The near entrance door was the officers’ entrance, the far door the orderlies’ entrance. Going through a swing door _opposite_ the officers’ entrance on the ground floor, you found yourself in a long corridor which traversed the entire length of the building and connected about a dozen large rooms wherein the inhabitants of the ground floor lived, slept, and made shift generally. The rooms averaged about twelve occupants apiece and looked out on to the inner (enclosure) side. The lower part of their windows had to be kept permanently shut, even in the daytime, a source of never-failing contention and resentment. The first floor was the counterpart of the ground floor, except that the windows might be opened and the general appearance was correspondingly brighter. At the end of each of these floors were the “small” rooms which opened off in little passages or saps at either end of the main corridor. These small rooms constituted the wings of the main building, which was constructed after the pattern and in the proportions of an E minus its central appendage. The sketch shows this clearly enough. These rooms were keenly competed for. They held three to four occupants each and the actual amount of cubic space per occupant was less in them, if anything, than in the larger ones. But the moral effect of only having to reckon with the individual proclivities of two, as against eleven, other of your fellow-men, was reckoned as an inestimable advantage; and no sooner was the rumour abroad of one of those periodical “general posts” occasioned by the departure of a party for exchange to Holland or elsewhere than the House Adjutant’s[5] room was besieged by a crowd of applicants and their backers, the insistence of whose claims was, as a rule, in exactly inverse proportion to their merit. Thus A, who is being strongly run for the shortly-to-be-vacant billet in Number 35, is a second lieutenant with eight months’ experience of captivity, and B, whose inclusion in Number 37 opposite seems no less essential to its existing occupants, is a Flying Corps captain aged 21, not yet through his first six months of _gefangenschaft_. C and D, however, who have commanded companies on the Somme, remain unchampioned and unambitious in their large rooms amidst a welter of disorder, discomfort, and possibly discord, and have to be prodded into admitting that they wouldn’t mind if they _did_ get a little peace now and again. It is the way of the world. [Footnote 5: At Holzminden the senior British officer worked through a personal adjutant, known as the Camp Adjutant, who handed on orders to officers in charge of each Kaserne, known as House Adjutants.]