From that day onwards our room was a sort of general manicuring saloon. Several of us bought sets, and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. we received visitors. As our guests received treatment gratis, and the initial outlay towards the opening of the saloon was sufficiently generous, it might have been thought that our guests came out of the transaction rather well. But they paid richly for their adornment in pain. We were all amateurs, and the manipulation of a pair of curved scissors requires feminine skill; no one has ever yet called me neat-fingered, and those scissors were very sharp. During the operations of our first fortnight, of all those who came to us with gay step, there were few who went away without at least one finger swathed in bandages. CHAPTER X HOW WE DID NOT ESCAPE § 1 As military regulations state that it is the duty of every prisoner of war to make immediate and strenuous effort to escape, and as every man is at heart an adventurer, it is not surprising that our languid community was from time to time regaled by the rumours of impending sorties. No one has ever yet managed to escape from Mainz, and even if the war had lasted for another twenty years, I believe it would have retained its impregnability. For the citadel had been constructed so as to resist the old-fashioned frontal assault, in which infantry without the aid of a barrage endeavoured to demolish vertical walls. Round the buildings ran stone battlements usually fifty feet high. At any point where it would be possible to jump down was stationed a sentry, and between these battlements and the buildings were two distinct chains of wire netting, that were continually patrolled. At an early date I decided that, in my personal case, the possible chances of escape in no way counteracted the enormous inconvenience to which an attempt would inevitably put me. And if I did get away, it would result in the probable loss of the greater part of my library, and of all my MSS. All things considered, it hardly seemed worth while.