A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War

by Sebastian Faulks

  (Lager-Echo, Knockaloe, No. 9, 26 September 1917)

  ‘G. H. M.’ was in Ruhleben internment camp for civilian prisoners of war, located to the west of Berlin. Prisoners there had been captured when working or travelling in Germany or in the North Sea at the outbreak of the war. The inmates had their own camp journal, in which this story was first published. A transcribed version, together with the biographical note included below, can be found in the Imperial War Museum.

  A CHRISTMAS TRAGEDY

  George Scrooge clambered into his bunk in a particularly bad temper. Not that one can blame a man for having a fit of the blues once in a while, but this was Christmas Eve, and nobody ought to be ill-humoured on Christmas Eve, no matter where he is. Of course Scrooge was convinced that there never had been such tiresome fools as his box mates, and his box mates were equally convinced that Scrooge had taken too much rations for supper; but, however that may be, Scrooge crawled under the blankets, swore at everybody in general, and pulled the curtain across the bed.

  Now it is important to note that fact, because when Scrooge woke up an hour later, the curtain was drawn back. ‘Extremely annoying!’ He was now in a worse temper than ever, so he stuck his head out in order to be rude, when he noticed – the moon was shining through the window – that the two Figures seated at the table were no box mates of his. This of course rather took him aback, and he wasn’t rude in the way he meant to be. ‘W-who the deuce are you?’ he spluttered. One of the Figures rose up – it was a merry fellow in a bottle-brown coat, with a cigar and a packet of toffee in his hand, and it gazed at Scrooge with a watery leer. ‘Keep your pecker up,’ it carolled; ‘I am the g[h]ost of your first Ruhleben Xmas!’ Scrooge gaped, when the second Figure approached the bed, breathing weak tea – and rum – onto his face. ‘And I am the ghost of your second Ruhleben Xmas,’ it wheezed. ‘I am a gay dog, I am – see?’ and it danced up and down the box shouting boisterously. ‘Oh cut it out!’ said Scrooge, and pulling the curtain he turned over and went to sleep. But not for long. He woke up feeling very cold and miserable, and saw that the curtain was again drawn back.

  This time the box was full of shapes – grey melancholy spectres that fixed him with weary eyes. ‘Go away!’ he said, as firmly as he could. The spectres did not move.

  A little shiver ran down Scrooge’s spine, and he tried again more pleasantly. ‘Don’t let me keep you if you wish to be off, you know.’

  Still the spectres did not move.

  Scrooge felt distinctly uncomfortable, and the worst of it was, he began to doubt whether he hadn’t, perhaps – after all – and the doubt became a certainty, and slipping his feet into a pair of clogs, he tried to whistle.

  The spectres did not move as he passed out of the box, but the corridor, too, was full of the sad grey shapes.

  ‘This is worse than I supposed,’ muttered Scrooge, and he hurried outside.

  More spectres – they thronged the yard, they filled the square from the Casino to the Captain’s office, they were gathered in the Grand Stands, they blocked the Promenade – from one end of the Camp to the other, there was no escaping them.

  Then Scrooge’s nerve forsook him.

  ‘Who are all ye?’ he shrieked. A wail rose from all the shadowy forms, a wail so plaintive and sinister that Scrooge’s very heart stood still. ‘We are the ghosts of the Ruhleben Xmases to [c]ome!’

  In the morning four men carried Scrooge to the Lazaret [sanatorium].

  G. H. M.

  A young Scotch boy of 20 yrs of age – having spent a year when 16 yrs old – in Germany – to learn the language, – returned there in the summer of 1914 to make a long bicycle trip. – While doing so the war broke out, & the lad was promptly interned at the Ruhleben camp, – where he suffered all sorts of hardships. The family’s friend, here in Zürich, sent him his first Christmas box – & in it put some home-made ‘toffy’ – which greatly pleased him. By the second Christmas he had ‘a mental break-down’ from what he had undergone – & was put in a sanatorium – where he is still – in Germany – of course. Towards the last weeks in Ruhleben he wrote this pathetic tale – showing the visions he had from hunger & ill health – before he entirely broke down – & it being published in the prisoners’ journal, it was signed with his initials, – which were recognised by his Scotch friend here, & this faithful copy given me.

