Next morning on our going into the yard the unfortunate prisoner who had been punished so diabolically was not to be seen.  More significant still his cell was empty, and the door was wide open.  I could only surmise that his worldly troubles were over.  If so he would be officially declared to have “died in prison!”

Favoured prisoners are granted a sack of straw to serve as a mattress.  I had been denied this luxury but secured it later through the good offices of the lieutenant who visited me on Tuesday night.  I was lucky enough to get new straw.  Apparently the sacks are never renewed during a prisoner’s incarceration.  He merely replenishes his stock when another cell becomes vacant, irrespective of the period the straw therein has been in use.  There is a mad rush for the empty cell, and the prisoners fight like wolves among themselves for the possession of the derelict straw, each bearing away triumphantly the small dole he has obtained from the struggle.

As may be supposed, under such conditions, the straw is not very inviting.  It soon becomes verminous, and this deplorable state of affairs becomes worse the longer the straw is in use.  In fact it becomes alive with lice.  In one instance I saw a dropped wisp so thickly encrusted with the parasites that it actually moved along the ground under the united action of the insects.

There is one inflexible law in German prisons.  Under no pretence whatever must one prisoner enter the cell of another while it is occupied.  This regulation is not to prevent conversation or communication between prisoners, but is for reasons which it is not necessary to describe.  When one recalls the utter depravity which prevails in German military centres the wisdom of the ordination is obvious.  The punishment is severe, the easiest being a spell of confinement upon a black bread and water diet, but generally and preferably clubbing into insensibility.

A few cells above me was a prisoner who had been incarcerated for fifteen years.  Whether the whole of this time had been spent in Wesel or not I could not say, but when I came face to face with him for the first time he gave me a severe shock.  He was a walking skeleton.  Every bone in his body was visible, while his skin was the colour of faded parchment.  He looked more like an animated mummy than a human being.  I stood beside him one day in the corridor, and a bright ray of sunshine happened to fall across his face which was to me in profile.  I started.  His face was so thin that the cheek and jawbones were limned distinctly against the light, producing the effect of the X-ray photograph, while the sun shone clean through his cheeks.  You could have read a paper on the off side of his face by the light which came through.