An attempt has been made to raise certain kinds of live stock, such as pigs, poultry, and Belgian hares—­a large kind of rabbit.  There were a few pet dogs about—­one had been trained by a Belgian to perform tricks equal to any of those displayed at variety theatres.

Apparently there is no lack of amusement.  I visited the cinematograph theatre, and the operator asked, “What would you like to see—­something funny?” He showed us a rather familiar old film.  The reels are those that have been passed out of service of the German moving picture shows.  In the large theatre, which would hold, I should think, seven hundred to a thousand people, there was a good acrobatic act and the performing dog, to which I have referred, with an orchestra of twenty-five instruments, almost all prisoners, but a couple of German Landsturmers helped out.  The guarding of the prisoners is effected by plenty of barbed wire and a comparatively small number of oldish Landsturmers.

A special cruelty of the Germans towards prisoners is the provision of a lying newspaper in French for the Frenchmen, called the Gazette des Ardennes.  The Gazette des Ardennes publishes every imaginable kind of lie about the French and French Army, with garbled quotations from English newspapers, and particularly The Times, calculated to disturb the relations of the French and English prisoners in Germany.  For the British there is a paper in English which is quite as bad, to which I have already referred, called the Continental Times, doled out three times a week.  The Continental Times is, I regret to say, largely written by renegade Englishmen in Berlin employed by the German Government, notably Aubrey Stanhope, who for well-known reasons was unable to enter England at the outbreak of war, and so remains and must remain in Germany, where, for a very humble pittance, he conducts this campaign against his own country.

For the Russians a special prevaricating sheet, called the Russki Visnik, is issued.  All these newspapers pretend to print the official French, British, and Russian communiques.

For a long time the effect on the British prisoners was bad, but little by little events revealed to them that the Continental Times, which makes a specialty of attacks on the English Press, was anti-British.

The arrival of letters and parcels is, of course, the great event for the prisoners and, so far as the large camps are concerned, I do not think that there are now any British prisoners unprovided with parcels.  It is the isolated and scattered men, moved often from place to place for exhibition purposes, who miss parcels.

Soltau, although a model camp, is bleak and dreary and isolated.  At the outset cases of typhus occurred there, and in a neat, secluded corner of the camp long lines of wooden crosses tell the tale of sadness.  The first cross marked a Russian from far-away Vilna, the next a Tommy from London.  East had met West in the bleak and silent graveyard on the heather.  Close to them slept a soldier from some obscure village in Normandy, and beside him lay a Belgian, whose life had been the penalty of his country’s determination to defend her neutrality.  Here in the heart of Germany the Allies were united even in death.