As midnight approached the wind and rain increased in fury.  Even the guard failed to stand against it.  The sentries were drenched from head to foot.  The conditions became so bad that an order was suddenly circulated to the effect that the guard was to be changed every two hours, instead of at four-hour intervals.  The sentries were quite powerless to assist us even if they had been disposed to come to our aid to mitigate our wretched condition in any way.  One guard, his compassion evidently aroused by a scene such as he had never witnessed before, secured some thin stakes and thrust them through the wire netting to form a support to a large blanket.  With this he thought that perhaps a little shelter might be obtained.  We crowded beneath this precarious protection, but the first blast of the gale which swept the field after its improvisation, whisked the blanket and the stakes into the air.  They were never seen again.

About twelve o’clock I was on the verge of collapse.  My friend supported me, but even he was faint from lack of food and exposure.  We decided to roll our soddened bodies in our saturated blankets, to lie down on the ground and to strive to woo sleep.  We stretched ourselves on the flat, but the wind and rain beat unmercifully upon us.  Although we were dead-beat the angel of sleep refused to come to us.  As a matter of fact, when we stretched ourselves in the mud we did not care two straws whether we ever saw the light of day again or not.

After lying about two hours upon the ground I put out my hand to discover that we were lying in two inches of water.  But not only this.  The floodwater, in its mad rush to escape to the depression at the lower end of the field, had carved a course through the spot where we were lying.  The result was that the rushing water was running down our necks, coursing over our bodies beneath our clothes, and rushing wildly from the bottoms of our trousers.  We were acting unconsciously as conduits, but we did not serve in this capacity any longer than we could help.

We regained our feet, our clothes now so water-logged as to bear us down with their weight.  We tramped laboriously to the top of the field and as the wind bore down upon us it carried upon its bosom a mad madrigal of hymns, prayers, curses, blasphemy, and raucous shouting.  Groups of men were now lying about thickly, some half-drowned from immersion in the pools, while others were groaning and moaning in a blood-freezing manner.  Small hand-baggage and parcels, the sole belongings of many a prisoner, were drifting hither and thither, the sport of rushing water and wind.  At the lower end of the field the water had sprawled farther and farther over the depression, and therein we could descry men lying in huddled heaps too weak to rise to their feet.