  T. E. LAWRENCE, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia (1888– 1935), was born in Wales and educated in Oxford. During the First World War he worked as an intelligence officer and liaison officer, shaping policy in the Middle East; he mobilised the Arab revolt (1916–18) against the Ottoman Turks, allies of Germany. He left for England after the capture of Damascus (Syria) in October 1918. The passage below is from his autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom (privately printed in 1926, published in 1935).

  I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or subscribe to their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England in her war. If I could not assume their character, I could at least conceal my own, and pass among them without evident friction, neither a discord nor a critic but an unnoticed influence. Since I was their fellow, I will not be their apologist or advocate. To-day in my old garments, I could play the bystander, obedient to the sensibilities of our theatre … but it is more honest to record that these ideas and actions then passed naturally. What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.

  Blood was always on our hands: we were licensed to it. Wounding and killing seemed ephemeral pains, so very brief and sore was life with us. With the sorrow of living so great, the sorrow of punishment had to be pitiless. We lived for the day and died for it. When there was reason and desire to punish we wrote our lesson with gun or whip immediately in the sullen flesh of the sufferer, and the case was beyond appeal. The desert did not afford the refined slow penalties of courts and gaols.

  Of course our rewards and pleasures were as suddenly sweeping as our troubles; but, to me in particular, they bulked less large. Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers terrible: a death in life. When the march or labour ended I had no energy to record sensation, nor while it lasted any leisure to see the spiritual loveliness which sometimes came upon us by the way. In my notes, the cruel rather than the beautiful found place. We no doubt enjoyed more the rare moments of peace and forgetfulness; but I remember more the agony, the terrors, and the mistakes. Our life is not summed up in what I have written (there are things not to be repeated in cold blood for very shame); but what I have written was in and of our life. Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race.

  A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.

  In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend, with a resultant feelin
g of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.

  W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868–1963) was an African-American writer, activist, and leader and one of the founders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), formed in 1909. The articles below were published in the NAACP journal, The Crisis. For many years after the war Du Bois worked on, but did not publish, a history of the black troops in the conflict entitled The Black Man and the Wounded World.

  Close Ranks

  This is the crisis of the world. For all the long years to come men will point to the year 1918 as the great Day of Decision, the day when the world decided whether it would submit to military despotism and an endless armed peace – if peace it could be called – or whether they would put down the menace of German militarism and inaugurate the United States of the World.

  We of the colored race have no ordinary interest in the outcome. That which the German power represents today spells death to the aspirations of Negroes and all darker races for equality, freedom and democracy. Let us not hesitate. Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly, with our eyes lifted to the hills.

  [July 1918]

  Returning Soldiers

  We are returning from war! The Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood: for America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope: for the dominant southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult – for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight, also.

  But today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.

  It lynches.

  And lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history. Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.

  It disfranchises its own citizens.

  Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white. The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies.

  It encourages ignorance.

  It has never really tried to educate the Negro. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated. It wants servants, dogs, whores and monkeys. And when this land allows a reactionary group by its stolen political power to force as many black folk into these categories as it possibly can, it cries in contemptible hypocrisy: ‘They threaten us with degeneracy; they cannot be educated.’

  It steals from us.

  It organizes industry to cheat us. It cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of our labour. It confiscates our savings. It reduces our wages. It raises our rent and steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty.

  It insults us.

  It has organized a nation-wide and latterly a world-wide propaganda of deliberate and continuous insult and defamation of black blood wherever found. It decrees that it shall not be possible in travel nor residence, work nor play, education nor instruction for a black man to exist without tacit or open acknowledgment of his inferiority to the dirtiest white dog. And it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this dogma as arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason.

  This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.

  We return.

  We return from fighting.

  We return fighting.

  Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

  [May 1919]

  MARINA YURLOVA was born in Russia around 1900. In 1914, still a young teenager, she joined the Cossack Army, fighting alongside the men. In 1919 she emigrated to the United States via Japan and became a dancer. The excerpt below is from her memoir, Cossack Girl (1934). Here she describes a test of the limits of her comradeship with the male soldiers: her close proximity to them while they are undressing brings new feelings of ‘modesty’ and ‘shame’: ‘That is what four walls can do to you’, she reflects.

  Our soldiers ran true to form in the building of their quarters – little rude huts, with ten men assigned to each. And they could easily have made them five times as large, with a whole army on hand to build them.

  And now a new problem arose. It was one thing to sleep near my ‘brothers,’ wrapped in a blanket under the open sky; it was quite another to share these cramped quarters with them.

  My first night will serve as an example for the rest. It had been raining all day, but we had gone through our drills just the same, and had come back to Kosel’s hut, and hung our uniform coats up to dry.

  Supper was over. The windows were tightly shut. The air was foul with the fumes of mahorka – a crude peasant tobacco – and the stench of unwashed bodies. I lay curled up in my bunk, watching the men with an entirely new feeling: modesty. That is what four walls can do to you.

  The oil lamps were lit, and a stove was burning. Kosel had found a pack of cards, so greased and dirty that the figures on them were barely visible, and the men were playing for matches instead of money. You don’t have anything to spare out of a few shillings a month; but the disputes were just as loud and the play just as intense as if a million roubles hung in the balance.

  After that they took to singing songs and telling stories. They were very good to me, those men; for though – since Kosel and the commander had made no objections to me – they had come to take me for granted, they were very careful to whisper any story that wasn’t fit for me to hear. The two noisiest there were the huge Gritsko and Fedka, a red-haired good-for-nothing about half his size, and all they argued about was the amount of liquor each could swallow without feeling it.

  But this is the scene that I remember still with a sort of horror. My nine companions had decided at last to hunt for insects, and there they all were, crouched around the stove, which was burning fiercely in the centre of the hut. First they took off their blouses and singed the seams, then they pulled off their shirts…

  The lamplight threw grotesque, great shadows on the walls, and gleamed on their white skins and hairy chests. I’d never seen a half-naked man before and lay in my bunk, staring at them with horrified fascination. Their conversation was brief and monotonous; they were so intent on their task that they had forgotten all about me. Outside a dog howled miserably, and a thin, drizzling rain pattered on the roof.


  The stove threw a red glow on Kosel’s matted chest.

  Nothing makes you so lonely as shame. I was suddenly conscious, as I lay there, of the predicament I was in; of my girl’s body – for the first time in my life, I think; of the strangeness of my surroundings – that I, a colonel’s daughter, should be here, in this place that smelled so horribly of bad air and bad tobacco, of singeing shirts, of damp foot wrappings hanging up to dry, of unwashed bodies and feet.

  Somebody – it was the great Gritsko, I think – rose slowly to his feet, muttering to himself, stretching his arms. He was quite naked.

  I pushed my fist into my mouth and bit on it until it bled. Then I crawled from my bunk and stumbled to the door – out into the night, into the rain and mud.

  When I came back at last, chilled and miserable, they had all gone to sleep. There was still a glow from the stove, and I thought I could safely take my own clothes off now to dry them, and to hunt for insects as the men had done. But my shirt was only half off my head when somebody snored loudly and twisted over in his sleep, and I scrambled into my shirt again, and went and curled up, shivering, in my bunk.

  When at last I fell asleep, I had a dream of Kosel.

  He had the body of a goat, four legs, and a great shaggy coat of fur.

  A naked Gritsko was driving him round and round the hut…

  ISABELLE RIMBAUD (1860–1917), was the sister of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. She describes evacuating Roche with her husband Pierre after its invasion in August 1914, and the bombing of Reims the following month, in her book In the Whirlpool of War (1918).

  Monday, August 3.

  The village becomes emptier every hour of men under forty-eight years of age. At the same time there is a change in the moral atmosphere: hatreds die down and enemies become reconciled. There is no more slandering a neighbour, no more desire to do him an ill turn; but gentle speech instead. The fires of envy and vanity die out in look and soul. In the families of called-up men the farewells are heart-breaking, as if something irrevocable were happening; and all arrangements are made on this understanding.