The Land of Deepening Shadow Part 20

Though a private corporation with 12,500,000 pounds share capital owned by the "Cannon Queen" and her family, it is to all intents and purposes a Government Department just as Woolwich a.r.s.enal is an adjunct of the British War Office. In the past, as the elaborate centenary (1910) memorial proudly recites, fifty-two Governments throughout the world have bought Krupp guns, armour, sh.e.l.ls, and wars.h.i.+ps, with Germany by far the biggest customer.

Out of the stupendous profits of war machines the Krupps have built workpeople's houses that, as regards material comfort, would not be easy to excel. These houses are provided with ingenious coal-saving stoves, that might well be copied elsewhere, for though Essen is in the coal centre of Germany, they are just as careful about coal as though it were imported from the other end of the world.

Frau Bertha and her husband (a simple and modest man, who is, I was informed, entirely in the hands of his specialists, and who has the wisdom to let well alone) have put up a big fight with Batocki, the food dictator. The semi-famine had not reached its height when I was in Essen, and the suffering was not great there. A munition-maker working in any of the Rhenish-Westphalian towns is regarded by Germans as a soldier. As the war has proceeded he has been subject to continuous combing out.

The amount of food allowed to those engaged in these great factories and rolling mills is, I estimate, 33 per cent. more than that allowed to the rest of the civil population. In all the notices issued throughout Germany in regard to further food restrictions, there is appended the line, "This change is necessary owing to the need for fully supplying your brothers in the army and the munition works."

Essen is a town that before the war had a population exceeding 300,000. A conservative estimate makes the figure to-day nearly half a million. The Krupp Company employ about 120,000. A prevalent illusion is that Krupps confine their war-time effort exclusively to making war material. That is a mistake. A considerable part of Krupp's work is the manufacture of articles which can be exchanged for food and other products in neighbouring countries, thus taking the place of gold. At Lubeck, I saw the quays crowded with the products of Essen in the shape of steel girders and other building machinery going to Sweden in exchange for oil, lime from Gotland, iron ore, paper, wood, and food products,

A mining engineer of the great mines at Kiruna, Lapland, told me that he had just given an order for steam shovels from the Westphalian manufacturers, who are also sending into Holland knives and scissors and other cutlery and tools.

Germany's princ.i.p.al bargaining commodities with contiguous neutral nations are steel building materials, coal, and dye-stuffs. Coal dug in Belgium by Belgian miners is a distinct a.s.set for Germany, when she exchanges it for Swiss cattle, Dutch cheese, and Swedish wood. When we consider that the great industrial combinations of Rhineland and Westphalia are not only reaping enormous munition profits, but supply the steel and coal which form the bulk of German war-time exports, we can easily understand why some Social Democrats grew dissatisfied because the all-powerful National Liberals resisted a war profits tax for two years. It is noteworthy that several of the more outspoken German editors have been suspended for attacking these profiteers.

I should qualify this statement of exports slightly by saying that they pertained up to November, 1916. The effort to put more than ten million men into military uniform resulted not only in the slave-raids in Belgium but in a concentration in munition output that stopped further exports of steel products and coal on a large scale.

We should always remember in this great war of machinery that Germany secured a tremendous advantage at the expense of France at the outset when she occupied the most important French iron region of Longwy-Briey. The Germans, as I previously observed, have been working the French mines to the utmost--indeed, they boast that they have installed improved machinery in them. They have, furthermore, been importing ore steadily from Sweden, some of the Swedish ore, such as Dannemora, being the best in the world for the manufacture of tool steel--so important in munition work.

Dusseldorf, probably the most attractive large manufacturing city in the world, had planned an industrial exhibition for 1915 or 1916, and the steel skeletons of many of the buildings had already been erected at the outbreak of war. But the Germans immediately set to work to tear down the steel frames to use them for more practical purposes. "We were going to call it a _German Fair_,"

said a native manufacturer to me early in the war; "but we can have it later and call it a _World's Fair_, as the terms will be synonymous."

Isolated near the Rhine is the immense reconstructed Zeppelin shed which British airmen in November, 1914, partly destroyed, together with the nearly completed Zeppelin within it. The daring exploit evidently work up the newly appointed anti-aircraft gunners, for they subsequently annihilated two of their own machines approaching from the West.

