Report on Ruhleben, June 3, 1915 (p. 94).]

[Footnote 31: A case is in my mind where a man lost wife and two
children thus. I shall never forget my task of trying to allay
his misery and his bitterness.]

III.

PRISONERS IN PREVIOUS WARS.

SOME PREVIOUS RECORDS.

The suffering of prisoners has been great enough, God knows, yet if we
are to help the future we must try to see even this, amongst the other
terrible facts, in its proper perspective. The imprisonment of resident
enemy nationals has certainly been a most unfortunate step
backwards--unfortunate even if we regard it as inevitable.[32] Yet we
must recognise that far more solicitude has been shown as to prisoners
than was the case in most earlier wars, and this though prisoners have
never been taken on so large a scale, and though there has probably
never been greater embitterment. It will be useful to cite a few
previous records.

NAPOLEONIC WARS.

I quote once more from Dr. Spaight's work, where much information may be
found in a condensed form. "A hundred years ago, England, while she
prayed in her national liturgy for all prisoners and captives, had no
compunction about confining the French prisoners of war in noisome hulks
and feeding them on weevily biscuits, salt junk and jury rum, which
sowed the seed for a plentiful harvest of scurvy, dysentery and typhus."
("War Rights on Land," p. 265.)

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.

Here is a description of the state of things in the Confederate
internment camp at Andersonville during the American Civil War, which,
after all, did not happen so very long ago. "Over 30,000 prisoners were
cooped up in a narrow space; there was no shelter from the sun or cold
but what the men could improvise for themselves; every possible disease
was rampant; the prisoners were largely naked; the dead were pitched
into a ditch and covered with quicklime; the smell of the dreadful
stockade extended for two miles.... The state of affairs was known, or
might have been known, at Richmond, for Colonel Chandler,
inspector-general of the Confederate army, inspected the camp, and
reported upon its administration in no halting terms. 'It is a place,'
he said, 'the horrors of which it is difficult to describe--it is a
disgrace to civilisation.'"

Of the prisoners returning from the South, Whitman writes: "The sight is
worse than any sight of battlefield or any collection of wounded, even
the bloodiest. There was (as a sa