A Summary of a Private Investigation into Alleged Abuses within the Imperial Penal Levy.
 
Addressed to Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Miria Ilraven.
 
 
Most August and Gracious Imperial Majesty, Queen Miria Ilraven:
 
  I set forth my pen herein to transcribe many of the shocking abuses which have occurred as a matter of routine business within the Imperial Penal Levy. No insult, affront, or slight is meant to the Imperial Armed Forces by my missive; rather, it is out of concern for the splendor of Her Majesty's reputation that I bring this urgent matter to Her attention. To swiftly address the allegations brought forth can only redound to the fame currently enjoyed by Your Majesty as that of a kind and compassionate sovereign; to bury this report would open the Imperial Armed Forces to the shame and obloquy of conduct most unfitting of professional soldiers.
 
  I attest that I, Jennivach Hollen, am a lieutenant colonel of the 4th Cavalry Brigade, Fusiliers Division, attached to the 1st Army as of this writing. I have conducted this investigation entirely on my own initiative, using no resources save those publicly available to a commissioned officer of the Imperial Armed Forces. Though I have many times approached the Office of the Question and lodged requests to launch an investigation into the activities of the Penal Levy, my requests have been uniformly denied without explanation or recourse for appeal.
 
  My initial firsthand experience with the Imperial Penal Levy began in the month of Bouviere, year 446. At that time in my capacity as an officer under the command of General Bruck Holland our brigade was stationed in Wilhoek, charged with patrol and peacekeeping activities in the province. Our territory included Fort Panthaganas, one of the initial training areas of the Imperial Penal Levy and home to much of its forces. In the six months of our deployment I bore firsthand witness to many of the atrocities I shall now describe in detail to Your Majesty. I have also brought my concerns to my own chain of command and to the attention of the staff of the Imperial Penal Levy. In every case I have been given the same peremptory dismissal and my reports buried. One superior, more solicitious than the rest, told me to my face that "There is no reason a promising young woman like yourself should derail your military career by exposing the garbage to the flies."
 
  As Her Majesty is no doubt aware, the Imperial Penal Levy was founded in the year 393 as a last refuge for elements of the regular forces too intractable to be disciplined by normal means. Here, soldiers and officers who had incurred death sentences could commute their punishments by volunteering or being sentenced for the most dangerous and difficult tasks which face the Ilraven Empire. The charter which established the existence of the Penal Levy itself states that any soldier who serves five years in the Penal Levy is released a free man or woman at the end of service, the debt to society considered fully repaid. After inception, the Penal Levy quickly established a reputation as one of the fiercest and most feared fighting elements within the Imperial Armed Forces, priding itself on a culture where only the hardiest of soldiers dared. From the very beginning, its casualties have been appalling. As the soldiers could (and regularly were) sent on missions where death was all but assured, the Penal Levy consciously cultivated a romantic image where any volunteer could be molded into a fearsome warrior. Consequently, the Penal Levy has expanded dramatically from its initial formation as a group of expendable convicts into a modern fighting force, but retains its roots as exclusively foot infantry.
 
  During my stay at Wilhoek, officers of the Penal Levy explained their application process to me in some detail. The Penal Levy does not recruit actively at the moment; instead, a diverse and varied pool of recruits seek it out. These range from impoverished refugees displaced by war, to starving mercenaries unable to find any other work, to hardened criminals condemned to the gallows, to idealistic and romantic youths longing to see the world. In the current state of affairs, where armed conflict is simply an accepted fact of life for much of the Empire, the Penal Levy faces no shortage of volunteers unaware of the ghastly horrors awaiting them. I found that members of the Penal Levy were often tight-lipped around outsiders and in public, but could be surprisingly candid once they were in private. Several must have also come to see me as a like-minded young woman, otherwise they would not have opened themselves to me in the way that they did.
 
