Part 1

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THE BETTER GERMANY IN WAR TIME

Being some Facts towards Fellowship.

BY HAROLD PICTON.

THE NATIONAL LABOUR PRESS, LIMITED, MANCHESTER AND LONDON.

TO THE BRITISH AND THE GERMAN PEOPLES AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER WHO KNEW AND LOVED THEM BOTH.

"Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is Hell."--A Dream of John Ball.

"Either we are all citizens of the same city and war between us, a civil war, a monstrous iniquity to be forgotten, as soon as it may bring in peace; or else there is no city and no home for man in the universe, but only an everlasting conflict between creatures that have nothing in common and no place where they can together be at rest."--Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 11, 1915.

"He had to be extremely careful, said Lord Newton at Knutsford last Saturday, because if he made any statement which did not accuse the Germans of brutality he was denounced by many people as pro-German."--Common Sense, April 20, 1918.

"Des faits de ce genre meritent detre mis en evidence. Il faudrait, dans ce dechainement d'horreurs et de haines, insister sur les quelques traits capables d'adoucir les ames."--La Guerre vue d'une Ambulance par L'Abbe FELIX KLEIN.

"Hate as a policy is either inadequate to deal with the crimes (real and invented) of our enemies, or, if adequate, so recoils on the hater that he himself becomes ruined as a moral agent."--G. JARVIS SMITH, M.C. (late Chaplain at the Western Front). Nation, Nov. 2, 1918.

"The belief at home that the individual enemy is an incurable barbarian is simply wrong...."--Second-Lieut. A. R. WILLIAMS, killed in action August, 1917.

"I will go on fighting as long as it is necessary to get a decision in this war.... But I will not hate Germans to the order of any bloody politician; and the first thing I shall do after I am free will be to go to Germany and create all the ties I can with German life."--J. H. KEELING (B.E.F., December, 1915).

CONTENTS

CHAPTER. PAGE.

FOREWORD xi.

I. MILITARY PRISONERS 1

II. CIVILIAN PRISONERS 75

III. PRISONERS IN PREVIOUS WARS 123

IV. REPRISALS OF GOOD 132

V. WHAT THE GERMAN MAY BE 149

APPENDIX 255

FOREWORD

One kind of German has been too often described, and not infrequently invented. I propose here to describe the other German. At a military hospital a lady visitor said to the wounded soldiers: "We've had lots of books and tales of horror; why don't some of you fellows prepare a book of the good deeds of the enemy?" There was a slight pause. "Ah," said one of the soldiers, "that would be a golden book." Very imperfectly, and in spite of all the barriers raised by war passions, I have tried to collect some of the materials already to hand for such a book.

In any quarrel it is difficult to recognise that there is good in one's opponent. Yet in order that any strife may be wisely settled, this recognition is plainly necessary. Mere enmity, without recognition of good, belongs to primitive barbarism. It was against the foolish unpracticality of this older barbarism (not surely only against its wickedness) that Christ protested in the words, "But I say unto you, love your enemies." He saw around him the folly and unenlightenment of the perpetual feud. I have collected the testimonies that are in the following pages because such facts seem to me to need wider recognition, if we are ever to gain an outlook upon a fairer and a truer world.

If my desire for peace has anywhere shown itself unduly, or in a way irritating to others, I ask forgiveness. Whenever peace is made, the world will need a peace built on all the facts of human nature. I have tried to give here some of those which war passions inevitably obscure. That is the whole of my task.

HAROLD PICTON. September, 1918.

FOOTNOTES: