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I found the Serbs and the Czechs to be the best people over passports in Central Europe. In Western Europe Belgium is most enlightened, having practically abolished the visa. France is striving to follow Belgium's lead. England in this matter, as in the matter of her charges for postage, telephones, and railway fares, seems to have completely lost that practical common sense which in the past has distinguished her from other nations. She charges foreigners heavily, keeps them waiting, and treats them impolitely. From Americans, for instance, there is a chorus of complaint on the ground of incivility. Not that Americans shine in this matter of passports for their own country. America sets Europe an unenlightened example of red-tape and venality.

What then, is the game in Europe? Why do free men and women spend golden forenoons in stuffy rooms, to fill in forms, to be brow-beaten by police and porters and clerks, treated like criminals or paupers, or unemployed come for an allowance? Perhaps they are paid for it? No, they actually have to pay, and pay heavily, suffering as it were injury on the top of insult.

It was partly explained to me in Munich by the British Consul-General. At Munich there is a Polish Consul and Vice-Consul, but there has been nothing to do, Poland having remarkably little business in Bavaria. The post languished. The Vice-Consul was recalled; the clerk was dismissed. One surmised the Consul himself might go and hand over his minute business to some other consulate which, no doubt, would have done it cheaply. But no. One day a solution occurred to the Consul. All Polish subjects in Bavaria ought to have Polish passports from the Polish Consul. Police orders to that effect were therefore issued. All who claimed to be Polish, or to have been born in those parts of Germany or Austria now Polish territory, were to put in an appearance. They would receive passports and would be duly charged.

But, having registered the whole Polish population, what then?

"Oh, I only give them visas for three months," says the Consul. "Every quarter they must come again."

So he converted his consulate into a revenue-paying establishment. What does it matter about the public? It is only asked to give one day in ninety to these formalities and has the other eighty-nine to itself.

The Polish passport office in Berlin fully confirms this point of view. Here are inordinate crowds whom politics have separated from kith and kin, trying to get passes to go home, to live, to exist. The door-keeper smokes a cigar; the first clerk makes eyes at the women applicants, the girl clerks suck sweets, the Consulate clock runs on, and you pay hundreds of German marks each for the upkeep of the business.

The Poles, or indeed, the British, or the Americans, for we are all tarred by the same brush, might take a lesson from the Czecho-Slovaks, who have at Vienna a bureau which will get your passport visa and your railway ticket for you, and reserve you a room in a hotel in Prague without any fee. The enlightened Government of this new republic understands that that is the best propaganda for their country which can be done. Not that Czecho-Slovakia does not charge for a visa and charge for permission to go out of the country. At Cheb I nearly missed my train whilst an official was weighing up in his mind how much he should charge for allowing me to go through without a visa.

Another aspect of the passport trouble in Europe is local nationalism which at Budapest takes the form of insisting on asking you questions in Hungarian and refusing to understand any other tongue. As you have to spend hours with the police in the Magyar capital before you obtain permission to stay there and again before you obtain permission to go away, this is peculiarly distressing.

Under such circumstances is it surprising that there is stagnation of peoples in Europe? This stagnation is great, and it is noticeable in almost every great city of the continent. It is a rich time for the hotel-keepers. There is scarcely a capital in Europe where you can reckon on finding a room without trouble. The following experiences are symptomatic enough: at Rome I visited about twenty hotels; shut out for the night, got into a "strange place" about three a.m.; Stuttgart, out all night; Sofia, visited all hotels, all full, slept in guard-room of town-patrol; Sofia, second time, shared a room with an officer; Vienna, toured city in a cab and found nothing; Warsaw, spent nine hours going from hotel to hotel, got a room for a thousand-mark tip. In Constantinople you can find cases of three families in one apartment. Wherever you go you are going to have adventures in finding a room, unless you are an officer or a member of an Allied Commission, or belong to the Red Cross or Starving Children's Fund, or some organization that has facilities for looking out for itself.

