I witnessed one incident with an English Tommy which provoked tremendous feeling when related to his comrades.  He was walking the field soaked to the skin, perishing from cold produced by lack of food, continuously hitching in his belt to keep his “mess-tin” quiet, and on the brink of collapse.  He happened to kick something soft.  He picked the object up and to his extreme delight found it to be a piece of black bread, soaked with water, and thickly covered with mud.  He made his way to the field kitchen where there happened to be a small fire under the cauldron in which the rations were prepared.  He slipped the soddened bread beneath the grate to dry it.  While he was so doing, the cook, an insignificant little bully, came along.  Learning what the soldier was doing, he stooped down, raked out the fire, and buried the bread among the ashes.  Then laughing at his achievement he went on his way.

The soldier, without a murmur, recovered his treasure with difficulty.  He moved out into the open, succeeded in finding a few dry sticks, lit a small fire, and placed his bread on top of it.  Again he was caught.  His warder bustled up, saw the little fire, which he scattered with his feet, and then crunched the small hunk of bread to pieces in the mud and water with his iron heel.

The look that came over the soldier’s face at this unprovoked demonstration of heartless cruelty was fearful, but he kept his head.  “Lor’ blime!” he commented to me when I came up and sympathised with him over his loss, “I could have knocked the god-damned head off the swine and I wonder I didn’t.”

I may say that during the night the guard announced an order which had been issued for the occasion—­no one was to light a fire upon the Field.  Even the striking of a match was sternly forbidden.  The penalty was to be a bullet, the guards having been instructed to shoot upon the detection of an infraction of the order.  One man was declared to have been killed for defying the order intentionally or from ignorance, but of this I cannot say anything definitely.  Rumour was just as rife and startling among us on the field as among the millions of a humming city.  But we understood that two or three men went raving mad, several were picked up unconscious, one Belgian committed suicide by hanging himself with his belt, while another Belgian was found dead, to which I refer elsewhere.

At 5.30 we were lined up.  We were going to get something to eat we were told.  But when the hungry, half-drowned souls reached the field kitchen after waiting and shivering in their wet clothes for two and a half hours, it was to receive nothing more than a small basin of the eternal lukewarm acorn coffee.  We were not even given the usual piece of black bread.

The breakfast, though nauseating, was swallowed greedily.  But it did not satisfy “little Mary” by any means.  During my sojourn among German prisons I often felt hungry, but this term is capable of considerable qualification.  Yet I think on this occasion it must have been the superlative stage of hunger.  The night upon the Field had come upon my illness from which I had never recovered completely.  It was a feeling such as I have never experienced before nor since, and I do not think it can ever be approached again.