asked how he was getting on, he replied,
“ Very well indeed.”
I next came into contact with a dozen of these prisoners at the Vicarage in Moscow and their condition was such that I expressed surprise at their healthy appearance. With one accord they proclaimed, what I afterwards discovered to be the fact, that their healthy appearance was due, in large measure, to the work of the British chaplain in that city, who spared neither money nor pains to secure not only for the British, but for all foreign nationals, extra food and nourishment. It must be understood that in doing this he was committing a grossly illegal act, which was winked at by the authorities, solely because he was acting for and on behalf of British prisoners.
The prisons themselves and internment camps were not prisons in the ordinary sense, that is, places originally built as prisons, so far as ordinary alien prisoners were concerned. The British officers and the so-called volunteers, who served with them, were housed in what had formerly been a monastery. No doubt the sanitary arrangements were very bad, but so, unhappily, were the sanitary arrangements everywhere. You cannot have frost to the extent they have it in Moscow during the months of February and March, coupled with an almost entire absence of fuel,
