Page:Hubert W. Peet - 112 Days' Hard Labour, Being Some Reflections On the First of My Sentences as a Conscientious Objector - 1917.pdf/14

 down,” were as a refreshing breeze which blew away some of the gaol cobwebs in the mind.

Outstanding in my prison life will always be the remembrance of the joy with which I happened upon Wordsworth’s lines:—

Whose dwelling is the light of setting sun. And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky and in the mind of man. A motion and a spirit which impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.”

Prison a Cosmopolis

What a curious cosmopolis a British prison may be. To start with, practically every district in Great Britain is represented by its “objector” prisoner or prisoners, some already undergoing their second or third sentence. In one prison a prominent figure at exercise was a full-blooded negro objector, a former resident of the West Indies. Mingled with the ordinary prisoners, mostly old men or young boys, though there was a good sprinkling of men of military age, were yellow men, brown men, and black men, and late one night the whole prison was roused by the arrival of the crew of a captured German submarine under a strong armed guard.

And what a set of paradoxes was involved in it all. In one cell was a man beginning his life sentence for manslaughter—because he had taken life. In other cells were scores of young men, confined there because they would not take life. In one wing of the prison were soldiers in detention, mostly for being absentees, and, therefore, apparently, tired of killing; and beneath the C.O.’s were imprisoned some Germans because they had been too eager to kill.

Prison Life—“Meals and Mail Bags”

The prison regime provides every temptation to atrophy, and to let oneself vegetate. Several times I felt acutely the danger that my pacifism might merely become passivism, and that if not watchful I might let my life develop into meals and mail bags. It was almost with resentment that any little interference with the mechanical daily regime was received, even when it afforded a chance of such a change as the transference to Wandsworth. Many a time the truly horrible question arose in my mind, “Is our whole system of civilisation based on prison and a fear of it?” Sometimes I thought with shame that it was; but, No. Bad as our