We had many different kinds of work to do. Sometimes we were water-carriers, and had to get up at four in the morning, go down to the river, and keep on ladling up water from a hole in the ice until we had filled a big barrel. This journey had to be repeated several times a day. Or we would have to stand for hours chopping wood, or make long journeys to the wood-stacks to fetch fuel for the camp. In the intense cold these tasks would have been severe enough in any case, but we were ill prepared for them. At the best we had only summer clothes on, none of us had any protection for the ears or nose against frostbite, many had no gloves, while a few had not even soles to their boots. It was no use reporting these things, our sergeant used to drive us away in a fury. The Russians were humaner and would often send us back with our tasks half done, because they saw that the cold was too much for us. Our life at Stretensk was full of tragedies, but I think the first is the most awful to remember. One of us, who had no gloves, had been forced to carry wood long distances through the cold, and his hands were badly frostbitten. The sinews perished and seemed to shrivel up, and he became unable to use his fingers. As a consequence he could not louse himself, as his fingers could neither grasp anything nor press even a louse to death. He became so verminous that in places the insects stood on him ten deep. His “corporalschaft,” fearing for themselves, expelled him from their midst. He pilgrimed all over the barracks, seeking a place where he might lay his head, but was everywhere driven off with contumely and insult. The floor being too wet even for him to sleep on, he at last found an asylum in a sort of dustbin, in which the refuse of the barracks was removed every morning. He lived absolutely alone, like a leper. His food was set apart for him every day, and he was jealously watched lest he should come too near. The self-loathing peculiar to verminousness seemed to eat up his moral fibre, and he acquiesced in his isolation as if it were quite proper. Now and again, indeed, he would make timid advances, with a pitiful smile, but he was always repulsed. The last time I saw him, he was sitting on the snow in the full blaze of the noonday sun, clad in a smart uniform he had just received, and feebly trying with his palsied hands to brush off the lice that had already begun to collect on his new clothes. That evening he was taken to hospital with high fever, and in two days he was dead, literally destroyed by lice. [SN: RED CROSS]