  Trainees enter the Penal Levy in several ways. The first and most common is through volunteering, often at a Penal Levy station staffed by several attractive young women and a few senior officers able to narrate an experience to fit the desires of the applicant. Criminals on the run from the law are promised anonymity and the chance to start life afresh; refugees are promised steady pay and shelter for their families; local boys who have never left their farms are told of exotic, faraway lands that they will be visiting. Secondly, the Penal Levy can also accept elements from the regular army who have been judicially sentenced to service within the Penal Levy, usually as an alternative to execution. Third, the Penal Levy can conscript or impress individuals into the ranks, usually from enemy prisoners. While this practice is officially denied, I have borne witness to no less than half a dozen such drafts. It is my belief that the Penal Levy does so on a regular basis, preying upon the dispossessed elements of society who have no legal recourse.
 
  I may also add that the Penal Levy has very little scruples as to the individuals that it accepts. Frail, sickly individuals whom the regular standing forces would reject on sight are given a pass without so much as a single fitness test, nor does the Penal Levy ever inquire into the details of a crime that brings a convicted man to its doorstep. Upon being brought into the training grounds, the recruit is at once stripped of all possessions, even his name. Any clothes he was wearing are unceremoniously torn away and burned, any identification he may possess is immediately confiscated and also burned. The recruit is then shaved, if male, and given an ill-fitting tunic befitting a prisoner. The recruit is assigned a number drawn by lot; this number is the only identification permitted to him or her, and I have seen the training instructors deal out fearful punishments to any recruits attempting to use their proper names. No other equipment or supplies are issued; if the recruit loses his tunic or has it stolen or destroyed, he or she is obliged to spend the remainder of training completely unclothed. The entire process is carefully calculated, or so I gathered from the trainers, to strip individuality away from the recruits and impress upon them that they are literal prisoners of the Penal Levy. Without sandals or a uniform to wear, recruits appear as felons to the untrained eye.
 
  A recruit is then led to be magically bound to the Chain of Command. Though I need not repeat the details to Her Majesty, it is well-known that enlisted elements of the regular Levy are ensorcelled by the Chain of Command such that a superior officer who invokes it can issue a command which the enlisted soldier is physically compelled to carry out regardless of will, intent, or consideration of personal safety. In my training it was emphasized that a professional officer must use this power responsibly and sparingly, only when necessary and then in a compassionate manner, for it is no light matter to strip a man's very will from him however temporarily. To date, I have had to invoke the Chain of Command only once, and it was to stop a suicidal soldier in my brigade from killing himself. No such compassion exists within the Penal Levy. Recruits once bound are immediately forbidden from killing themselves and while on the surface this may appear to be an admirable precaution, many a recruit soon discovers that death is the only deliverance from the torturous hell within the Penal Levy.
 
  At this point I must bring an unpleasant statistic to Her Majesty's attention: Nearly one tenth of recruits in the Penal Levy die before their very first day of training. Of those who survive, another one in six will not live through basic instruction. Though the Penal Levy has no shortage of members, power is concentrated tightly within the officer echelons and the instructor cadre. Recruits have no rights, no recourse to appeal, and no defense against the depredations of their superiors. A recruit is thrown into an enclosed cage with other enlistees, there to languish until chosen for basic training. When food is rationed out, the officers in charge of victuals deliberately restrict food so that the recruits are forced to fight and compete amongst themselves for the scant amount made available to them. When I inquired why the recruits were underfed and malnourished, offering to share some of the supplies from my own brigade, the officers quickly assured me it was unnecessary. They deliberately did this, so they said, in order to promote internecine strife. Thus the recruits fought amongst themselves and developed a pecking order based usually on brute strength, forming alliances and battle lines. It was accepted that many recruits would simply starve to death before training, nor were any distinctions made for men and women. The women were thrown into the same enclosures as the men, there to either prostitute themselves to the strongest men in return for protection or simply face rape. These pens are uniformly squalid, filthy, and reeking; very rarely are they cleaned, nor are the corpses of those who have died under such wretched conditions disposed of in a timely manner. That such callous behavior could be approved and abetted by commissioned officers is unworthy of any fighting force in the service of Her Majesty.
 
  The instructors in particular have unlimited power over their hapless charges and in the Penal Levy there are no sergeants or other noncommissioned officers - rather, the lower officers handle training directly. Each second lieutenant is given forty trainees to teach over a twelve-week period. Together, six of these women report to a single officer of captain or major rank. A recruit can languish in the pens for weeks to years before being assigned to an officer for basic instruction and these enlistees are uniformly malnourished and desperate when they are finally released for training. At this time, the recruits are magically shrunken down to the height of four inches on average, ostensibly for the safety of the instructors but in reality for ease of domination. After they have been thoroughly washed, shaved, and combed of lice, the trainees are brought out to meet their instructor. One important fact of relative obscurity is that all of the training instructors are young women. When I asked one of the trainers about this, she explained that even the training instructors must sleep eventually. My puzzlement must have been clear from my expression, for she then patted her belly and explained that women can do what men cannot - keep others captive within themselves. Thus it is that the instructors keep their charges within their wombs when necessary, to prevent their trainees from escaping. As one lieutenant expressed it, no matter how carefully a command is worded under the Chain, a clever recruit will still find a way to twist it.
 
  The training instructors prevent themselves to their new recruits as surrogate mothers, even when some of the recruits are old enough to be their fathers. If they are mothers, however, then these officers have displayed some of most un-maternal traits I have ever had the displeasure of witnessing. During my deployment, some of the training instructors seemed to think that I enjoyed watching them mistreat their trainees, and so they invited me to watch their training sessions and join them for after-hour gossip. For the next three months after leaving the pens, the recruits see no one at all except for the other members of their class and their instructor. These young women have different methods of discipline, all of them brutal and all of them humiliating if not downright barbaric. In but a single example, Second Lieutenant Rachel O'Laughlin described some of her practices to me. A recruit who failed to address her as "ma'am" was ordered to clean her boots with a toothbrush, a laborious process which could take days. A recruit who did not wash himself in time for lights out was thrown into her mouth with a handful of water, then viciously gargled in her upper throat for a minute in full view of his classmates; he emerged white as a sheet and clearly terrified. A clearly famished recruit who accepted a morsel from his classmate was unceremoniously inserted into the insole of Lieutenant O'Laughlin's boot until he vomited from nausea. On the very first day of training, she deliberately murdered one of her own trainees in agonizing fashion. Having ordered her recruits into icy cold water to sit, Trainee Number 38110 refused and the lieutenant stepped on him, crushing his leg underneath the heel stem of her boot. His shrill cry of agony quickly faded into pained whimpers until he bled out and died, and such a display of cruelty ensured that the lieutenant had few discipline problems for the next few weeks. When I objected, the lieutenant told me in full hearing of her trainees, "Ma'am, please don't concern yourself with the fate of a few insects."
 
  More disturbingly, Lieutenant O'Laughlin's story is hardly atypical of the appalling conditions under which the enlisted men and women of the Penal Levy train. One lieutenant in the training corps is nicknamed "The Decimatrix" because her stated policy is to kill off at least one tenth of her recruits every training cycle, and she often kills twice that many. Another young lieutenant wears her trainees caged in earrings or sewn into her uniform to social functions for the officers of the Penal Levy. Yet another has a habit of swallowing one recruit alive at the end of every two weeks of training, chosen from those who displeased her most in the preceding week; his terrified comrades, huddled in the darkness of her womb, are forced to listen to his tortured screams as her stomach digests him alive.
 
