ONE OF GERMANY'S MANY PROBLEMS

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 73, 19 December 1917, Page 4

ONE OF GERMANY'S MANY PROBLEMS

_ _fr- : — One of tho scandals of tho war has been the extreme reluctance of tho German Government to come to some arrangement with Great Britain regarding a mutual exchange of incapacitated prisoners of war. Tho British Government has unceasingly striven for a settlement of this urgent question, in viow of the cruel vicissitudes and barbarous inhumanities that our men have experienced in German prison camps. The horrors of Ruhleben and Wittenburg aro still fresh in tho public memory. Now, at last, if tho Press correspondent at Tho Hague has authority for tho statement cabled yesterday, relief is at hand. The British and German Governments, ho states, have agreed to arrangements for exchanging and transporting wounded and invalid prisoners of war. Three vessels will be employed, sailing under tho Dutch and lied Cross flags. Tho first will leavo Rotterdam for Boston on January 1, carrying 850 liberated British prisoners. It is expected that the work of exchanging will take four months. This is an arrangement that could quite easily have been settled long ago, but it has been abundantly clear that for some reason or other tho German Government did not want it settled, for on general grounds neither party had anything to loso by tho exchange. But thero is ono very good and particular reason why the German Government should sec fit to cvado tho question of an exchange, and it is probably tho real one. The arrival back in tho Fatherland of a large body of men who have luxuriated in tho British prison camps and havß_ been afforded plenty of opportunities for examining the truth of inspired assertions in the German Press that England was a starved and beaten nation, that London was in ruins, and so on and so forth, will bo peculiarly embarrassing to the German Government. These men, on arrival, will probably bo carefully coached as to what they must say, for the sake of tho Fatherland, when they mingle once more in their native towns with their gulliblo and sorely-de-ceived fellow-citizens. But truth, liko murdor, will out, and the Chancellor, in the Reichstag, will no doubt bo called upon to parry, as best he may, some exceedingly awkward questions. Ono suggests itself: How is it, if England is starving, that German soldiers who havo come back from England fared

better for food in their war-prison in that country than, they are able to do in civil life in their'native country \