Dinner meant another welcome interruption in the difficult task of settling down, and, since it was Saturday, turned out to be bean soup. Although the quantity was far short of what I required, particularly in my famished state, it appeared so tasty, so far beyond anything I had been accustomed to in camp as far as German rations were concerned, that I was beginning to think myself in clover. Still, I was in solitary confinement. How long was this state of affairs to last? I had asked the man in charge of the canteen, a British prisoner who paid me a visit in his official capacity. He did not know. He had had four and a half months after his escape of the previous summer. The N.C.O.’s refused to commit themselves, if they answered my questions at all. So I tried to face the prospect of being shut up in a small cell, with no company but my own, for five months. On this basis I worked out the final date, made a very rough calendar, and thereafter at 11 A.M., the hour of my arrival in the Stadtvogtei, marked with great ceremony the termination of every twenty-four hours in “solitary.” I was not examined again, contrary to my expectations, and my clever plans, framed in Vreden prison, of “diddling the Boche” into a forgiving frame of mind could not be tested. My hopes of a glimpse of Ruhleben camp and my friends were not realized. The term of my solitary confinement evidently was regarded as a state secret, not to be communicated even to the person whom it most concerned. This was a policy always pursued by the _Kommandantur_ in Berlin--whether out of sheer malice or callous indifference I don’t know. Since I was the first escaper to be punished under a new regulation, there was no precedent to form an opinion from; but I did not know that, and consequently expected the same term of “solitary” as other men before me. Those who came after me were not permitted to have much doubt about the subject. We saw to that. On the morning of the second day I was told that, in addition to solitary confinement, punishment diet had been ordered by the powers that were. One day out of every three (for four weeks) I was to receive bread and water only. It sounded unpleasant. The canteen man, who came to see me every day for a few minutes, assured me that this was something new, quite outside his experience, and, being pressed, cheered me vastly by consenting to my expressed opinion that it might, perhaps, indicate a correspondingly short term of “solitary.” As it turned out, the punishment diet proved the reverse of what it was intended to be, an aggravation. In filling power, twenty-four ounces of bread were far superior to the ordinary prison food, and much more palatable than fish soup. Very soon I began to look forward to my “hard” days.