The badly paid war slaves of Essen are working the whole twenty-four hours, seven days a week, in three s.h.i.+fts a day of eight hours each, under strict martial law. The town is a hotbed of extreme Social Democracy, and as a rule the Socialists of Westphalia are almost as red as those of the manufacturing districts of Saxony. But Socialists though they be, they are just as anti-British as the rest of Germany, and they like to send out their products with the familiar hall-mark of "Gott strafe England," or "Best wishes for King George." It is the kind of Socialism that wants more money, more votes, less work, but has no objection to plenty of war. It is a common-sense Socialism, which knows that without war Essen might shrink to its pre-war dimensions.

Essen is very jealous of the great Skoda works near Pilsen in Austria. My hotel manager spoke with some acerbity of the amount of advertising the Austrian siege howitzers were receiving. "You can accept my a.s.surance," he said, "that the guns for the bombardment of Dover were made here, and not at the Skoda works, as the Austrians claim."

Every German in Essen seems to feel a personal pride in the importance of the works to the Empire at the fateful hour. The 43-centimetre gun "which conquered Belgium"--as the native puts it--is almost deified. Everybody struts about in the consciousness that he or she has had directly or indirectly something to do with the murderous weapon which has wrought such death and glory in Germany's name. "The Empire has the men, Essen has the armour-plate, the torpedoes, the sh.e.l.ls, the guns. It is the combination which must win." That is the spirit in Kruppville.

CHAPTER XXI

TOMMY IN GERMANY

One day the world will be flooded with some of the most dramatic, horrible, and romantic of narratives--the life-stories of the British soldiers captured in the early days of the war, their gross ill-treatment, their escapes, and attempts at escape. I claim to be the only unofficial neutral with any large amount of eye-witness, hand-to-hand knowledge of those poor men in Germany.

One of the most difficult tasks I a.s.sumed during the war was the personal and unconducted investigation of British prisoners of war.

The visitor is only allowed to talk with prisoners when visiting camps under the supervision of a guide. My tramps on foot all over Germany gave me valuable information on this as on other matters.

My task was facilitated by the Germany policy of showing the hated British captives to as many people as possible; thus the 30,000 men have been scattered into at least 600 prison camps. In the depleted state of the German Army it is not easy to find efficient guards for so many establishments. Prisoners are constantly being moved about. They are conveyed ostentatiously and shown at railway stations en route, where until recently they were allowed to be spat upon by the public, and were given coffee into which the public were allowed to spit. These are but a few of the slights and abominations heaped upon them. Much of it is quite unprintable.

Many a night did I lie awake in Berlin cogitating how to get into touch with some of these men. I learned something on a previous visit in 1914, when I saw the British prisoners at one of the camps. At that time it was impossible to get into conversation with them. They were efficiently and continually guarded by comparatively active soldiers.

On this occasion I came across my first British prisoner quite by accident, and, as so often happens in life, difficult problems settle themselves automatically. In nothing that I write shall I give any indication of the whereabouts of the sixty prisoners with whom I conversed privately, but there can be no harm in my mentioning the whereabouts of my public visit, which took place in one of the regular neutral "Cook's tours" of the prisoners in Germany.

The strain of my work in so suspicious a place as Berlin, the constant care required to guard one's expressions, and the anxiety as to whether one was being watched or not got on my nerves sometimes, and one Sunday I determined to take a day off and go into the country with another neutral friend. There, by accident, I came across my first private specimen of Tommy in Germany.

We were looking about for a decent Gasthaus in which to get something to eat when we saw a notice high up in large type on a wall outside an old farmhouse building, which read:--

Jeder Verkehr der Zivilbevolkerung mit den Kriegsgefangenen ist STRENG VERBOTEN,

"Any intercourse of the civil population with the prisoners of war is strictly forbidden."

These notices, which threaten the civilian population with heavy penalties if they exchange any words with the prisoners, are familiar all over Germany, but I did not expect to find them in that small village.

My neutral friend thought it would make a nice photograph if I would stand under the notice, which I did after a cautious survey showed that the coast was clear.

As I did so a Russian came out of the barn and said, in rather bad German, "Going to have your photograph taken?" I replied, in German, "Yes."

He heard me speaking English to my friend, and then, looking up and down the street each way to see if we were being watched, he addressed me in English with a strong c.o.c.kney accent.

