There were over eight thousand prisoners at Stretensk when the disease broke out, and to combat it there were two Austrian doctors. They had at their disposal a room capable of holding fifteen beds, and for medicine a quantity of iodine and castor oil. I once strolled into the hospital by mistake. I saw a number of beds on which men were lolling fully dressed, other patients were leaning against the wall, others were in various postures on the floor. It all looked so casual that I thought it was the waiting-room. An orderly drove me away, and explained that the men on the beds were dying of typhus, and that the other men were waiting their turn to get a bed and die too. Our barracks had been built for occupation by Russian soldiers. It was a long, one-storied brick erection. Inside it was “double-decked,” _i.e._ there were parallel rows of double platforms, one above the other. It would comfortably take about a hundred men, while four hundred of us were crammed into it. At night I slept with my neighbour’s knees in my back, and my knees in the next man’s back. Just so much space as we could cover lying on our sides was ours, and this was our sitting-room, drawing-room, dining-room, and bedroom. As the windows were coated with ice inches thick, the barracks remained dark through the whole winter. The atmosphere, as I have already mentioned, was always foul. We were organized into groups of thirteen men, each of whom elected a corporal as leader; a certain number of groups again were under a sergeant. The labourers, of course, always elected one of their own number as corporal, and the educated men had a foretaste of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The labourer’s dream of heaven is to lie on his bed all day, do nothing, and have his meals brought to him. They were now able to enjoy this paradise, with the additional relish of making the hated bourgeois fetch and carry for them. If you tried to avoid being made use of in this manner, and kept away from your place, they would fetch the dinner and eat your portion because you were not there. Appeal to the sergeant was useless, because he too nursed a grievance against the “upper” classes. The educated N.C.O.s were just as bad in their way. I tried an experiment on them by describing myself in the official lists as a “teacher.” They thought that meant elementary school teacher, and treated me with that brutality which the middle classes show to a man a shade below them in position. They soon found out their mistake, and then came fawning to me, abjectly apologetic. It is the plain truth that there was no feeling of responsibility or good comradeship among our N.C.O.s. They invariably treated us more roughly than the Russians did. [SN: OUR TASKS]