Only a week before I had seen wounded Germans in the freight shed at Calais; and all the prisoners that I had seen elsewhere, whether in ones or twos, brought in fresh from the front or in columns under escort, had been Germans.  The sharpest contrast of all in war which the neutral may observe is seeing the men of one army which, from the other side, he had watched march into battle—­armed, confident, disciplined parts of an organization, ready to sweep all before them in a charge—­become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganized, rounded up like vagrants in a bread-line and surrounded by a fold of barbed wire and sentries.

Such was the lot of the nine thousand British, French, and Russians whom I saw at Doeberitz, near Berlin.  This was a show camp, I was told, but it suffices.  Conditions at other camps might be worse; doubtless were.  England treated its prisoners best, unless my information from unprejudiced observers be wrong.  But Germany had enormous numbers of prisoners.  A nation in her frame of mind thought only of the care of the men who could fight for her, not of those who had fought against her.

Then, the German nature is one thing and the British another.  Crossing the Atlantic on the Lusitania we had a German reserve officer who was already on board when the evening editions arrived at the pier with news that England had declared war on Germany.  Naturally he must become a prisoner upon his arrival at Liverpool.  He was a steadfast German.  When a wireless report of the German repulse at Liege came, he would not believe it.  Germany had the system and Germany would win.  But when he said, “I should rather be a German on board a British ship than a Briton on board a German ship, under the circumstances,” his remark was significant in more ways than one.

His English fellow-passengers on that splendid liner which a German submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy.  They passed the time of day with him and seemed to want to make his awkward situation easy.  Yet it was apparent that he regarded their kindliness as racial weakness.  Krieg ist Krieg.  When Germany made war she made war.

So allowances are in order.  One prison camp was like another in this sense, that it deprived a man of his liberty.  It put him in jail.  The British regular, who is a soldier by profession, was, in a way, in a separate class.  But the others were men of civil industries and settled homes.  Except during their term in the army, they went to the shop or the office every day, or tilled their farms.  They were free; they had their work to occupy their minds during the day and freedom of movement when they came home in the evening.  They might read the news by their firesides; they were normal human beings in civilized surroundings.