And so it had to be. At first the British officers lived on their pay as captives; which, according to rank, was at the rate of seven to ten Turkish pounds a month. But food prices soon expanded to extraordinary proportions, while the exchange value of the Turkish pound continued to decrease. By the beginning of 1918 it was worth less than two and a half dollars; while sugar, for example, was four dollars a pound. Tea was fifty dollars a pound, and real coffee was unobtainable. Under these conditions, it became almost impossible to obtain even a bare subsistence on seven Turkish pounds a month without outside help. The Dutch Legation, therefore, supplemented each captive officer's pay to the extent of five, then fifteen, Turkish pounds a month, taken from the Red Cross funds at their disposal. Even thus the food difficulties could not have been solved without the help of parcels from home. These arrived either seven or eight months after they left England, or never. Many were delivered only after the Turks had looted from them such articles as were scarce, including boots, clothes, and good tobacco. Letters from England needed from two to five months for transit. The lack of furniture was overcome by amateur carpentry. With string, nails, and planks of wood each newly arrived prisoner constructed a bed, a table, and a chair. Profiteers in the bazaar naturally took advantage of the demand for wood, and, by the time of which I write, the price of it had soared to two Turkish pounds a plank. Besides the officers there were at Afion about two hundred Tommies shut up in a Greek church. Their daily rations from the Turks were one small loaf of bad bread and one basin of thin soup. For the rest, they existed on the tinned food which they received from time to time in parcels. As for the Russian soldiers, who were herded into the Madrissah buildings, they were literally starving, and most of them had sold part of their clothing to buy extra food. Weak and ragged, they passed the time in walking round and round the courtyard. During the bitter months of winter scores of them died from hunger and cold. Conditions in the prison camp varied according to the character of whoever happened to be the Turkish commandant. For a time the officer in charge was one Muslum Bey, who was reported to have committed several executions for Enver Pasha during the turbulent days of the Young Turk _coup d'état_ in 1908. He was a brute, a swindler, and a degenerate, and during his reign unspeakable outrages were committed. He himself gave a Russian officer who had committed some minor offence more than a hundred strokes of the bastinado. When his arm was tired he made his sergeant-major continue the flogging until the Russian fainted. The unconscious body of the victim was then thrown into a cellar, where a part of his face was burned by contact with quick-lime.