eat.
The answer was: Twelve noon. Cabbage soup headed the menu, then came
dead horse meat, or salt fish if you chose it, black bread and water.
Same menu for supper. We learned that the people of the city fared
scarcely better. All were rationed. The soldiers and officials of the
Bolsheviks fared better than the others. Children were favored to some
extent. But the 'intelligenza' and the former capitalists were in sore
straits. Many were almost starving. Death rate was high. The soldier got
a pound of bread, workmen half a pound, others a quarter of a pound. In
this way they maintained their army. Fight, work for the Red government
or starve. Some argument. Liberty is unknown under the Soviet rule.
Their motto as I saw it is: What is yours is mine.'"

Captivity with all its desperate hardships and baleful uncertainties,
had its occasional brighter thread. The American boys feel especially
grateful to Mr. Merle V. Arnold, of. Lincoln, Nebraska, the American Y.
M. C. A. man who had been captured by the Red Guards a few days
preceding their capture. He was able to do things for them when they
reached Moscow. And when he was almost immediately given his liberty and
allowed to go out through Finland, he did not forget the boys he left
behind. He carried their case to the British and Danish Red Cross and a
weekly allowance of 200 roubles found its way over the belligerent lines
to Moscow and was given to the boys, much to the grateful assistance of
the starving allied prisoners of war.

But they became resourceful as all American soldiers seem to become,
whether at Bakaritza, Smolny, Archangel, Kholmogora, Moscow or wherenot,
and they found ways of adding to their rations. Imagine one of them
lining up with the employees of a Bolo public soup kitchen
and going through ostensibly to do some work and playing
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't-see-it with a dish of salt or a head of
cabbage or a loaf of bread or a chunk of sugar, or when on friendly
terms with the Bolshevik public employees volunteering to help do some
work that led them to where a little money would buy something on the
side at inside employees' prices. Imagine them with their little brass
kettle, stewing it over their little Russian sheet-iron stove, stirring
in their birdseed substitute for rolled oats and potatoes and cabbage
and perhaps a few shreds of as clean a piece of meat as they could buy,
on the sly. See the big wooden spoons travelling happily from pot