The Better Germany in War Time: Being Some Facts Towards FellowshipPicton, Harold W. (Harold Williams)
History
The Better Germany in War Time: Being Some Facts Towards Fellowship
Picton, Harold W. (Harold Williams)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals, charities, etc.; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
The doctor in the hospital told Marie she must have plenty of
milk every day, and we smiled together, for we knew their weekly
income left no margin for milk for her—the children must be fed
first. So _you_ are helping, and Marie has her milk each day,
and she and her babe are growing strong and well again.
The work done by the Friends’ Emergency Committee, Dr. K. E. Markel and
others on this side, and by Dr. Rotten, Siegmund Schulze, Prof. Stange
and their fellows on the other, is indeed as “a clear flame of truth in
a dark and haunted night.”
PROF. STANGE.
To the great work of Prof. Stange, of Göttingen, I have once or twice
alluded. He directs all the instruction given in the Göttingen camp,
attends daily, gives lectures and superintends the library. He
experienced the usual difficulties of any civilian who tries to practice
Christianity in war-time. “One great German newspaper wrote with
indignation that the prisoners in the Göttingen Camp had as good a time
as if they were at a health resort.” Doubtless this paper, like some
others, contrasted the (rumoured) abominable treatment of German
prisoners by their enemies with the too great indulgence shown to
prisoners in Germany. But Prof. Stange is not abashed. “No internment
camp,” he writes, “can be compared with a ‘holiday resort.’ In spite of
everything that may be done for the prisoners, internment is and remains
always a very hard lot. In the Göttingen camp, too, many a prisoner
needs not only the exertion of his whole strength, but help as well to
make the endurance of his lot physically and spiritually possible.”
Stange is one of those who have learned to envisage the anxieties, the
loneliness, the uncertainty, the ennui of the prisoner, and the terrible
enervation of long months, and, alas, years of confinement. In this, as
in so many circumstances of the war, it is the more sensitive and
developed minds that suffer most, and are most easily destroyed, those
minds that are indispensable in the building of any worthy future.
Prof. Stange quite frankly acknowledges to a war prejudice against the
English. But when he found their great need of help, his prejudices
melted away, and he soon engaged in helping them too with books classes,
and other means of activity.
Prof. Stange recognises that such work for enemy prisoners helps towards
better treatment of their own prisoners abroad, but, he adds, “It must
certainly be emphatically stated that we in Göttingen never took up our
work for the prisoners with this object. What compelled us to work was
simply and entirely the great distress and need of the prisoners
themselves.” (P. 36. The extracts are from Prof. Stange’s pamphlet on
Göttingen Camp.)
THE LAST RESTING PLACE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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