On All Souls’ Day, 1916, the Russians, who under the old _régime_ always respected religious observances, allowed the medical staff to leave the camp and go up to the graves on the hill. We found the candles burning just as at home, and we all stood with bared heads in reverence to the dead. The scene was penetrated with a mournful irony. Below slept the unfortunate and the brave, and there came to do them honour the cowards who had deserted them, the thieves who had robbed them, and the murderer who had killed them just as certainly as if he had driven a sword into their hearts. I have said so much against the Germans that it is a pleasure to bear witness to the courage of two of their numbers. Heinze, the student already mentioned, was surpassed by no one in his attention to the sick. He had caught so many diseases during the various epidemics he had fought, that people would think I was romancing if I were to give the list. And there was a young student of philosophy from Bonn who had the orderlies under him at a particular hospital. He waged a perpetual warfare with the Jews, doing his utmost to prevent them from robbing the patients of food and money. He spared himself neither day nor night, and was so heedless of danger that at last his doctor had to give him an express command to keep out of the sick-room. In the end the Jews were too strong for him, and they intrigued him out of his position. It will never be known how many the epidemic carried off, because at first the men died so quickly that they could not be counted. The doctors estimated that in three months eight hundred men, or ten per cent. of the prisoners, died. The disease being not particularly virulent, the mortality was only about twenty per cent. of the patients. We may reckon that about half the camp caught typhus. We have only guesswork to go upon, because the dishonest doctors intentionally falsified their sick-lists. The Jewish hospital orderlies, who had undertaken the work merely to enrich themselves, nearly all perished. Some time in the winter of 1916 a prisoner found smuggled in a parcel he had received from home, a German newspaper containing the Red Cross Report on conditions in Siberia. It accused the Russian hospital attendants of infamous cruelty, scandalous neglect of their duties, and shameless thieving. The Austrian doctors got hold of the report and read it to one another with shouts of laughter. “Why,” they said, “it wasn’t the Russians who did that, it was our own men. The Russians wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I suppose the same thought has occurred to all my readers. This story makes the horrors of Wittenberg intelligible. You cannot expect the Germans to be kinder to the English than to their own soldiers. [SN: CHRISTMAS CHEER]