out.

It was a fake. The men could not be intimidated, and they were sent
back to the Lager.

It was on another occasion that the man I am referring to was put to
work in the mine.

I was asked by another if I knew anything about 200 German prisoners
being sent back to work in France, because they were not allowed to
work in England. He said that when the Germans heard about it they
took 200 of our men from Doberitz camp and sent them to work in Poland
as a reprisal.

The work there may not have been very much harder, but it was a great
hardship upon our men, because there would be a considerable delay in
their parcels of food reaching them from England, and meantime they
had to subsist on the scanty fare supplied by their captors.

The men seemed to be getting parcels on a very liberal scale. Some
were getting more than others, but they divided up by eating in messes
of four or six, or some such number.

I did not hear of many complaints of parcels being undelivered, though
in some cases parcels were missed. But so far as I could ascertain
they were not withheld in any deliberate or systematic manner; and
when one comes to consider the enormous number handled and the
probability of parcels getting lost through insecure packing, the
number of complaints I heard of seemed comparatively insignificant.

The Russian prisoners seemed to be the least provided for, and parcels
for them were very rare. They lived or rather starved on the German
rations; and when men have to work or remain in the open air all day
such a ration was a form of torture.

When the watery liquid of potato water called soup was issued from the
kitchens fatigue parties were paraded to draw the issue for each
mess.

The British prisoners were not altogether dependent on this ration,
and would let the Russian prisoners carry the dixy for them, and in
return they would be given a cup of soup by the British Tommies. So
hungry were the Russians for this little "extra" that hundreds of them
would wait for hours in the cold on the off-chance of a few getting
the job.

One cannot speak with these British Tommies and hear of their
hardships without feeling a profound admiration for their indomitable
spirit. You can take a British soldier prisoner, send him far from the
protection of his country, but he is British wherever he goes and his
courage and resourcefulness cannot be broken.

Whenever I met a man who had been a prisoner since the beginning