I spoke up here. "Plenty of our own boys are as far from theirs."
"Yes," put in Elizabeth. "And are they being treated by the Germans one-half as decently as these are being treated by us, do you suppose?"
"Not likely!" with much feeling, from Vic. I knew she'd had a special "boy" who had been a prisoner in Wittenberg during that relentless first winter of the war. He had died of it, Vic's young corporal of the London Regiment.
Other women seem to have forgiven the enemy those horrors of deliberate starvation, cold, dirt, and disease, which destroyed their sons or sweethearts, but not Vic Jelks, the Cockney Land Girl, whose motto is "keep smiling" above the sorrow which was too proud to wear any black. Vic is one of England's woman-folk who do not forget.
"Indeed some of these Germans seem quite as decent as our own men," Mr. Price urged. "Why, the other day when I was away selling that horse, I was hearing about some old farmer in Merionethshire who has a German prisoner living in and working. Now the farmer's only son is a prisoner of war in Germany working on a farm.
"Talking to the German one day about where his home was, what do you think the farmer found out? Why, that it was the father of his German that had got his (the farmer's) son working for him! And what was the end of it? The German prisoner wrote home to his people. 'Be kind to your Welshman, for these people here will do anything for me.' So you see, Miss Vic!"
But Vic would not let him have the last word.
"Did you say Merionethshire, Mr. Price? Wasn't it somewhere there that a big potato crop failed, because the potatoes were put in by Germans? The blighters had cut all the eyes out of 'em so that they shouldn't sprout. How's that, eh? That's the way they'll do you in, after all their jaw about 'kindness' and the lot. That's the dirty trick they play you—if you'll excuse my language, Mrs. Price!"
The farmer's wife, with her usual briskness, had risen and had fetched two large bottles of milk, a farmhouse loaf and a basin full of the butter that I'd made yesterday.
"Now here's the lunch for these much-discussed prisoners," Mrs. Price announced. "You needn't look as if you thought I were trading with the enemy, any of you girls, because I'm not. I'm sending the men out something to eat because I know it makes them work better if they're fed right.