They all said, "Yes."
"How long were you drilled?"
And one was struck with the pitiful side of the blunder that made the First Lord of England's Admiralty the laughing stock of military experts the world over. In America we had read and only half believed that Winston Churchill had taken five thousand young men, practically greenhorns, and thrown them into Antwerp, a mere handful compared to the German hosts. That needless sacrifice of men, that useless waste of five thousand, their number making them practically useless, came home now in another way. Every boy there—and they nearly all look like boys—could blame the high-hatted strategist of the Admiralty for their predicament. And many of them openly did.
"The grub here," said a voice from their ranks, "is swill; it's nothing but skilley, and poor stew at that. Slops, I calls it, sir."
Having tasted the "slops," I could not agree with him and put it down to his inherent animosity towards all things German. I should have said that Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office seems more the good-looking, young Englishman of the university type than German; also his accent and intonation is entirely English. I noticed that when he spoke to me, the prisoners looked at him queerly. Then I saw two of them go off into a corner of the room and begin whispering; the chances are that they decided he was an English journalist who in some miraculous way had been granted permission to enter Germany and visit the Doeberitz camp. Hope is eternal with any one who is a prisoner. As we left the room, the officer going first, this was confirmed; beckoning Dr. Roediger, the two prisoners who had been whispering said to him, "When you go to England, won't you tell them over there that we get their letters all right, but that we're afraid the Germans are not going to let us have our parcels?"
Dr. Roediger asked them what they meant.
"Why, the folks write us that they are going to send us packages as Christmas presents—tobacco and things a chap can't get here. Now it would be a rotten Christmas if a chap didn't get those, wouldn't it? Can't you help us?"
Dr. Roediger assured them if any packages came they would be delivered, but the prisoners seemed to doubt this, and when we left them their faces fell. As we were going out, one of them whispered to me, "See if you can get us our Christmas packages, won't you?"
Christmas in a place like that....