# 112 Days' Hard Labour/Introduction

​The full significance of prison I understood for the first time when its actual oppression was removed the night after the completion of my first sentence. I was back in the Guard Room at Hounslow again, charged within four hours of leaving gaol with disobeying a military order. As, after lights out, I lay on the wide wooden unmattressed bed, beside some soldiers, good fellows—infinitely kindlier and more understanding than the warlike civilian—I was conscious of the awful weight of prison life on one’s soul and mind. Memory and contrast surged through my brain. There was the sense of the present albeit sleeping companionship instead of the loneliness of the cell. There was the recollection of the unrestrained talk and laughter during the evening in such contrast with the hurried, whispered word in prison. There was, too, the slackening of the nervous tension—tension arising from the habit of listening to every sound re-echoing in the prison galleries and the attempt to visualise what the sounds may signify.
There was the relief of realising that no eye of a watchful officer was at the spy-hole in the cell door, transforming the solitary into the most public of lives. And liberty, though not possessed, yet somehow seemed less remote because of the knowledge of the one simple bolt on the guard-room door, instead of the multiplicity of complicated locks and gates between one and the outside world.
Too Tired “To Catch Up”
Then followed a disappointing realisation. Although the eagerly-awaited opportunity of picking up some of the happenings, developments, and changes in this acting, living world during the past four months had arrived, the tried and tired brain was too bewildered to embrace it. The consequent despondency made me feel like a tired child trying to hurry up the street to catch up the head of a procession that had begun to pass, and unable to gain upon the passing show. I felt tempted just to sink down in utter disappointment and let all the rest go by unheeded. I felt my pacifism had turned to passivism and that prison had crushed out all the joy of life and effort.
Once or twice had this nostalgia of prison, this real gaol fever, come over me, but never for more than a few minutes. Yet, ​now with the prison temporarily behind me and with the prospect of a fortnight’s quasi-liberty in the guard-room, I was overwhelmed.
But this was, and is, only one side of the lantern—the dark one—the half-truth that ever deceives. I fell into a doze, to awake suddenly to a realisation that the flood of depression had rolled away. Running through my head were those verses of John Addington Symonds that deserve, when wedded to a tune worthy of them, to be the spring song of victory—
“These things shall be. A loftier race Than e’er the world has known shall rise With fire of freedom in their hearts And light of knowledge in their eyes . . . They shall be gentle, brave and strong To spill no drop of blood, but dare All that shall plant man’s lordship firm In earth and fire and sea and air.”
Instead of the depression, there came into my mind that joy that had so continually been mine in prison; the experience that the isolation, driving one back upon oneself, had brought one into the presence of the Beyond-Oneself; the sense that God, and Good, and Beauty were one; the honour of being privileged to help stem the tide of an evil force.
Thus, in the attempt to reproduce something of the conflict of that tumultuous midnight hour do I think I can best crystallise the sensations and experiences of the last few months, and put before you the obverse and reverse of my impressions behind prison walls. Further detailed analysis I have not time to make or to record before returning for my second sentence very shortly. I believe, therefore, I shall best spend my limited time in pigeon-holing mainly in subject and paragraph form, as completely as I can, an account of the ordinary life that I and my fellow C.O. prisoners have led, and shall again be leading by the time this will be read by you. Thus, and thus only, can we best serve our dear ones, our country and humanity in the upward struggle towards that great Unity of life here and hereafter.
Hubert W. Peet, Detention Room, Hounslow Barracks.
March 1st, 1917.