Poor old Europe! She was more of a unity in the days when we were "an armed camp." We have broken the power of militarism. There has been a revolution in Russia. A British statesman in the House of Commons, in 1917, said it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven. Some millions of young men died before Armistice Day, 1918. Since then there has been great work clearing away barbed-wire entanglements along the old front. But it seems to be a nightmare task: entanglements multiply upon us faster than we can clear the old ones away. You cannot get across Europe because of the obstructions: you cannot circulate.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

It has been a bleak early spring with snow on the uplands of Thrace. For those who travel from Paris to Constantinople on that Western moving shuttle, the Orient Express, there would be nothing to trouble the mind unpleasantly--except in that the more comfortable we are, the more we demand and the more we grumble. But if you travel by the ordinary unheated train, where even the first-class carriages are more or less bereft of glass and have the windows loosely boarded up with bits of old packing-cases, you taste something of the persistent northern wind which blows down sleet and rain from the Black Sea, from Russia, as it were Russian unhappiness it was blowing down.

A dreary journey on to Philippopolis and Svilengrad, with the wind lashing the train, lashing it all the way to the Chataldja lines and the zone of Allied control. Eight passport examinations, eight examinations of your baggage, plentiful two, three, and four-hour stops, a land of ruined railway stations and bare hills, and only late on the second evening after Sofia do you creep into the imperial city.

It is Stamboul at night, agleam with lights, running with mud, flocking with dense crowds. You change some money to piastres at a small booth, and your pocket is at once picked--a common experience. The Pera tram is so crowded that you escape being asked for a fare, which is fortunate, seeing that you have no Turkish money. So across the wonderful bridge on which all the nations of the world are seen walking, up to the so-called pleasant heights of Pera and its hotels and palaces. Here for a dirty little room one pays more than in a first-class hotel in New York. You are fortunate if you find even that soon. A Greek-owned hotel. You scan the names of the occupants--they are of all nationalities of Europe. Russians and Armenians seem most to abound. There appears to be a Scotsman among them, a Mr. Fraser, but he is a Scot resident in Smyrna and smokes a narghile every evening after supper. The lounge of the hotel looks like a cr?che for the children of refugees. But couples are seen here on the couches interested only in themselves, and a long-haired Russian is at the piano playing Scriabine devotedly and with deep concentration, as if the boisterousness of the children were unheard.

Constantinople has five times as many people as it can house, a city now of appalling unhappiness and misery, and of a concomitant luxury and waste. A scene at night: two children, a boy and a girl, lie huddled together on the pavement sleeping whilst the rain beats down upon them. The crowd keeps passing, keeps passing, and some step over them, many glance questioningly downward, but all pass on. No one stops. I stood at a corner and watched. Then I walked up to the children and wakened them and tried to make them speak. But they stared with their pale faces and said nothing. At a neighbouring pastry-cook's I bought two cakes and brought them to them, and stirred them up to take them, which they did eagerly, each grasping tightly a cake in the little hand. I stopped a Russian woman who was hesitating as she passed. "There are many," said she. "It is quite common. You see plenty babies lying in the rain. When you come? You come off a ship? . . . The only way to help them is give them piastres." I did that, and by that time a little crowd had gathered and every one began to fret and give a little money to them. So the crowd changed its mind, and the children began to have little sheaves of paper-money in their hands. And still they lay in the rain and no one could take them in.

The Russians have got Constantinople at last. It is an irony of Fate. There are a hundred thousand of them there, the best blood of Russia, and the most charming and delightful people in Europe in themselves, though now almost entirely destitute of means. A large Russian army without arms is not very far away, and a Russian generalissimo without power stays in his yacht at Galata. The great city has been outwardly transformed by the Russians who seem at first to have taken over all the business and to have dispossessed innumerable Turks and Greeks. Russian is the predominant language; all the best restaurants and many of the shops seem to be Russian, and Russian pedlars in scores cry their wares in the streets. Greek and Turkish business is modest and retiring, but everything Russian is advertised by large artistic signs. The gleaming lights of innumerable "Lotto Parlours" catch the eye, you pass with the rolling crowd into the cabaret, the music-hall, the theatre, the caf?, the restaurant, the book-shop--all Russian. You see the establishments of Russian doctors, lawyers, dentists, dancing-masters. In an improvised wooden hut you see a celebrated portrait-painter sitting, ready to paint you whilst you wait or execute commissions of any kind. The restaurants all have Russian names and sometimes refer back to business left behind in Russia--the restaurant "Birzha" from Rostof, "Kievsky Ugolok" from Kiev, "Veliky Moskovsky Kruzhok," the "Yar," and the like. These are very tastefully arranged and the cooking is excellent, being under the supervision of celebrated Russian chefs. Thus at the "Kievsky Ugolok" it is well known that the cook of Prince Vorontsof is in charge, and the restaurant does not merely live by reputation but an excellence of cuisine testifies in itself to some master-hand. The waitresses at most of these Russian establishments are often women of society, and some of them very beautiful in the simplicity of uniform. There is a fascinating added pleasure in being waited upon by such gracious women, but the heart aches for the fate of some of them. On each table is a ticket with the name and patronymic of the waitress, thus, Tatiana Mihailovna, or Sophia Vladimirovna. They are on a level with those they serve, and the women embrace them, the men kiss their hands. Naturally there are no such things as tips; service is charged for in the bill. Elegance mingles with melancholy. Russians meet and talk endlessly, and sigh for Russia, and the Russian music croons the night long from the musicians' gallery or orchestra.

