e was in
our own case a menace of food shortage, there was also what might in
official language be described as a complete revision of the prisoners'
rations. The prisoners' own language would very likely describe it
differently. We can scarcely be surprised at sad and even very bitter
words at times from prisoners' wives.

That prisoners themselves are, however, sometimes able to envisage the
difficulties is indicated by the following extract from a _Daily News_
interview with a corporal repatriated from Muenster. He commented on the
fact that some men were the recipients of more parcels than they needed,
while others got none. The interview continues:

You see, without regular parcels from home a man simply starves
at a camp like Muenster. If the Germans had the food I believe
they would give it, but they haven't: they are starving
themselves.[3] All they allowed us was bread and water and thin
soup. The consequence is that the men who get no parcels have to
go round begging from the other chaps just to keep body and soul
together.

From what I saw of it, getting so much while others get nothing
isn't good for a man either. Some fellows--the stingy sort--will
save up their parcels against a rainy day. Make a regular little
store they will. Others--the lively sort--sell what they have
over to the unlucky ones, and spend their time gambling with the
few marks they make. Poor devils! You can't blame them!

The word "starvation" has been, and is here, too freely, if very
naturally, used. The remarks of Lord Newton, speaking in the House of
Lords on May 31, 1916, are important in this connection:

If Lord Beresford was accurate in his assumption that prisoners
of war would literally starve to death if parcels did not
arrive, hundreds of thousands of prisoners would be dead
already. Russian prisoners, of whom there were over a million in
Germany, received no parcels at all, and if it was impossible to
exist upon the food supplied by the Germans, these men would
literally have died like flies.... Lord Beresford and other
noble lords had been rather prone to ignore the fact that
Germany was a blockaded country. It was common knowledge that
there was a general scarcity of food throughout Germany, and, if
the prisoners did not get as much as they ought to have, in all
probability the vast majority of the German population w