“We each wrote a card to some one in England, telling them about the lice.  We would have stretched it—­if we could—­but we couldn’t.  We drew pictures, and told what these lice could do; especially we told about the Russians, and how bad they were.  There are twenty-one of us, and there went out twenty-one cards all dealing with the same subject.  The censor began to feel crawly, I’ll bet, before he got far into reading them, and he would not let one of those cards out of Germany.  It wouldn’t have sounded very good to the neutral countries.  So along came one of the head officers.  He came in swaggering, but, by George, he went out scratching!  And he certainly got something moving.  We’re all going down to Cellelager to-morrow to be fumigated; and while we’re out, there’s going to be a real old-fashioned house-cleaning!  You’re just in time, boys.  Have you got any?”

“We did not have any,” we said, “when we came.”

“Well, you’ll get them here, just sitting around.  They’re all over the floor and crawl up the leg of your chair; they crawl up the wall and across the ceiling and drop down on your head and down the back of your collar; they’re in the walls and in the beds now.  But their days are numbered, for we are all going up to Cellelager to-morrow to be fumigated.  They’re running a special train, and taking us all.”

That night Ted and I slept on two benches in the middle of the room, but we found that what the boys said was true.  They had crawled up on us, or else had fallen from the ceiling, or both.  We had them!

But the next day we made the trip to Cellelager by special train—­“The Louse Train” it was called.

The fumigator was the same as at Giessen, and it did its work well.  While the clothes were baking, we stood in a well-heated room to wait for them.  The British and French, having received parcels, were in good condition, but the Russians, who had to depend entirely on the prison-fare, were a pitiful sight.  They looked, when undressed, like the India famine victims, with their washboard ribs and protruding stomachs, dull eyes and parched skin.  The sores caused by the lice were deep and raw, and that these conditions, together with the bad water and bad food, had had fatal results, could be seen in the Russian cemetery at Cellelager I, where the white Russian crosses stand, row on row.  The treatment of Russian prisoners will be a hard thing for Germany to explain to the nations when the war is over.

Parnewinkel was the name of the village near Cellelager I, and this name was printed on the prison-stamps which we used.  The camp was built on a better place than the last one, and it was well drained, but the water was bad and unfit to drink unless boiled.

As the spring came on, many of the Russians went out to work with the farmers, and working parties, mostly made up of Russians, were sent out each day.  Their work was to dig ditches through the marshes, to reclaim the land.  To these working parties soup was sent out in the middle of the day, and I, wishing to gain a knowledge of the country, volunteered for “Suppentragen.”