The saddest shops are those which, no doubt, belong mostly to Armenians and Spanish Jews, where "valuables" are exposed, the miscellaneous collections of the things the Russians have sold or wish to sell. Here are rings, lockets, bracelets, fur-coats and wraps, gold vases, trinket-cases, odd spoons of Caucasian silver, cigarette-holders,--like so many locks of hair cut from diverse humanity. Here lie intimate possessions, prized, not likely to be sold, seemingly quietly reproachful under the public gaze, baptismal crosses, jewelled girdles, gloves, Paris blouses, English costumes. The refugees must sell all that they have, and some have sold all. I met the wife of a colonel of Life Guards. She was dressed in a cotton skirt, a cream-coloured "woolly," a waterproof, and a wretched cheap collar of fur. Once she never stepped out of her house but into a car. Now in weather-beaten thin old boots she must tramp from place to place over the cobbles, living in one room with her family, washes the clothes herself, scrubs the floor, has no money. The women have won the unbounded admiration of the British in Constantinople. For pluck these Russian women would be hard to rival. But what a destiny! They spend their money, they sell their jewels and rings, they sell their clothes, they take out trays of chocolates to sell in the streets and shiver at the street-corners; to feed their children they sell more clothes. Hundreds of cases have been discovered in which the women are confined to their rooms, having sold almost all their wearing apparel, and having nothing in which to appear on the streets.

You see the strangest vendors--children standing at a street corner trying to sell a blouse and a pair of boots, tatterdemalions trying to dispose of unsaleable rags, ex-students with heaps of textbooks trying to sell to those students who, despite everything, are still carrying on.

When new boat-loads of refugees arrive, the street-selling is naturally augmented by a more hopeful crowd, and it was possible to see one day little bears with scarlet ribbons round their necks being offered for sale on the pavement, tiny baby-bears with pink noses and sprawling feet, fed with milk from wine bottles:

Alas, the temptations are great. Need becomes more and more incessant. Starvation stares thousands in the face. One sees those who keep their heads up still, but we lose sight of many who are utterly cast down and lost. Many a Russian has gone down here in this great city and been lost, vanished into the hideous underworld of the Levant. They sell all their jewels and then sell the last jewel of all. In the cabarets and night-halls of low amusement there is nude dancing and drink, lascivious Greeks, drunken American sailors capable of enormities of behaviour, British Tommies with the rolling eye, "seeing the world and being paid for it" as the posters say. The public places are a scandal, and the private dens got up in all sorts of styles with rose-coloured shaded lights and divans and cushions for abandonment to drugs and sensual affections must be explored individually to be described. A part of old Russia has come to Constantinople--to die.

In charge of this imbroglio is a British General. The city is under Allied control, and is patrolled by the troops of four nations, but the British is the main authority. G.H.Q. Constantinople occupies a large barracks which faces a parade-ground. Indian sentries march to and fro outside and enjoy thus serving their King, a picture of polish and smartness. Facing the barracks is a smaller building called "The Jockey Club" where the Commander-in-Chief himself and many of his staff meet to lunch or dine, play billiards, or chat pleasantly over their liqueurs in English style.

