Three of the Russians broke away from this camp, and finding themselves near the stores, crawled in the window and stole a half of a pig. They were recaptured, and, after doing thirty days' cells, were forced to work out the price of the pig at the rate of thirty pfennigs--or six cents--a day, which ordinarily would have been credited to them for the buying of necessities. And pork came high in Germany. There was one kind of pill for all ailments. That however, may have been only stupidity. At least the practice is not confined to the prison camps nor the army of Germany, as all British soldiers know. But even these were not for the British. On another occasion a party of Russians arrived from another camp twelve miles away. They said that some Englishmen there who had refused to work had been shot at until all were wounded in the legs. We continued to receive our old friend, the _Continental Times_, here, and through it first learned of the Skager-Rack or Jutland battle, in which, the paper claimed, over thirty major British ships had been sunk, in addition to a larger number of smaller ones. The _Times_ said it was a great victory for the Germans. The last we doubted and the first we knew to be untrue, since some of the ships they claimed to have sunk had been destroyed previous to our capture, nine months before. It was in the _Times_, too, that we first heard of Kitchener's end. We could not believe it, and for a month laughed at the guard's insistence on the story, until one day a post card arrived from England, saying: "K. of K. is gone." That was a terrible blow to us, for to the British soldier; Kitchener was the tangible expression of the might of his Empire. Some of our party of eleven British had been prisoners since Mons and they were in a very bad way. The poor food, the lack of the fundamental necessities of the human frame, the terrible monotony of the continual barbed wire, the same faces round them, mostly unfriendly, all combined to have a most depressing effect, not only upon their bodies, but upon their minds. Many of them will never be of any use again. Compared to Ladysmith, when that place was besieged in the South African War, the latter, terrible though it was, was far and away better than this, even if we did live on horse meat at the last in Ladysmith. There was a certain amount of vice here, induced by the life. A kilted Highlander was accused of having fathered a child in a German family, where he had been employed. We did not learn the facts of the case; but such, at least, was camp gossip and it served to detract materially from the habitual despondency of our lot. CHAPTER XVI THE THIRD ESCAPE Saving Up for the Day--A Special Brand--Watchful Waiting--Off Again--Why the Man in the Moon Laughed--A German Idyll--The Narrow Escapes.