ur own may be read in the _Woman's Dreadnought_, Vol
III., p. 551. The rather terrible appeal of the Captains at Knockaloe is
also printed on p. 561. It is a letter which is unwise and hysterical. I
do not wonder at its hysteria, and I confess that some things in the
letter hit me rather hard. But, alas, the desperation of the interned
men on either side does not help towards wise judgment, and for that
desperation we are all, in every country, in some measure responsible.
It is best to remember instead the real sympathy that those actually in
touch with prisoners do often feel. Colonel Panzera's message is clear
evidence of this, and from a private letter I take the following:

The attitude of prejudice or even hatred towards enemies,
whether prisoners or not, often disappears when men are brought
face to face in the work of an internment camp, for example, and
find that they are very much like each other. An officer of a
certain camp here was taken prisoner and interned for six months
in Germany before he escaped. He says that two or three times
the officers of the camp were changed, and in each case began
with harsh treatment, either the result of official suggestion
or of the general feeling. In each case, after the lapse of a
short time, close acquaintance modified this attitude, and
finally kindly relations and treatment resulted. In the same way
the nurses in a certain hospital here refused to receive or
treat German prisoners until a company of the wounded men
arrived, when the feeling of natural humanity proved too strong,
and they were quite eager to attend to them. At the internment
camps in this country the officers generally speak of the men
under their charge with humanity and respect.

The following is significant. "In the town near a certain internment
camp of ours much indignation was roused by the story that some of the
interned aliens had set in motion some railway trucks on a sloping
siding, with the intention of allowing them to crash into an arriving
passenger train at the bottom. An English friend of mine happened to
observe the real origin of the story. The trucks _began to move in an
accidental way, and two or three of the aliens nearly lost their own
lives, certainly risked serious accident, in endeavouring to stop the
trucks when they were already moving_."

Thus in the quiet neighbourhood of an internment camp a brave deed