  I met another young trainer named Joy. The very first words out of her mouth to her recruits was that they would come to dread her joy more than her anger or her disapproval. At irregular intervals of training, Lieutenant Joy would select one recruit to stay out of her uterus while the other trainees were imprisoned inside for the night. She would then have him restored to his normal size and bind him with the Chain of Command to have intercourse with her. Her resulting ecstasy made her womb almost unbearable for the recruits trapped within, thrown around and bruised by the crushing movement of her walls and then flooded by the sticky fluids of their comrade. Usually, a few trainees would be crushed to death or drown the first time she did this and it was uniformly agreed amongst the recruits that it was a highly traumatic experience to live through. Lieutenant Joy confided to me that when she first became an instructor she had wanted to do it every night, but that it killed off nearly her entire squad within a month. She also stated that doing it in irregular intervals felt more fulfilling, since her trainees always lived in dread anticipation of the next event. She told me that her recruits always developed the habit amongst themselves of taking roll every night within her womb and only resting if they were all accounted for. Once, when she had her squad within her body, she took my hand and placed it on her belly. When she then massaged her womanhood with her fingers to simulate the effect of intercourse, the reaction from her trainees came almost immediately. The way that the wretched prisoners within her body squirmed under my hand like trapped fish in a net is a sensation that I will no doubt remember to my dying day.
 
  Lieutenant Joy also told me some of her personal history with the Penal Levy. She said that she had been a soldier in the regular army, blamed for a severe breach in regulations so that her superior officer might escape punishment. Having been sentenced to the Penal Levy as one of the very few female enlisted, her new life had been abject misery until she finally snapped and nearly killed two of the men in her class during a brawl in her trainer's womb. After this she became aggressive and pugnacious, traits which her own trainer quickly noticed, and she was taken out of basic instruction after a month to be entered directly into the instructor cadre. When I asked Lieutenant Joy how she had become an officer in the Penal Levy without even finishing basic training, the young officer merely told me that she was the only one who had even been in basic training at all. According to the second lieutenant only women who had that dominant streak were invited for officer candidate school, where they quickly became indoctrinated into seeing and treating the trainees as outlets for their own sadism. Such women were actively recruited into the officer corps as instructors and leaders.
 
  These incidents and others like them happened on a daily basis as a matter of routine and were neither exceptional nor isolated. Indeed, the only reasonable conclusion that I can draw is that the leadership of the Penal Levy deliberately fosters a command climate where such barbaric acts are considered part of one's duty, albeit a duty which the training instructors approach with unbridled enthusiasm. The training that the enlistees of the Penal Levy receive, far from shaping them into the professional warriors of their mythology, merely serves to dehumanize and degrade them into a fearful subservience of their female masters. At no time did I ever observe instruction in drill, marching, usage of weapons, protocol, camp, entrenchment, or supply. Hardship and difficulty may be the school of good soldiers, but it is certain that deliberate cruelty is not. A full record of my observations may be found in the appendix attached to this report, but I have highlighted some salient events for Her Majesty:
 
  One lieutenant lined up her boots every morning in a straight file and would force her enlisted to crawl to their morning bath beneath the arches of the heels. She proudly repesented this ritual to me as "a daily reminder of feminine dominance over their lives."
 
  Every lieutenant controls when her trainees eat, what they eat, and how much they eat. Trainees who reported infractions to their instructors were routinely rewarded with the food of their comrades and protected from retaliation - but, notably, not always protected.
 
  Since recruits at the end of the day were always stored in the trainer's womb, the trainers had a great interest in making sure that they were properly washed. One trainee who had failed to wash to his instructor's satisfaction was nonchalantly fed to a carnivorous plant without being given a chance to remedy his shortcoming. His comrades were forced to stand around the plant and sing cheerful Levy songs while the plant digested him alive and screaming.
 
  One trainee who made a remark about his instructor's breasts was crushed to death beneath them and his comrades forced to wash his remains off her skin.
 