"You speak English, then?" I said.

"I am English," he replied. "I'm an English prisoner."

"Then what are you doing in a Russian uniform?"

"It is the only thing I could get when my own clothes wore out."

Keeping a careful eye up and down the street, he told us his story.

He was one of the old Expeditionary Force; was taken at Mons with five bullet wounds in him, and, after a series of unpublishable humiliations, had been drafted from camp to camp until he had arrived at this little village, where, in view of the German policy of letting all the population, see an Englishman, he was the representative of his race in that community. "The local M.P." he called himself, in his humorous way.

Robinson Crusoe on his island was not more ignorant of the truth about the great world than that man, for, while he had learnt a few daily expressions in German, he was unable to read it. The only information he could gather was from the French, Belgian, and Russian prisoners with him, and some he got by bribing one of the Landsturm Guards with a little margarine or sugar out of his parcel from England. He was full of the battle of Mons and how badly he and his comrades in Germany felt at the way they had been left unsupported there. None the less, though alone, with no Englishman for miles, living almost entirely on his parcels, absolutely cut off from the real facts of the war, hearing little but lies, he was as calmly confident of the ultimate victory of the Allies as I am.

I asked him if he heard from home.

"Yes," he said, "now and then, but the folks tell me nothing and I can tell them nothing. If you get back to England you tell the people there not to believe a word that comes from English prisoners. Those who write favourably do so because they have to.

Every truthful letter is burned by the military censor. Tell the people to arrange the parcels better and see that every man gets a parcel at least once a week--not send five parcels to one man and no parcels to some poor bloke like me who is alone. How is the war going on, guv'nor?" he asked. I gave him my views. "I think it's going badly for the Germans--not by what they tell me here or what I gets in that awful _Continental Times_ paper, but from what I notice in the people round about, and the officers who visit us.

The people are not so abusive to the English as they used to be.

The superior officers do not treat us like dogs, as they did, and as for the Landsturmers--well, look at old Heinrich here."

At that moment a heavy, shabby old Landsturm soldier came round the corner, and the c.o.c.kney prisoner treated him almost as though he were a performing bear.

"You're all right, ain't you, Heiny, so long as I give you a bit of sugar now and then?" he said to his decrepit old guardian in his German gibberish.

This state of affairs was a revelation to me, but I was soon to find that if the British prisoners are weary of their captivity their old German guardians are much more weary of their task.

These high-spirited British lads, whom two years of cruelty have not cowed, are an intense puzzle to the German authorities.

"You see," remarked a very decent German official connected with the military censors.h.i.+p department, "everyone of these Britishers is different. Every one of them sticks up for what he calls his 'rights': many of them decline to work on Sunday, and short of taking them out on Sunday morning at the point of the bayonet we cannot get them to do it. We have to be careful, too, with these Englishmen now. As a man of the world, you will realise that though our general public here do not know that the English have captured many Germans lately, and the fact is never mentioned in the _communiques_, we have had a hint from Headquarters that the British prisoners may one day balance ours, and that hards.h.i.+p for these _verfluchte Englander_ may result in hards.h.i.+p for our men in England."

That incident was long ago. It is important to relate that since the beginning of the battle of the Somme there is, if I was correctly informed, a marked improvement in the condition of English prisoners all over Germany--not as regards food supplied by the authorities, because the food squeeze naturally affects the prisoners as it does their guardians, but in other ways.

In addition to the British capturing numbers of German hostages on the Somme to hold against the treatment of their men in Germany, I think I may claim without undue pride that much good work has been done by the American Amba.s.sador and his staff of attaches, who work as sedulously on behalf of the prisoners as though those prisoners had been American.

The German authorities hate and respect publicity and force in matters not to their liking, and Mr. Gerard's fearlessness in reports of conditions and urgent pleas for improvement have been of great service. All the threats and bl.u.s.ter of Germany have failed to cow him.

To continue my narrative of the c.o.c.kney soldier in Russian uniform.

So many Englishmen are in Russian uniform, Belgian uniform, French uniform, or a mix-up uniform that there is no possibility of my c.o.c.kney Russian being recognised by the authorities, and the photograph which my neutral friend took of him and me was taken under the very eyes of his Landsturmer.