. Lulu was very proud of his rank. I doubted at first whether the man had a forehead; his black hair hung low; he was of the type--and there were many more in that room like him--of the hereditary criminal. Our gunmen would look like saints in comparison with this apache of the slums. Through an interpreter I was permitted to talk to the Belgians, and I chose the mildest looking man of them all. He said that he was perfectly satisfied to be where he was. The other men in the room nodded assent. This puzzled me a little, for they looked sullen enough to be unafraid to speak their minds even in the presence of a gray coated Prussian officer. But the Belgian explained, "Here we have a place to sleep, we get food, and we are not in danger of being killed."

Another black-browed fellow volunteered his story. "When the war began I was a reserve. I was told to hide my uniform and shoot at the Germans whenever I got a chance. Then I was called into regular service, and I put on my uniform and fought in the ranks. After that, with hundreds of my comrades, I was told to put on my civilian clothes again and go back home or any place where I could hide and take shots at any stray German soldiers I could see."

This seemed to me to be a confirmation of the German charges, that soldier civilians had been making war upon them.

At the other extremity of the street I found the other feature of the camp. Here were the Turcos. Dressed in outlandish costumes I saw some still wearing the burnooses of their tribes, others natty little, light blue, gold-embroidered jackets, some with the red fez, others with turbans, a motley collection that did not look at all the terrible Turco we had heard about. It happened to be what Captain Stutterheim called "Lice day," and thoroughly enjoying it the Turcos were standing in the street beating their blankets.

The leader of the Belgians was Lulu; but the Turks had a handsome gentleman who looked as if he would cut your throat for two cents, who answered to the name of Jumbo. Like Lulu, Jumbo was very proud of the two yellow stripes sewn on his arm. It was Lulu who posed his comrades for the photographer, arranging them with a nice sense of values. And when I looked the length of that line, glanced from one brutish face to another, I need no other confirmation of the statement that out of two hundred Turcos at the Zossen camp one in every four had been captured with ghastly trophies in his possession. The same charge of savagery has been made against the Turk, but from everything I can learn about the Turkish soldier--and here in Berlin I have talked to three American correspondents who have traveled with Turkish armies--there is a vast difference between the German trained Turkish soldier, and the French Turco.

Presently we selected a grinning, black villain and the most dapper Frenchman in the camp. All his comrades roared with laughter when they understood, and the whole procession came up the camp street as if they were going to a workman's Sunday picnic. Nicely posed, they made a splendid picture, which provoked the Baron's _"Allies!"_ and roars of deep-throated Germanic laughter.

Possibly with a stage-manager's instinct to relieve the setting, the Captain walked us a short distance to a model little hospital camp in the pine woods. The surgeon in charge amazed us by saying that fifty per cent. of the captured French soldiers were tubercular. After walking with the wounded through the pines, we returned to the camp. We passed Frenchmen busy at landscape gardening. It seemed incredible. On every camp street they had made a long box design of evergreen and lettered to read the name of the company and the regiment.