"What a pleasure it is to see our fellows in the streets so clean and well-behaved, with no interest except in football, and to compare them with the loafers you see everywhere," says General M. "One thing the British Empire can thank the Jews for," says Capt. C., "is that they've ruined Russia." "What's the matter with the Russians," says stout Col. C., "is that there's no punch in them; they're a helpless sort of people, from a general to a private soldier, it's all the same; they cannot cross a road unless you take them by the hand and lead them across." "What's the matter with Col. C. is that he warmed a seat in the War Office all the war," says Capt. T. "If he had ever faced a tenth of what the Russians have faced he'd talk to a different tune." "What I dislike about them is that you see the rich ones doing themselves well in the restaurants whilst other poor beggars are starving outside," says another who does not like the Russians now. "The French aristocrats went to their deaths with a smile," says another. "What do you think? Oh, but you've got a soft spot in your heart for the Russians." "I have a golden rule. I think it is in the worst of taste to say anything against a people who have suffered so much as the Russians. And what should we be doing in their place--if the pride of England had been broken, and we also were all in exile eating the bread of strangers. Should we present as brave a front?" But how difficult it is to put oneself in another person's place in the imagination, and how unreadily it is done!

The Greeks certainly still hope that they will hold the city. If the Turks come back and the Greeks remain at Chataldja, and the Allies for economy's sake go away, it will be a great temptation to the Hellenes to try and assist Providence in the fulfilment of the outstanding prophecy by bringing Constantine to Constantine's city.

Now, before entering the Cathedral of Sancta Sophia you must pass Turkish sentries and show your passport. Otherwise you cannot get in. The Turk has sworn that no Greek shall enter, and in order to keep the Greeks out he is ready to hold up the whole world. One day no doubt the Turk will be turned out from his stolen mosque--be it by Greeks, be it by Russians, be it by Bulgars. The war has weakened the Turk more than is generally understood. Turkey does not stand where it did in the nineteenth century, and cannot do so again. The vital capital of Turkey has become Angora. The Kemalists are the force of Turkey, and they are Asiatic. In fact, Turkey has now been turned "bag and baggage" out of Europe, and the Turks are playing a new r?le in politics and international life.

Pierre Loti, in his book entitled "La Mort de notre ch?re France en Orient," gives a sentimental defence of the Turk, deplores our English rule, and urges France to endeavour to take charge, making the whole Mediterranean what it has been once before, a French lake. The air of the many blue soldiers in Constantinople, and the continual clash of British and French authority in the city suggest that Loti really speaks for France. There are, therefore, at least four powers which wish to have the key of Europe and the control of the ways of life between Asia Minor and the West. The one power which now does not enter into men's considerations is the one which both traditionally and economically is most concerned--and that is Russia.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL:

A sentimental interest which is more than usual directs Britain's gaze, and especially the gaze of the Empire, to Gallipoli, and that is the interest of sacrifice. Here is the scene of a great and glorious attempt in war, and here lie many thousands of our dead.

The flag of Britain flies over Anzac, and every 25th of April at Anzac Bay and throughout Australia and New Zealand, services are held to commemorate the landing in 1915, and the bold attempt to win through, to beat the Turk and liberate the Russian. It is all pure poetry now, the wrecked lighters stuck in the sand, the sweep of Ocean Beach, the rounds of Suvla Bay. You see it one day, and all the sea is impotently angry, raging against a shore which does not reply; you see it another, and it is lapped in an eternal peace; you see it as it is going to look hundreds of years hence, when all the cemeteries are fitted out in stone, and the cypresses have grown around them, and the British have gone home, and no one visits Gallipoli any more--serene, untroubled.

You run from the once bullet-swept water's edge to the slight shelter of a sand-bank, and walk by the narrow sap into "Shrapnel Valley," still strewn with old water-bottles and broken rum-jars, by a trench then to "Monash Valley," and there probably you start coveys of partridge, which abound now in great numbers, or you start the silver fox or ever-present hare. Wild life has returned as if there never had been a sound of gun. You walk the path up which the rations went in the old days, and see the litter still. You see the great charred patches where stores were burned before the evacuation. How untouched all seems between these giant crags! How vividly you see all that they saw, the grandeur of Nature, the glimmer of the sea! You can still smell the Dardanelles expedition, and tread in old footsteps which hardly have been worn away.

