If it had not been for the French civilians giving us food as we went along the roads to and from work we should most certainly have starved. If the sentries saw us make a movement out of the ranks to get food they would immediately make a jab at us with their rifles, but conditions here were not so bad as at Moretz, where if a man stepped out of the ranks he was immediately shot. I heard about this from men who had themselves been working at Moretz, and had with their own eyes seen comrades of theirs shot for moving from the ranks. At Ervillers in February, 1917, a prisoner's allowance for the day consisted of a quarter of a loaf of German black bread, (about a quarter of a pound,) with coffee in the morning; then soup at midday, and at 4:30 coffee again, without sugar or milk. On this a man had to carry on heavy work for over nine hours. The ration of the German soldier at the same time and place consisted of a whole loaf of bread per day, good, thick soup, with beans and meat in it, coffee, jam, and sugar; two cigars and three cigarettes. The food conditions at Marquion a little later are thus described: We used to beg the sentries to allow us to pick stinging nettles and dandelions to eat, we were so hungry; in fact, we were always hungry, and I should say we were semi-starved all the time. While we were here our Sergeants put in for more rations, but the answer they got was that we were prisoners of war now "and had no rights of any kind; that the Germans could work us right up behind their front lines if they liked, and put us on half the rations we were then getting." Flogged with Dog Whip The ration was coffee and a slice of bread at 4:45 A. M., soup of barley and horseflesh at 2 P. M., eight pounds of barley and ten pounds of meat between 240 men. And they were compelled to work hard for eight or nine hours a day on this diet. The frequent cruelty of the guards generally is a matter constantly referred to: The German Sergeant in charge at Ervillers (says one prisoner) was very harsh. Twice I saw him (this prisoner was there for a month only) using a dog whip, and heard of him doing so on another occasion. He used it mostly on men who were slow in getting out to work owing to weakness. The description by a body of these men on their arrival at a camp in Germany, after being withdrawn from the front, may be taken as another example of this: We were forced to work; we were given hardly any food, and when we fell down from sheer exhaustion we were kicked until we got up again, and it was not until we absolutely could not get about that we were sent back.