One can imagine what they find there.
With us food is pretty scarce and none too good at that—turnips cut into six pieces and boiled in water, and unwashed carrot tops—mouldy potatoes are tit-bits, and the chief luxury is a thin rice soup in which float little bits of beef-sinew, but these are cut up so small that they take a lot of finding.
Everything gets eaten, notwithstanding, and if ever anyone is so well off as not to want all his share, there are a dozen others standing by ready to relieve him of it.
Only the dregs that the ladle cannot reach are tipped out and thrown into the garbage tins.
Along with that there sometimes go a few turnip peelings, mouldy bread crusts and all kinds of muck.
This thin, miserable, dirty garbage is the objective of the prisoners.
They pick it out of the stinking tins greedily and go off with it under their blouses.
It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up.
They have faces that make one think—honest peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick hair.
They ought to be put to threshing, reaping, and apple picking.
They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland.
It is distressing to watch their movements, to see them begging for something to eat.
They are all rather feeble, for they only get enough nourishment to keep them from starving.
Ourselves we have not had sufficient to eat for long enough.
They have dysentery; furtively many of them display the blood-stained tails of their shirts.
Their backs, their necks are bent, their knees sag, their heads droop as they stretch out their hands and beg in the few words of German that they know—beg with those soft, deep, musical voices, that are like warm stoves and cosy rooms at home.
Some men there are who give them a kick, so that they fall over;—but those are not many.
The majority do nothing to them, just ignore them.
Occasionally, when they are too grovelling, it makes a man mad and then he kicks them.
If only they would not look at one so—What great misery can be in two such small spots, no bigger than a man's thumb—in their eyes!
They come over to the camp in the evenings and trade.
They exchange whatever they possess for bread.
Often they have fair success, because they have very good boots and ours are bad.
The leather of their knee boots is wonderfully soft, like suede.
The peasants among us who get titbits sent from home can afford to trade.
The price of a pair of boots is about two or three loaves of army bread, or a loaf of bread and a small, tough ham sausage.
But most of the Russians have long since parted with whatever things they had.
Now they wear only the most pitiful clothing, and try to exchange little carvings and objects that they have made out of shell fragments and copper driving bands.
Of course, they don't get much for such things, though they may have taken immense pains with them— they go for a slice or two of bread.
Our peasants are hard and cunning when they bargain.
They hold the piece of bread or sausage right under the nose of the Russian till he grows pale with greed and his eyes bulge and then he will give anything for it.
The peasants wrap up their booty with the utmost solemnity, and then get out their big pocket knives, and slowly and deliberately cut off a slice of bread for themselves from their supply and with every mouthful take a piece of the good tough sausage and so reward themselves with a good feed.
It is distressing to watch them take their afternoon meal thus; one would like to crack them over their thick pates.
They rarely give anything away. How little we understand one another.
I am often on guard over the Russians.
In the darkness one sees their forms move like sick storks, like great birds.
They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it; their fingers hook round the mesh.
Often many stand side by side, and breathe the wind that comes down from the moors and the forest.
They rarely speak and then only a few words.
They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are.
But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us.
Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned.
But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.
The Territorials who are in charge of them say that they were much more lively at first.
They used to have intrigues among themselves, as always happens, and it would often come to blows and knives.
But now they are quite apathetic and listless; most of them do not masturbate any more, they are so feeble, though otherwise things come to such a pass that whole huts full of them do it.
They stand at the wire fence; sometimes one goes away and then another at once takes his place in the line.
Most of them are silent; occasionally one begs a cigarette butt.
I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind.
I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; and that is exactly what troubles me.