Page:Hubert W. Peet - 112 Days' Hard Labour, Being Some Reflections On the First of My Sentences as a Conscientious Objector - 1917.pdf/12

 The Cell’s Public Privacy: The Peephole

It will be good one day in the future again to live in a room in which there is not a peephole in the door. The prisoner never knows when he is being watched, and however innocent his action it is unpleasant to feel that complete privacy can never be relied on. During the evening officers wear silent felt slippers, and their visits are only known by the slight click of the shield over the hole as he moves it to look through. It was disconcerting, for instance, when engaged one morning in saying my prayers, suddenly to be accused by a voice on the other side of the door of being the author of tapping signals which were going on through the wall somewhere in the neighbourhood, and on my denying the charge, to be told that at any rate you had just been using “foul langwidge”! A few nights later, the tapping still continuing, and evidently still suspicious of me, the same officer declared I had attempted to deceive him by getting into bed with my trousers on, having heard him about. I was, as a matter of fact, sitting up in bed with my jacket round me finishing a book before lights out, but it was only by getting out of bed I was able to prove that I had taken as many of my clothes off as it is possible to divest oneself of under conditions in which nightwear is not provided!

Our Prussian Penal System

The tone of voice used by some officers has a very depressing effect. Their speech was too often a mere shout, the voice in which one would herd cattle. I have many a time been cheered up for the whole afternoon just by one word from a genial curious officer, who when you told him how many feet of mail bags or dozens of tabs you had made or sewn on, used to say “Good” in a tone that showed some acknowledgment of your being a human creature. And yet I came to realise that the officers were the victims of the system as much as the prisoners. Shouting and satire directed at men if they do not immediately and by instinct show a knowledge of prison rules are largely only “Pretty Fanny’s way” (one of the warders who was especially guilty in this respect I soon came to think of as “Pretty Fanny” rather than by his right name), and with a few exceptions I found that even with a prison warder the appeal to the best in them evoked the right response. After all, this is the foundation of truth upon which all of us pacifists are really building for the future. Man may be worse than the best, but he is better than the worst. No man is as good as his creed, but he seldom consistently falls to the depth of the worst of the systems he may have contrived, which include prison and the Army. Of the two, I prefer the latter. It is the distinction between the barbarous and the brutal. The one is crude, but leaves many a loophole for inherent humanity to exercise itself. Our civil penal code is, on the other hand, calculated, scientific, soulless cruelty—Prussian in the true meaning of the term.