World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, Canadian
meant a great deal to give up any of their precious food; but they
knew, from experience, that we were starving, and we thought we were,
for after good army rations, one small slice of black bread does not go
far towards satisfying hunger. But, after existing on German fare for
two months, we knew what it was to be really hungry; we were more like
famished wolves than human beings.
This is a day's ration, served out to us the first day in camp, and in
the two months I was there it never varied: for breakfast, a small bowl
of coffee made from dried acorns, and served without milk or sugar. It
was so bitter as to be almost undrinkable, and there was not one morsel
of food given with it. For dinner we were allowed a bowl of stuff they
called soup. It was made by boiling cabbage and turnips with a few dog
bones; when I went there first I wouldn't believe the boys when they
told me that our soup was made of dog bones, but one day I met one of
the French prisoners who had been a doctor, and we went for a walk
around the grounds, so I asked him what kind of an animal went into our
soup and he told me it was just ordinary dog. We argued the question
for several minutes, and I was still unconvinced, so he said, "Go into
the cook house and see for yourself." I went, and the cook (who was a
French prisoner) very obligingly lifted out some bones with his long
spoon and showed me one of Fido's legs. That settled the question,
and, naturally, I enjoyed the soup more than ever. As an extra treat,
to give it a special flavour, sometimes they threw in the bark. The
boys had taken their own way of finding out what they were eating--they
saved all the bones for several days and then they put them
together--the result was a German Dachshund. We had nothing but this
soup for dinner, and for supper we were given a bowl of slop which the
boys called "sand-storm," and a three-pound loaf of Deutschland black
bread to be divided among ten of us. This bread was made from ground
vegetables mixed with rye flour. If you read Gerard's "Four Years in
Germany" you will see that samples of this food were examined by a
specialist and declared to be almost devoid of food value. It was
planned to reduce our numbers by a process of slow starvation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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