I am afraid it will be a very long time before I see my constituents. I wish them all a happy new year and hope that during next year I may meet them again. The outlook for me is not very bright, but I intend to do my best to be cheerful. Up to the present we have been very well treated. We had some most exciting experiences in the submarine. The officers on board treated us as though we were their guests and not their prisoners. We have as companions two French officers who were made prisoners the day before us, their submarine having run ashore.”
—Manchester Guardian, January 10, 1916.
Captain Wilson (an able-bodied prisoner) has since been unconditionally released.
The Food Question.
The report already given makes it clear that very similar complaints, or (as Mr. Jackson puts it [page 16]) complaints that were “exact counterparts” as to food, have often been made on both sides. It is also plain that complaints on this score in German camps have been by no means universal. I do not in the least suppose that the food in general would be satisfying or other than dreadfully monotonous. (“Oft recht eintönig,” says Professor Stange quite frankly in his interesting pamphlet on Göttingen camp.) Loss of appetite, depression, indigestion will then in many cases produce grave physical trouble. All this may occur and does occur, without anything like a deliberate attempt at starvation. British born wives of interned Germans would sometimes, even before the reduction of rations, speak bitterly of their husbands’ needs. An anti-English journalist might have used such complaints to charge us with starvation. But even perfectly bona fide complaints need indicate only monotony, loss of robustness, and consequent physical (and mental) ills—and indeed the tragedy of these things may become terribly dark. It is, however, something very different from deliberate starvation.
In any comparison between the two sides it is only fair to take into account the special difficulties of the German case. The number of prisoners in Germany by August, 1915, was probably over one million. This is an enormous figure. While Great Britain and her Allies have tried to prevent food from reaching Germany, the drain upon the German food stock has continually grown as the number of prisoners has increased. By the end of 1917 this famished country had to support probably more than two million extra persons. The French Press long ago frankly regarded this as one of the means of helping towards the starving out of Germany, while in an American cartoon the Russian prisoners were figured as an enormous beast with its head in a cupboard labelled “Germany’s Food Supply.” These are considerations for the fair-minded, and it is for them to recall that as soon as there was in our own case a menace of food shortage, there was also what might in official language be described as a complete revision of the prisoners’ rations. The prisoners’ own language would very likely describe it differently. We can scarcely be surprised at sad and even very bitter words at times from prisoners’ wives.
That prisoners themselves are, however, sometimes able to envisage the difficulties is indicated by the following extract from a Daily News interview with a corporal repatriated from Münster. He commented on the fact that some men were the recipients of more parcels than they needed, while others got none. The interview continues:
You see, without regular parcels from home a man simply starves at a camp like Münster. If the Germans had the food I believe they would give it, but they haven’t: they are starving themselves.[3] All they allowed us was bread and water and thin soup. The consequence is that the men who get no parcels have to go round begging from the other chaps just to keep body and soul together.
From what I saw of it, getting so much while others get nothing isn’t good for a man either. Some fellows—the stingy sort—will save up their parcels against a rainy day. Make a regular little store they will. Others—the lively sort—sell what they have over to the unlucky ones, and spend their time gambling with the few marks they make. Poor devils! You can’t blame them!
The word “starvation” has been, and is here, too freely, if very naturally, used. The remarks of Lord Newton, speaking in the House of Lords on May 31, 1916, are important in this connection: