strian
officer, arrived in Arad and heard the apprehensions that an epidemic
might spread from the fortress. This had, in fact, been debated by the
town council; and Lachmann was eventually responsible for a commission
of inquiry. But Hegedues, although he was degraded and condemned to
prison, made a successful appeal, for his father-in-law was a
field-marshal, one Pacor.

A few improvements were made in the casemates towards the end of 1917,
as a Spanish commission was expected. But it never came. Some of the
long galleries have, since the Armistice, been furnished with windows
and electric light; but about four months after the Armistice I found
them full of dead flies and heavy with an abominable stench. Amid the
debris were many lamps, such as one uses in a mine. There was a
proclamation, dated 1918, which tried to lure deserters back; it
promised that no punishment would be inflicted on them if they should
return, but that robbery or murder would meet with capital punishment,
either by shooting or by strangling. The floor was littered with all
kinds of paper, with scraps of furniture, a few chains and some prison
books, which dated back for years. These gave details of all the
punishments and were written in a very ornamental script, as though
the clerks had taken a pleasure in their work. The Arad fortress had
been partly used as a prison for a long time; but Misko Tatar, a
Magyar, who stayed there sixteen years for having murdered his
fiancee, his mother and his sister, as well as one Kocian, who
remained for more than eighteen years--he had murdered the proprietor
of a canteen, his wife and child in the Bocche--and Rujitatzka, a
Croat, who together with another man had been accused of theft, had
killed their escort and thrown his body into the Danube--none of these
culprits could remember having heard of such punishments as the
Bosniak civilians had to bear. The iron ring from which people used to
be suspended for a couple of hours could still be seen on a large
tree. If the relatives or friends could pay a fine this penalty was
discontinued. Another method was to fasten a man's right wrist to his
left ankle and the left wrist to the right ankle. He would then be
left for a week; every night a blanket was thrown over him. But there
is something very strange in the composition of the Magyars. When the
revolution broke out and the prisoners, after all the years of horror,
were gaining their freedom, an acquaintan