I was taken back to my cell. I was now sinking fast. I saw little hopes of recovery. I was quickly becoming a broken-down creature, and though physically I should have lasted out for years, mentally I saw there was a crash not far ahead. I had seen it happen with other men before. As it was, mentally I was fast becoming a species of cow. I would stand for hours at a time, leaning my head into the corner, my hands in my pockets, staring at the floor. I would find that for hours I had been saying to myself "My dear sir"--I always called myself "my dear sir" when talking out loud,--"you really must make an effort to get out. I mean it's simply too stupid to spend the best years of your life in a box like this. Use your wits. Do something. Go on, you juggins, get out somewhere. Think!" and so on, from twelve till three. I became absolutely impersonal, and found it difficult to have likes and dislikes about anything. I absolutely forgot what flowers smelt like. Milk I could not imagine. Fruit, tobacco, fish, were mere names to me. I had forgotten what they were. I could not understand the meaning of the term "red." Though I longed to be free, I felt that human beings would be perfectly unbearable. I no longer considered myself as one. I felt perfectly decorporealised: I was merely a mind contemplative and a poor one at that. And yet I longed for their company. I still kept up my nightly habit of repeating a few verses from any poem I could remember, and after the light had gone out--for here there was electric light--I would rise solemnly in the dark, and make the most fiery speeches to the Cambridge Union--poor Cambridge Union. I would then proceed to oppose my own motion, pick holes in it, show up the proposer as an impostor and a charlatan. A seconder would then arise, who with all the sarcasm of a Voltaire would rend the immediate speaker adjective from substantive, verb from adverb, until quivering with the laceration received, the latter would be thrown, a bleeding proposition, into the waste deserts of verbosity. V--GHASTLY HOURS UNDER GERMAN BRUTALITY