In the afternoon, after receiving some bread and coffee, I was sent away on ponyback, with a German cavalryman as escort. This trooper was friendly and garrulous. He pronounced himself a Social Democrat and an Internationalist. He was a good German, he claimed, and had fought for Germany since 1914; but he had neither hatred nor contempt for Germany's enemies. It was the Ministers, the politicians, the professors, the journalists, and the general staffs who had manufactured hatred. The German civilians and non-combatant troops were blinded by racial feeling; but, according to my Social Democrat guard, not so the fighting man. He liked and respected many of his officers, especially the colonel whom I had met; but after the war the proletariat would see that they, and the class they represented, discarded their arrogance and ascendancy. And, either ignorant or unmindful of Germany's crimes, this half-baked idealist looked forward with confidence to a wonderful peace that would send him back to his trade of printing, and would bring about an immediate heart-to-heart reconciliation of Germany and the rest of the world. With such debating-society talk I was distracted from the dull ache in my thigh and the spasmodic pains that came with every jolt from the pony. The heat was intense on my uncovered head, and the flies collected in their hundreds each time we halted to allow a party of ragged Arabs, mounted on camels or donkeys, to pass round some bend of the track ahead of us. The country was fairly level, however, and it was not long before we reached my next stage--a field hospital corresponding approximately to the British casualty clearing station. There my face and thigh were dressed, and for the first time since capture I could indulge in the glorious luxury of a wash. The doctor in charge complained that the hospital had been machine gunned by a British aeroplane, but he seemed surprised when I told him that the red crescent painted on the _side_ of the building could not be seen by an aviator. He agreed to mark a large red crescent on the ground. My destination, it appeared, was the Austrian hospital at Tul-Keran, whither I was forwarded by motor-ambulance, with several wounded Turks. It proved to be a dirty, insanitary building, such as the British would scarcely have used as a billet; but at all events it provided a much-needed place of rest. Most ex-prisoners will agree that the interval when they were first left alone for any length of time was a first-class substitute for purgatory. All at once the realization of being cut off and under most galling restraint becomes vivid and intense. The thought of irrevocable separation from one's fighting companions, and of what they must now be doing, leaves one utterly miserable and dejected.