Why Stay We
Here?
III. Sample
Passages *(b)*
(a) how the War affected people
(b) the Germans
(c) casualties of the War
In his teens Godwin had studied for
a few years in Dresden. He had
learned
German, made good friends and
learned to love Wagner and Goethe.
This
comes out in his descriptions of
German soldiers and the prevailing
attitudes
towards them.
"A doleful-looking crew, these
prisoners; their bodies seem too big
for their heads in those little
pill-box caps; and the grey field
uniforms look too big for their
bodies; their boots too big for
anything at all.
Men in a wire enclosure. Prisoners.
Moving about and looking out like
animals in a zoo; looking out at the
battalion as it swings raggedly down
toward the village street. Not very
dreadful-looking foes, these
square-heads. Mostly decent-looking
lads, with simple, honest faces.
Staring out through the wire,
watching them pass. ‘Jerries,’ ‘Heinies,’
‘Boches,’ and by those names,
good-natured or contemptuous, one
thought of them; a breed of men
first encountered in this war and
with no existence apart from it. It
is permissible to think of them as
beasts about the earth; to think of
them otherwise is very difficult,
indeed. So many terrible things have
been charged against them.
And yet, what were they but Germans?
Saxons at that. You might go up to
that wire and call to them:
Du–du mit dem Schnurrbart, kennst du
vielleicht Dresden?
Ja? Ich ging dort auf die Schule,
weisst du?
And it would be nice to hear about
Dresden again. Zeidlitz might be
there among them in that cage. Would
he remember that time when the Herr
Director boxed his ears for
mimicking the class master with his:
'Schafskopf! Dummer Esel, du!' and
that dignitary, there in the
doorway, an unseen spectator of the
outrage upon his dignity.
Or Stolze? Did he dream of his
Gedichter still; yearn for his
fiddle, and paint in dreams his
Erlking, riding through the night?
What rot! These were Jerries,
Heinies, Boches. Those
others--Germans. Yet, mystery of
mystery, one and the same.
The battalion halted, dismissed, and
fell out." (Why Stay We Here? p.
128)
"Why was it so easy to think of
Germans as ‘Huns’, as the outcasts
of an outraged civilization? Yet so
it was: one side of one did that
automatically, echoing the spoken
and written word heard and seen
everywhere. The thought and feeling
of the war mood, tainted and
tainting. Was there a deeper self,
dwelling apart, sane and sweet and
whole, incorrupted? Yes, there was ,
only one had stifled it, let it go.
Bob England’s letter had done this,
then: it had made the forest live
again; it had restored reason,
judgment. Tolstoi was real again.
And Stephen was in the war, but not
of it. He must not let go again. In
it, but not of it..." (p. 132)
Below: German prisoners of
war.
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