ct the whole vast area thus enclosed. It gave me a violent
spasm of heart sickness as I thought of English officers and men by
hundreds being thus ignominiously hemmed in and worse sheltered than
convicts. They had latterly been allowed to erect for themselves
grotesquely rough hovels or hutches, many of which they set on fire
when suddenly permitted to escape, so that as I found it the whole
place looked indescribably dirty and desolate.

Even the shelters provided for the officers, and the hospital hastily
erected for the sick, were scarcely fit to stable horses in, and were
by official decree doomed to be given to the flames as the surest way
of getting rid of the vermin and other vilenesses, of which they
contained so rich a store. Here I found huge medicine bottles, never
made for the purpose, on which the names of sundry of our sick
officers remained written, to wit: "Lieut. Mowbray, one tablespoonful
four times a day. 3. VIII. 1900." In one of these bunks I found a
packet of religious leaflets, one of which contained Hart's familiar
hymn:--

Come ye weary, heavy laden,
Lost and ruined by the fall;
If you tarry till you are better,
You will never come at all.
Not the righteous,
Sinners, Jesus came to call.

Although, therefore, religious services were never held in that prison
pen, the men were not left absolutely without religious counsel and
consolation. I was unfeignedly glad thus to find in that horrible
place medicine for the soul as well as physic for the body, and some
of those leaflets I brought away; but the physic I thought it safest
not to sample.

Over this unique combination of prison house and hospital there
floated a very roughly-made and utterly tattered red cross flag, which
now serves as a memento of one of the most humiliating sights it ever
fell to my lot to witness, and I could not help picturing to myself
the overpowering heartache those prisoners must have felt as hour
after hour they were hurried farther and yet farther still through
deep defiles and vast mountain fastnesses into a region where it must
have seemed as though hope or help could never reach them. But "men,
not mountains, determine the fate of nations"; and to-day, through
the mercy of our God, that pestilential pen is no longer any
Englishman's prison.

[Sidenote: _Pretty scenery, and superb._]

Our next halting place was at Godwand River, still on the