Having tasted the "slops," I could not agree with him and put it down to his inherent animosity towards all things German. I should have said that Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office seems more the good-looking, young Englishman of the university type than German; also his accent and intonation is entirely English. I noticed that when he spoke to me, the prisoners looked at him queerly. Then I saw two of them go off into a corner of the room and begin whispering; the chances are that they decided he was an English journalist who in some miraculous way had been granted permission to enter Germany and visit the Doeberitz camp. Hope is eternal with any one who is a prisoner. As we left the room, the officer going first, this was confirmed; beckoning Dr. Roediger, the two prisoners who had been whispering said to him, "When you go to England, won't you tell them over there that we get their letters all right, but that we're afraid the Germans are not going to let us have our parcels?" Dr. Roediger asked them what they meant. "Why, the folks write us that they are going to send us packages as Christmas presents--tobacco and things a chap can't get here. Now it would be a rotten Christmas if a chap didn't get those, wouldn't it? Can't you help us?" Dr. Roediger assured them if any packages came they would be delivered, but the prisoners seemed to doubt this, and when we left them their faces fell. As we were going out, one of them whispered to me, "See if you can get us our Christmas packages, won't you?" Christmas in a place like that.... Drawn up outside another of the unpainted sheds, we saw two men whose appearance instantly contrasted with the half slouch of those about them. "You're a regular, aren't you?" I asked a tall, powerfully built man who wore the chevrons of a sergeant. "Yes," he replied. "The boys here are just new recruits." I caught the sympathy in his voice when he spoke of "the boys." His very manner, his stiff, unyielding, soldierly bearing, made me understand better than ever before what Kipling meant when he called the British soldier a king. More than ever one marveled at the system that takes men out of the London gutters and transforms them into regulars, into a sergeant who could stand amid the humiliation of that prison camp and not once forget that he was a soldier of England. That single man was one of the greatest tributes to the regular army of England that I have ever seen. I found myself talking to a browned, deep-chested sailor, whose red insignia told me he was a gunner's mate. "What are you doing here?" I asked, surprised, not knowing how a man from a war ship could have been made a prisoner. "I was with one of the English naval guns at Antwerp," he said. Then he made his complaint. It was different from the way the younger men had talked, based on a different thing, a different way of thinking; in fact, his one way--the question of discipline.