So he would bring for my
breakfast nothing but a small piece of dry bread. One day that I was
positively ill with hunger, I begged repeatedly for another piece of
bread, but he refused it me. It was not malice on his part, but pure
stupidity, for he was absolutely incapable of understanding how I felt.
And to save fuel, he let me suffer from cold, as well as from hunger;
would never put more than one wretched little stick at a time into the
stove. Everything was pinched to an incredible extent. Thus it was
impossible for me to get a candle in the evening before it was
absolutely dark, and then never more than one, although it made my eyes
water to try to read. Candles and firing, it appears, were not put down
in the bill. And yet this hospital is kept up on subscriptions from all
the great Powers, so there must be someone into whose pockets the money
goes. Most of us survived it; a few died who possibly might have been
kept alive; one was preserved for whom the Danish newspapers have
beautiful obituaries ready.
Over my head, in the same building, there lived a well-known German
archaeologist, who was married to a Russian princess of such colossal
physical proportions that Roman popular wits asserted that when she
wished to go for a drive she had to divide herself between two cabs.
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