a doctor, and we went for a walk
around the grounds, so I asked him what kind of an animal went into our
soup and he told me it was just ordinary dog. We argued the question
for several minutes, and I was still unconvinced, so he said, "Go into
the cook house and see for yourself." I went, and the cook (who was a
French prisoner) very obligingly lifted out some bones with his long
spoon and showed me one of Fido's legs. That settled the question,
and, naturally, I enjoyed the soup more than ever. As an extra treat,
to give it a special flavour, sometimes they threw in the bark. The
boys had taken their own way of finding out what they were eating--they
saved all the bones for several days and then they put them
together--the result was a German Dachshund. We had nothing but this
soup for dinner, and for supper we were given a bowl of slop which the
boys called "sand-storm," and a three-pound loaf of Deutschland black
bread to be divided among ten of us. This bread was made from ground
vegetables mixed with rye flour. If you read Gerard's "Four Years in
Germany" you will see that samples of this food were examined by a
specialist and declared to be almost devoid of food value. It was
planned to reduce our numbers by a process of slow starvation.

We used to fight over the garbage cans for the peelings of potatoes,
and cabbage, and when the old prisoners, who were getting their Red
Cross boxes, brought us their German issue of soup, it was not safe for
them to come inside our enclosure. They would place the can inside the
gate and we fought over it like a pack of hungry wolves. If you think
we are exaggerating, see Gerard's new picture film "My Four Years in
Germany." It tells better than I can just how bad things were. Well,
one day when our soup was handed in by the other prisoners a funny
thing happened; we had seen the boys coming and had made a rush to the
huts to get our bowls--a very short fellow reached the soup can first
and before he could get his bowl filled, we had all crowded in on top
of him--poor Shorty had his head and arm in the soup and was almost
drowned before we got him out. He had soup everywhere except in the
bowl. Every British prisoner had to put up with this kind of food for
the first two months; after that, the Red Cross parcels would begin to
arrive. The condition of the Russian prisoners was indeed pitiable.
They received no help from home, and were depending solely on German
f