4 Dec 1918: Graudenz

Wednesday. Dec. 4.     Getting through gradually.  The days pass by on leaden feet.  The rumour is very persistent that we are going away on Sunday, sailing from Danzig on the Monday.

The French officers have plastered the walls of their room with such placards as ‹On les a› (We’ve got them beat) and large maps marking in Alsace & Lorraine as French territory.

Saw in a shop today various of the German substitutes for bicycle tyres (for they have very little rubber).  The chief one was a system of springs enclosed between two circular bands soAnother was simply thin rope plaited into a kind of thick tyre.

Cox, a man I know here, whose weight is normally around 11 stone 4, told me yesterday that, at the height of our starvation here he just weighed 8 stone.