Apart from the kitchen, which always has a huge open chimney, there were no fireplaces of the ordinary kind in the houses. All heating in winter is done by stoves of sheet iron with a chimney leading out through the nearest wall. These stoves, fed with wood, give out a tremendous heat for a short time, but it is very hard to maintain anything approaching an even temperature. Wood was plentiful during the winter of 1916-17, and we used to buy it in the form of whole logs. These we had sawn up by two Armenians into short lengths, which we then split with an axe. This gave us a good deal of exercise during the cold winter mornings. Unfortunately, the next year, wood had become scarce and much more expensive and all prisoners suffered considerably in consequence. A good deal of charcoal is used for cooking, but we saw no coal being used in the district, even the railway up to Angora being largely dependent on wood. After a few months at the restaurant, the contractor began to put up prices and most of us demurred. This finally led to the majority going on strike and deciding to mess themselves, as we were allowed to by the rules. The old commandant, however, and the contractor, had no idea of accepting the alternative if they could possibly help it. Consequently, we were first forbidden to cook in the kitchens of our own houses, for fear we should set the chimneys and the houses on fire. To get over this, we made fireplaces in the back gardens or yards behind the houses. Other little pin-pricks of the same kind were tried, but we finally got our own way, and found that our mess bills were reduced to nearly a half what they had been before. We had a number of British orderlies with us, who did our cooking and waited on us. To start with, there was some difficulty in getting a separate room as a dining-room for each mess, but eventually we settled down and furnished on an economical plan, our carpenters making benches, tables, etc. The restaurant contractor was so disgusted at our strike that he closed down altogether for two or three days, thus throwing out into the cold the few who had remained faithful to him on any conditions rather than do their own catering. There was, somewhat naturally, a good deal of ill-feeling between the two parties in consequence, and it took time to die out. In the end, the restaurant supporters had to start a mess of their own and came into line with the rest of us. We were allowed a fair amount of liberty, although at the start things did not look promising, the old commandant telling us we should be only able to go one short walk a week. Actually we were allowed in the road for a hundred yards or so outside our houses and could go to the bazaar or Turkish bath any day by getting a sentry to go with us.