as in all war matters, we come upon "reprisals." The following
is a cutting from the _Daily News_ of July 20, 1917:

Mr. James Hope, for the Foreign Office, stated in the Commons
yesterday that five British officers had been for over three
months imprisoned in Constantinople as a reprisal for the
alleged imprisonment of Turkish officers in Egypt. The United
States Ambassador was requested on April 25 to explain to the
Porte by telegram that only one of the five Turkish officers in
Egypt had been under arrest, and that for attempted escape. He
regretted to say that one of the five British officers had died.
They had just received a message from the Danish Minister at
Constantinople stating that the four surviving officers returned
to camp on July 4.

Statements about _enemy_ reprisals are usually less frank than this. The
neutral observer has usually to watch each side describing its most
drastic actions as reprisals upon the other for similar deeds.

SERBIA.

The condition of Austrian and German prisoners in Serbia has been
touched upon by Dr. F. M. Dickinson Berry, Physician to the
Anglo-Serbian Hospital Unit. I give the following quotations from an
article by Dr. Berry in the _Nation_ of August 21, 1915.

"There is no doubt that the prisoners suffered badly during the
winter.... Typhus decimated them earlier and more universally, probably
owing to the way in which they were crowded together. Outside the town
our prisoner pointed out a cottage adjacent to a brick-kiln, where he,
with 250 men, had stayed some months without beds, blankets, or even
straw to sleep on, and with the scantiest of food." But the villagers
showed kindness, said the prisoner, and bestowed on them the food placed
by Serbian custom on the graves of the dead. "Many of the prisoners fell
sick and were taken off to the hospital. Here, too, they lay on the
floor with nothing to cover them but a great-coat, if the fortunate
possessors of such. Few who entered the hospital ever came back; if not
ill with typhus when they came in, they were pretty safe to get it
there, and they passed on to the cemetery beyond the town, where, as in
so many Serbian cemeteries, however remotely situated, there is a
portion covered thickly with plain wooden crosses, marking the graves of
Austrian prisoners. Our informant told us that of those with him 50 per
cent. had died; of eleven Italians whom he had under his charge