Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918

7. Civilians behind the Wire

[ 203 ] [ 7 ] Civilians behind the Wire All the world’s a cage, And all the men within it weary players; They have no exits, only entrances, Where each spends many months ‘ere he departs. —L. E. Filmore, “The Seven Ages of a Kriegsgefangener,”1 The nightmares began almost as soon as he reached neutral territory . The dreams were vivid, featuring faceless officials wresting him from his comfortable Dutch hotel room and returning him to the horse stall where he’d spent the last three years. Gilbert Graham, a 28-year-old Australian electrical engineer released into Dutch custody in late April 1918 from a German civilian internment camp, wrote to his wife about the dreams: Here I usually sleep too heavily to dream but when I do it is quite disturbing , because I always find myself back in Ruhleben, awake, with the knowledge that Holland was only a dream. It is always the same with slight variations , but I always have the same obsession, that is my brain worries and worries how to get back the letters which I wrote you and the Dad [sic] announcing my false freedom, such letters having been written under the dream impression that I was in Holland. It is quite disturbing while it lasts.2 Like many of his comrades also released into Holland during prisoner exchanges, Graham found himself unable to throw off the experience of confinement, longing alternately for solitude and for company, bothered Civilians behind the Wire [ 204 ] by dreams, memories, and melancholy. At one point, he mused to his wife, “I shall indeed be like an Antarctic explorer returning to the world after this [experience].”3 Graham was certainly not alone in this experience of civilian internment in the First World War, and in fact, he was one of hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians taken into custody by nations involved in the war. Millions more were displaced by the war, forced into refugee camps or housed in private homes and public institutions, either because they fled voluntarily or because military officials mandated movement from war zones. Enemy alien men of military age (roughly seventeen to fortyfive years old) were particular targets, but men, women, and children around the world were affected by these policies of internment as well as by deportation and repatriation programs during and after the war. Altogether close to a million civilians spent at least part of their war behind barbed wire or in other forms of confinement. While not a new invention in 1914, the widespread use and systematic organization of concentration/internment camps in the First World War was an innovation that became a precedent for later conflicts. The first to use concentration camps (reconcentrado) was Spanish general Valeriano Weyler in the fight against rebels in Cuba (1898), and such camps were also utilized by the British in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), when civilians were detained in camps or concentrated areas, supposedly in order to control support networks for guerilla fighters .4 The major difference in World War I was that civilian internment was a deliberate state policy regardless of whether the nation in question was fighting on its own territory. Even nations as far removed from the battle lines as Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Chile interned civilians. Numbers of internees varied widely by country. For example, the Isle of Man housed more than twenty-five thousand civilian men interned by the British during the war, while in Germany, more than one hundred and ten thousand civilians were in captivity by 1918. Italy interned seventy thousand people in the Friuli and Dolomite border zones, sending the men of military age to Sardinia. In France, camps accommodated enemy men and women but also undesirable French and Belgian people from the military zones. In all, an estimated sixty thousand people spent some time in the French concentration camps of the war period.5 In fact, Civilians behind the Wire [ 205 ] internment camps existed in all combatant countries (Romania, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, Australia, Canada, United States, Chile), in neutral countries (Switzerland and the Netherlands), and in many colonial possessions (German East Africa, Malta, Singapore). Were these interned men and women still civilians when they were being held in military custody, guarded by soldiers, and subject to military control? The internment practices of World War I highlighted the difficulties in determining which civilians constituted military threats to the home...