"Well," he said, "I can bear up under it, but with some of the lads here it is pretty hard. They are used to better."
"But," I argued, "they can't expect what they get at home, can they?"
He agreed with this himself, but persisted, "If they'd give us better grub, I could give them better discipline."
It seemed to be the thing that concerned him most.
As we went along talking to these English people, one heard all kind of stories. There was the marine, who, when he was captured, had seven pounds, and in ten weeks he had spent it all but one mark, buying himself little luxuries at the camp; now he was wondering what he was going to do with his money nearly all gone. There was another marine who, when I asked him why he had enlisted, did not say, "Because my country needed me," but rather, "Because I thought it would be a bit of a lark, you know." There was another fellow who had a grouch because the Germans would not let him write long letters home.
"Yes, that's the fellow," Lieutenant Colonel Alberti commented. "The first day he was here, he wrote an eighteen-page letter. The officer in charge of the camp has to read every letter sent out by the prisoners. For the first few days these fellows had nothing else to do but to sit down and write. You can imagine the result. We were inundated with letters, so we had to put a limit on them. You see they all have to be translated. Now they are allowed to write every so often."
The camp at Doeberitz Road only opened my eyes a little. Two days later I was watching the gray shape of a Zeppelin soaring two thousand meters above our motor, as we hurried down the Kaiser Wilhelm Road towards Zossen. This time a good friend had gone to General von Lowenfeld, the Commander of Berlin, and from him had been secured the exceptional privilege to take photographs in the prison camp at Zossen.
If my first sight of Doeberitz was sinister, Zossen was farce. As our motor drew up before a gate similar to Doeberitz, we were put into a light mood by the spectacle of a baggy, red-trousered Frenchman balancing himself on a little box and nailing a gap in the wall of his own prison. He was busy nailing a strand of barbed wire to a post and near him stood another Frenchman, who looked up at him, poked him in the ribs with his stick when the sentry wasn't looking, and made faces like a mischievous boy. The humor of the situation was not out of the picture, so we afterwards learned, for the Zossen camp has a surprisingly good time of it. A handsome white-haired baron, who spoke excellent English, and who was introduced to us as the Lieutenant Baron von Maltzahn, was as genial as the spirits of the prisoners. With Captain von Stutterheim, who has charge of the Weinberger section of the huge camp, they made an escort that was willing to do everything possible to show us every detail of Zossen. One quickly saw that the Captain and the Baron, who was the aide of the General in Command of the Zossen garrison, were proud of the camp.
