"There were about eighteen patients and two nurses in the hut where I was. The nurses took turns of night duty week about. The day nurse during my first week there was a very severe and sour-faced creature. She could speak a little English, and I'm sure she did not speak to me more than twenty times, and not once kindly. The night nurse was a woman about forty years of age. She could speak only a very little English, but she was pleasant and good-natured. She took more care of me than any of them and would bring me a glass of milk now and again when the guards were not looking. She also informed me that this was the place that students came to, for practising and experimenting on the wounded prisoners, and added that I would have a lot more operations--which I had. "Conditions became worse as months dragged on. It was now summer of 1915, and still my legs were not allowed to set. One operation followed another. I saw an iron plate with rusty screw nails an inch long, that had been used to patch up my thigh bones. I suffered much physically--but worse than that was the mental suffering I experienced, worrying about my folks at home. "Every other day, young sarcastic doctors would come in, take the splints off, and commence squeezing and turning my broken legs in a painful fashion. Some would shout: 'English swine, why don't you cry out?' but I don't remember doing so when any of them were near me. "The food got worse and worse toward winter. I got three meals a day. Breakfast consisted of weak coffee and a slice of black bread with some kind of lard spread on it. Dinner was herring bone or potato-peel soup, or ham-bone soup with a slice of heavy potato bread. Supper was a repetition of breakfast except that very often the lard was absent. "There were two German patients who got the best of attention. I learned though, that they were wounded in the act of deserting, and were to be court-martialed upon recovery. After they were able to sit up they would get a large jug of beer with their midday meal and this was a keen torture to me. "I became determined to find some way of communicating with my sweetheart and friends at home, to let them know I was still alive. The night nurse told me she expected to go near the firing line for duty, so I asked her if she could try to smuggle out a letter for me so that it would reach my friends. At first, she very positively refused, saying that should the effort be found out, she would be instantly shot, but after I explained my case to her and pleaded with her she brought me a pencil and note paper and watched a chance when all was quiet. She put a screen round me and whispered in my ear to praise the commandant, and the doctors, and write in the brightest manner of everyone there. Thus, she said, the censor might allow the letter to go through. "While she watched the guards, I scribbled, doing all she told me to. I described the place and commandant something in the following manner: