But our chief grievance was a medical one. The organisation of the camp was quite inadequate to meet the demands of any sudden epidemic. In ordinary times it certainly worked well enough. Personally I never went to hospital, but a friend of mine who spent a week in the isolation hospital brought back a very favourable account of his treatment. The food was excellent, and the sister was particularly kind, going out of her way to do everything that lay within her power. But it was very different towards the end of the autumn, when the grippe was raging in the camp to such an extent that in the average room of eleven officers, there was hardly a day when less than four officers were in bed, and the arrangements were very poor. Of course every allowance must be made for the fact that there was hardly any medicine in Germany, and that when a disease had once started there, it was almost impossible to stop it. But the medical attendance was both ignorant and desultory. Those cases that were removed to the hospital were given, it is true, attendance as careful as they would have received in England. But in the camp the doctor appeared to take no interest in his work at all. Very often he only visited the patients once every three days, and when he came he did not take much trouble with them. He used to ask a few casual questions and then say, “Aspirin and tea.” The sick had to rely entirely on the other occupants of their room, and the help they received was willing but naturally ignorant. The result was that many officers became very seriously ill, and several of them died. The German organisation was in this case criminally inadequate. CHAPTER IX THE DAILY ROUND § 1 Within a few weeks, however, the arrival of a parcel had ceased to be an affair of momentous import. We could look on bully beef and Maconochies with comparative unconcern. The contents of each parcel varied only in such incidentals as sugar, chocolate, and packets of whole rice. The framework was the same, a solid enough construction, but one that as a continuous diet proved ineffably tedious. To begin with, we tried to make our meals more interesting with improvised puddings. We mixed a certain number of different ingredients into a bowl of water, beat them up into a paste, and then baked them in a tepid oven. The result was usually stodgy and quite tasteless. Personal vanity prevented us from confessing this, and night after night we struggled through these lukewarm, unpalatable dishes. How long this would have gone on I do not know; when the end came it came very suddenly. One evening there was a lecture in connection with the Pitt League, and it was rumoured that Colonel Westcott was going to speak. And Colonel Westcott’s speeches were such that no one would willingly miss. He had always ready some new panacea, some fresh catchword. As long as he remained passive he was infinitely entertaining.