We from the sorting camps were feeling the pinch about now, and were living, most of us, and apart from the German ration, on precarious charity. At Karlsruhe we had blown ourselves out on tomatoes and bread: at Heidelberg we had added relish to the bread, with an occasional pot of honey from their well-stocked canteen. But in the canteen at Holzminden there was nothing to eat beyond a very nauseous paste. Some of us were lucky and fell in with a well-stocked mess; the rest of us waited blankly for our relief parcels, eking out with a tin here and a tin there, frying bread in dripping, lucky if we could see a meal ahead. For the first time in our lives we knew hunger; not so fiercely as our successors in 1918 were to know it, but more fiercely perhaps than the veterans of 1914 and 1915, who, whatever their other tortures, had at least come as prisoners into a country where food was to be had for the purchasing. Finally there was the question of fuel. It was October now, and the days in Brunswick were no longer balmy. Each of our rooms—scheduled to hold twelve—possessed a stove, but there was nothing to put in the stove. We saw woods on the horizon to three sides of us. The regulations, we understood, permitted us the daily ration of a German soldier in the field. But no wood was forthcoming, except what was brought for the consumption of our three cooking stoves. A dangerous minority endeavoured, as usual, to destroy the comfort of the community by stealing this cooking supply. The practice was sternly stopped. Then recourse was had to the stools in the dining rooms. These blazed well for a night or two, but were naturally not replaced, and we had all the fewer stools to sit upon. Finally those who preferred a blaze to a night’s rest sacrificed their bed boards. It was reckless jettison, but excusable. The Camp Commandant had broken faith with us over the fuel question if possible more flagrantly than over others, and the camp was justly incensed. One day a representative of the Dutch Legation in Berlin had been down to visit us. On the morning of his arrival the Commandant, scenting the trouble which might be expected on this as on other issues, had caused it to be proclaimed at morning _appel_ that from that day fuel would be issued free (loud cheers!). We might have known. We never got a faggot free. The representative carried out his colourless inspection, and that evening we were as cold as before. The end of this particular campaign was that ultimately, and under the extreme pressure of the increasing cold, we paid for wood at the rate of 40 marks a cubic metre. The only people who got fuel free were those under detention in the cells.