The colonel did not stand alone, there was corruption in every branch of the administration. The hospital kitchen was in the hands of a Polish Jew and his wife. They had begun the war with almost nothing, and they were now said to be worth thousands of pounds. No money was paid by the kitchen but some stuck to their palms. His staff collected money for a water carrier, and gave it to him to disburse. He put it in his own pocket, and used to pay the man out of Government funds. His soldiers were so angry with him that at the outbreak of the Revolution he was one of the first they impeached. He was sent to Irkutsk to await his trial, but the case dragged on interminably. After the Bolsheviks came in he was released, and when I last heard of him he was occupying some position under their Government. Like master, like man. The minor officials squeezed all the money out of us they could. If a window was broken in a barracks, they fined every prisoner who lived there, and reaped a sum sufficient to glaze all the windows in the camp. The Russian clerks in the colonel’s office treated us just as if we had been Russians ourselves. Every petition had to be accompanied by a tip adapted to the importance of what you wanted, otherwise it simply found its way to the waste-paper basket. The prisoners took advantage of these customs to spin intrigues against one another with the Russians. A German medical student made application to be considered as such, _i.e._ that he should be removed from the stuffy barracks to the doctors’ quarters, receive a salary, and enjoy considerable privileges. He accompanied this application with ten roubles for the clerk. Heinze, the medical student I have already mentioned, was jealous of his colleague, so he overtipped him, and gave the clerk twenty roubles to keep the application back. The clerk, of course, pockets the twenty roubles, and then after some time informs the first man how the matter stands. So by whetting the one against the other he reaped a golden profit. All our letters and parcels had to be paid for by tips. If we stopped tipping, we received nothing. The prisoners were, of course, forbidden to send letters except through the prisoners’ censorship, but all the while I was at Stretensk I conducted with friends in England an extensive correspondence that never went through our censor’s hands. To put the Russians off the scent I used to describe myself as a fur-merchant. In one letter I pretended to be a lady, wrote in a very round hand, underlined every other word, and described how good Russian eau-de-cologne was for my headaches. My correspondents were mystified; I had offers of capital for my fur business, and a letter of very tender sympathy about my headaches. [SN: VENALITY]