It is an astonishing position, dominated by vast inaccessible ridges. Leaving the so-aptly named "Dead Man's Gully" on the left, you look up to the "Sphinx," that perfect position of the sniper, climb to "Battleship Hill," and then to Chunuk Bair. In an hour or so you may walk all the way we ever got. And we did not need to have got much further than Chunuk Bair. Down below on the one hand is the sea where the men-of-war lay and thundered with their guns. But across and in front gleams in the sunlight what was the Promised Land, the roofs of Chanak and the purple narrows of the Hellespont.

The New Zealanders will have their special monument here beside the cemeteries where their many dead are lying. They took Chunuk Bair, and unsupported, pressed on to win the day, only to be outnumbered and met by terrible odds of swarming Turks. You may pause now and pick an anemone in that terrible no-man's land, where the skeletons of our old dead, picked clean by the jackals, were found otherwise untouched when we came again in the November of '18. You can see the damped, slightly discoloured patches where dead men lay, and even find still now and then a human bone--of friend or foe, who now can tell?

We have gathered together the bones and have buried them all, be they English or Turk, and have decently cleaned up Gallipoli--as Englishmen would. Australians and New Zealanders work there now with simple devotion and energy, and are astonishing the Turks, who ask, "If they do so much for the dead, what will they do for the living?"

A few army huts on the height above Kellia Bay mark the headquarters where Col. Hughes and his Anzac staff are living. From ever-windy hills they look across the Narrows to the wan house where Byron lived. Gangs of Greeks are working for them. The extremity of Gallipoli Peninsula is as it were an imperial estate, and every day a round of work goes on at Helles, at Greenhill, at Suvla, and the rest. With the coming of summer the ships are coming with the marble, and the stone slabs will climb the hills where once our fellows struggled upward. It is a fine undertaking. No ranks are distinguished in the gravestones, and all are equal in sacrifice. But dominating everything will be a tall white obelisk to be put up on the highest point of Helles, visible to all ships passing through the Gate and going forth upon the seas. Australia will be there. England might lose its interest in the Dardanelles--but the Empire never. The younger men have their eyes upon it. And what a contrast the Laodicean atmosphere of G.H.Q., and the frankness of an Australian and New Zealand mess!

A certain widow of a brave general who died in the attack, has, through wealth and influence, obtained permission to erect a personal monument to her husband on Gallipoli. If this is carried out it will be greatly resented by the Australians, who say, "If wealth can purchase a monument, there are plenty of rich Australians who would readily erect memorials to their gallant kith and kin who perished here." A pity if the equality and simplicity of the Gallipoli cemeteries is broken into.

An exchange of hospitality with H.M.S. "Tumult," standing off Chanak, kept us in touch with the outside world, giving us the wireless messages each day. Thus we heard of the application of the "sanctions" to Germany, the conclusion of the trade treaty with Soviet Russia, the fall of Batum, and other items of world interest. The first officer told us how they stood off at Sevastopol and took on Russian wounded, the most appalling cases of suffering where there was never a murmur from the men, and the Russian sisters sat with them all day and all night with a never-tiring devotion. The Commander and every one were strongly Russophile--won to them by personal contact with the Russians, and that although the ship "stank like a pole-cat" before it could bring the refugees to port.

The Commander very kindly gave me a passage to Gallipoli, where a large part of Wrangel's army was encamped. We tore up the channel at an unexampled pace, the cleft north wind driving angrily past as the destroyer rived its way through. And in an hour we came to the ramshackle capital and main port of the peninsula, where a host of khaki-clad soldiers stared at us from the quay.

General Wrangel's army numbered about eighty thousand men when it was transported from the Crimea, and about ten thousand had left him for one cause and another at the time when the French presented the ultimatum--"Go to Brazil or back to Soviet Russia, or we shall cut off the rations on April the first." Wrangel's war material, his guns and machine-guns and ammunition, were given mostly to the Georgians, who promptly lost it to the Bolsheviks or sold it to Kemal. The Greeks certainly complain that the Kemalist army, after being almost devoid of artillery, suddenly became possessed of it in a mysterious way, and shelled them with French shells. The Greek set-back at Smyrna is no doubt partly attributable to the disposal of Wrangel's weapons. His ships and stores were mostly commandeered by the French, and the value of them set off against the rations supplied to the army.

France probably thought originally that she could yet employ these forces in a further adventure against the Bolsheviks. Her idea doubtless was to throw Wrangel's army into the scale on another front of war whenever opportunity should arise. Britain, in refusing to support Wrangel, actually cut herself free from an enormous amount of material responsibility in case of Wrangel's failure.

