eared to be in good health and
cheerful, many of them engaging in games and other pastimes."

The diet described must be frightfully monotonous. Feeding has
throughout been one of the German difficulties. "Germany claims to hold
433,000 prisoners of war," wrote an anonymous American journalist
(probably in November, 1914); "the housing and feeding of so great a
number must be a tremendous strain upon resources drained by the
necessities of war." The numbers must now exceed two million. The Press
article referred to [Misc. No. 7 (1915)] is severe on the misery of camp
life, and the verminousness of the men (they were of mixed nationality)
in the camp at Doeberitz which he visited. (See, however, the further
official reports quoted below at p. 9). But the writer does not confine
his condemnation to one side. "One hears of battles in which no quarter
is granted. There are stories of one side or the other refusing an
armistice to permit the other to gather its wounded. Each side is
desperately determined to win, and neither is counting the cost. So men
must rust in prison camps until the struggle is over." The monotony in
this case seems to have been varied by fights between the prisoners of
different nationality, each set considering that the others had not done
their part in the war. We need not be contemptuous about that. The
monotony of the prisoners' life must tend to produce the maximum degree
of mutual friction. There is absolutely no privacy for the prisoner of
war. To be forced to remain, day and night, for months and years in
idleness, with a crowd of others, not of one's own choice is, I believe,
one of the psychological factors which make internment (especially to
many civilians) decidedly worse than imprisonment in a criminal prison.

CORRESPONDENCE AND PACKAGES.

My next document illustrates the fact that each side makes similar
complaints about the other. Telegram received by American Embassy,
London, December 23, 1914, 22nd from Berlin Embassy:

"Foreign Office reports receiving many complaints that money and
packages sent German military and civilian prisoners in enemy
countries from Germany do not reach addresses. Please secure
information for Department to forward German Foreign Office
whether money and other postal matter will be delivered to such
prisoners promptly and intact.--BRYAN, Washington."

There is no doubt that many letters and parcels have _not_ reached
German p