Unfortunately, the language in which most of the prisoners described the state of mind which this kind of thing left them in is not quite suited for publication. It was one of the mildest of them--a London cockney who seemed never quite to have got back all the blood he lost when his thigh was ripped open with shrapnel at the assault on Thiepval--who said that "Jerry" never would get over being surprised when "a bloke called 'im a b----y blighter arter 'e'd tried to shove a _ersatz_ fag on you an' 'oped you w'udn't be bearin' 'im any 'ard feelin's in the years to come." The attitude that German girls and women appear to have adopted toward Allied, and especially British, prisoners from the time the armistice went into force is not a pleasant thing to write of, and I confine myself to a single observation which an old sergeant of the "Contemptibles"--one of the sixty-nine that the _Vidette_ brought from Hamburg--made on the subject. It was one of the most witheringly biting characterizations of a nation I have ever heard fall from the lips of any man. He had been telling me in a humorous sort of way of "raspberry leaf tea," _ersatz_ coffee of various kinds, paper sheets, and various and sundry other substitutes, and then, switched off to the subject by a question regarding a statement a German officer had been heard to make about the relations of prisoners and women of the country, he spoke of the ways of the girls of Hamburg since the armistice. "There is no doubt," he said, "that the young of both sexes have been getting more and more shameless in their morals ever since the beginning of the war, but it is only since we were practically set free by the armistice that the state of things has come home to prisoners. I don't think that there are very many British prisoners--certainly no man that I know personally--who have had anything to do with these young hussies; but that is not the fault of the girls, for they have pestered us only less in our camp than upon the street. It's principally because we have a bit of money now, and sometimes a bit of food that isn't _ersatz_. I don't think I'm exaggerating very much, sir, when I say that fifty per cent. of the girls of the lower classes in Hamburg would sell themselves for a cake of toilet soap or a sixpenny packet of biscuits. _Ersatz_ food and _ersatz_ women! By God, sir, Germany's a country of substitutes and prostitutes, and it's glad I am to be seeing the last of it!" I have yet to hear the Germany of today summed up more scathingly than that. Speaking of the moral degeneracy of Germany, a poster found by a member of the Commission in a train by which he was travelling sheds an interesting light on the subject. It was addressed to the "Youth of Wilhelmshaven and Rüstringen" by the Council of Workmen and Soldiers, and the following is a rough translation.