With us there was none of that: we were in a permanent camp, and our parcels when once they had begun to arrive came through regularly. There were delays occasionally, especially when heavy fighting involved congestion of the railways; but eventually we received every parcel dispatched from a central committee. The only ones that did get lost were the home parcels that were sent privately. Everything sent from the Red Cross Committee, or from Harrod’s or Selfridge’s, arrived intact and in perfect condition. As regards actual treatment, owing to the fact that officers were not made to work, there were very few occasions when physical violence was possible, cases of this sort generally occurring when men proved intractable in the factories. The only opportunities that were presented were when officers tried to get away, and the sentries availed themselves of these chances pretty generously. There were four or five attempted escapes, and on two of these occasions the officers were badly mauled by the sentries. The second time that this happened the German orderly officer put a stop to this treatment at once; but on the first occasion the officer stood by while the sentries belaboured their captive with the butts of their rifles. The would-be Monte Cristos turned to the German officer and asked him if he considered such treatment proper for a British officer. The German shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well,” he said, “you must expect this sort of thing if you try to escape. You ought to stop in your room.” Before, this particular German had always been especially agreeable to us. The only possible excuse for his behaviour lies in the fact that he was very fond of the bottle, and might have been a little drunk. But however one looks at it, it was a sufficiently discreditable affair. Of the insults and degradations to which the officers of the camp at Holzminden were subjected we had no experience. The Germans adopted towards us an invariable attitude of respect that was if anything too suave. They were always profuse with promises, but it was very hard to get anything out of them. “Oh, yes,” they would say, “we can do that easily. We will go to the General and it will be all right. Don’t worry any more about it. We’ll see to it, it will be quite simple.” But nothing ever happened. The simplest request always managed to lose itself somewhere between the block office and the Commandant’s study; and gradually we learnt that formal applications were no use whatsoever, and that if any one wished to change from one room to another, the surest way to get there was to collect all his baggage into a heap and move there independently.