The weather in the winter of 1918 was absolutely arctic. For a month there was a very hard frost, and during all this time, had it not been for festivities such as the foregoing I should have stayed stupidly in bed and hibernated until the spring. Intenser cold I have never felt. In the room in which we dined the water froze in our glasses on several occasions while we were eating our evening meal. Icy winds howled through the house, and the paper windows we had improvised (to replace unobtainable glass) had burst, through weight of snow. Also, the plaster of the outer walls of our mansion had peeled off, so that cold blasts penetrated through the walls. With few clothes and only one pair of leaky boots it was impossible to keep warm and dry-shod. Fuel, of course, was very scarce. In my bedroom some precious quarts of beer, which I was preserving for Christmas, froze and cracked their bottles. I invited a party to taste my blocks of amber ice, but they were better to look at than to swallow. Under these climatic conditions washing was a labour that took one the best part of the morning, and until I caught a chill I used to economize time and fuel by rolling in the snow on the flat roof of my house. This amused me, and surprised the neighbourhood, but it was a poor substitute for a bath. That winter was a black, bleak time. During the hard frost it was impossible to escape, but we used occasionally to reconnoitre the sentries outside our house after lock-up. I have spent some amusing moments in this way, especially in watching one sentry (generally on duty at midnight) who used to warm himself by playing with a cat. With pussy on one arm and his rifle on the other, he formed a delightfully casual figure. It would have been quite easy to pass him, but the difficulties lay beyond. . . . I then thought, wrongly I dare say, that the only reasonable hope of success lay in starting from Constantinople, and it was to this end that my real schemes were shaping. But I thought it well to have two strings to my bow, and besides, I considered no day well spent which did not include some practical effort towards escape. A complex of causes contributed to this idea, which became almost an obsession. First, I dare say, was boredom. Second, the feeling that one was not earning one's pay or doing one's duty by remaining idly a prisoner. And thirdly--or was it firstly?--the condition under which our men were living and the crimes which had been committed against them made it imperative that someone should get to England with our news. It was high time, and past high time, that the civilised world should know how our prisoners fared. I have already written the savage story of our life at Mosul, where the men died from calculated cruelty. The history of the Kut prisoners is even worse, for the crime was on a greater scale.