Wrangel's army was not aided by us as a fighting force, and it could not as a matter of policy be aided by us in its tragical plight after the d?b?cle. It had to depend on the French.

Wrangel, it is said, had a guarantee from the French that they would ration his army when they took upon them the transport to Gallipoli and Lemnos. France would no doubt have continued to do so but that the conclusion of the trading treaty between Russia and England showed that the external fight against the Bolsheviks was over, and, indeed, put France in a highly disadvantageous position. For as long as France retained General Wrangel she could not reasonably hope to enter into trading relationship with Soviet Russia.

The position of the army was greatly complicated by the hundreds of thousands of civil refugees who all, more or less, looked to Wrangel as their leader, and grouped themselves around him--all of them, however, in an equally parlous plight.

France, however, had felt that in backing Wrangel she could not lose very much if he failed, but might reap a golden reward should Fate play into his hands. If a favourable internal revolution had occurred whilst Wrangel held the Crimea, France would have been the favoured friend of the new Government of Russia, but Britain would naturally have been out in the cold. And France did not give Wrangel much material support. It is a mistake to think that France spent any very remarkable amount on the Wrangel expedition. But France has been much annoyed at the subsequent trouble it has cost her. And, whereas you will find individual British officers with an unstinted admiration and affection for the Russians, you find little on the French side but cold politeness or contempt.

An interesting figure is Col. Treloar, ex-Captain in the Coldstream Guards, a soldier of fortune, now serving in Wrangel's army from pure devotion to the Russians. Appalled at the tragedy of the Russians, here is a man who does not mind speaking out. He was with Denikin before Wrangel, and explained that General's downfall by the scoundrels and incapables by whom he was surrounded, and a curious type of English soldier in the rear capable of selling vast quantities of supplies. Wrangel fell because the enemy was infinitely better equipped. The barrage in the Crimea was more like that of a grand attack in France than anything previously encountered in the Russian fighting. In Treloar's opinion, Wrangel's army still remained an army, and should be granted an "honourable return to Russia," i.e., be put down somewhere on the Black Sea shore with arms and ammunition, and left to make what terms they could with their enemies.

At Gallipoli thirty thousand troops with fifteen hundred women and five hundred children were put down. Some of these are housed in the town, but most are in tents on the hills outside. The American Red Cross does very remarkable work ministering to the sick and to the women and children. In general one has learned to distrust huge charitable organizations, but they do upon occasion give opportunity to extremely kind and simple-hearted men and women to give their life and energy to suffering humanity. Such a case is that of Major Davidson at Gallipoli, and another that of Capt. MacNab at Lemnos, where men are working not merely for a salary but for sheer love of their fellow-men.

"We must have a Tsar," said the Count to me. "But he must be terrible. What the Russian people need is cruelty--not machine-gun bullets and shells, but cruelty. They do not mind dying. The whip must be used!"

The gospel of the knout! His countess bade me pay no attention when he said things of that kind. He was in reality the kindest of men and could not bear to look on suffering.

He had lost lands, position, wealth, power of all kinds, in the old Russia. He had something against the Russian people. In a curious way he disapproved of Davidson's kindness. A man in rags would come in for a pair of pants. Davidson would give him a pair out there and then.

"He does not understand us Russians. He should make him come five times and then not give it him. That is the only way to get respected."

The soldiers mostly wear their medals, and naturally have a large number of them. Each has a war-history which all might envy to possess and none envy to go through. Questioned individually, one found them loyal to their chief, but complaining bitterly of their rations. Not many were preparing for Brazil or for a return to Russia. Their future presented itself as a strange and difficult problem--both collectively and individually.

Of the people in the married quarters one did not obtain such a favourable impression. Rooms were divided into three parts by hanging army blankets, and a family was in each part. Windows were lacking, insects very plentiful, and dirt unavoidable. Here were a number of typhus hospitals in charge of the Red Cross, a children's feeding-station and nursery, a lying-in hospital. Two mosques were used as hospitals and presented a remarkable picture, the patients lying in a circular group amid columns covered with Arabic inscriptions. Russian doctors were at work, and disease had been well stemmed. Mortality was very low. Only when the hot weather comes--if the army is still here--one fears for the ravages of dysentery and fever.

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