  A lieutenant named Vivian Wheelwright established a nightly ritual with all of her trainees. After unbirthing them for the night, she forces all of them to worship and praise her womb with fulsome panegyrics while saying the most degrading and humiliating things about men. If she feels that her trainees show insufficent creativity, enthusiasm, or conviction, the next day she takes the first person birthed out to be used for carnal pleasure while the others were still imprisoned behind her cervix. These excursions terrorize the recruits, sometimes to the point of insanity, and are invariably fatal to the luckless individual pushed out first.
 
  Another lieutenant kept a pet spider whom she fed nothing except the trainees under her command. She would deliberately starve her spider until it was hungry enough to suck an entire recruit dry, then release half a dozen of her trainees into its pen and see which one the spider pounced upon to encase in webs and reel away. She considered this to be an exciting sport.
 
  With such sadistic and barbaric practices not only carried out routinely by the training instructors, but also actively aided and abetted by senior leadership, it is small wonder that many recruits simply perished in basic training or were broken and useless when part of the standing forces of the Penal Levy. These are some of the most extreme conditions that the human spirit can endure and do we wonder if it breaks the wills of many? Penal Levy officers justify their cruel training as necessary to weed out the chaff from the wheat and insist that the adversity is necessary to determine who the best soldiers are. This argument seems unconvincing to me for three reasons: Firstly, the callous and abhorrent treatment of the trainees by their superiors exceeds any reasonable standard of discipline and can only be a cloak for the sadism of the instructors. Secondly, if such weeding out were necessary, it would be done in a much more humane and much more expedient way by simply vetting applicants during the enlistment process. Thirdly, for all the vaunted prowess which such training is supposedly meant to create, I have seen no evidence whatsoever that the soldiers trained by the Penal Levy are well-disciplined and indomitable warriors of steely resolve. Rather, war exercises with my own brigade have convinced me that they are desperate and despairing men, terrorized by fear of their own superiors to the point that they are willing to accept appalling losses in the name of following orders. The Chain of Command is an iron leash on their necks. Compared to the dread prospects of reporting failure to their domineering superiors, death in battle must seem like a welcome respite. Such a hypothesis is borne out by the bloody operational history of the Penal Levy, which has often suffered much greater casualties than other elements of the Imperial Armed Forces when fighting under similar conditions.
 
  A recruit who manages to survive basic instruction is placed within the standing forces of the Penal Levy. The overwhelming interaction that a member outside of the Penal Levy has with the Levy will be with the officers. The enlisted soldiers are very rarely seen except on the battlefield, for they do not escape the clutches of the dreadful uterus after basic instruction. If the barracks occupied by the Penal Levy are small and luxurious compared to the expansive but bare rooms used by the regular forces, that is because a Penal Levy enlisted man or woman is bivouacked within the body of a superior for as long as he or she remains in the Levy. Such quartering results in appalling attrition losses. Some soldiers are crushed to death by the exercise and exertions of their superiors and their bodies discarded upon the next muster. The vast majority of the officer corps within the Penal Levy are completely indifferent to the well-being of the soldiers under their command when engaging in sexual liaisons, with the result that a single night's escapade can result in unit losses of up to 50%. Some soldiers simply become lost within the dark depths and are never seen again. In theory every officer must bring out her soldiers for sunlight and exercise; in practice this rule is rarely enforced, resulting in many blind soldiers with atrophied muscles, sometimes so weak that they cannot survive outside of the uterus. All of the enlisted will spend their time as shrunken individuals, restored to human size only to fight and then condemned to being tiny puppets again for their superiors in the Levy.
 
  In theory a soldier who serves his five years of time with the Penal Levy is entitled to a new life and a new identity under the charter of the Levy. In practice, the Levy keeps records very sloppily. Some soldiers I spoke to had white hair (or no hair) and wrinkles, spending so much time in the Levy that they had nearly gone blind. After carefully searching through the records available in Fort Panthaganas, as well as an inquiry made with the Imperial Library of the Armed Forces, I have made a startling discovery: Not one enlisted soldier in the history of the Penal Levy has been discharged for fulfilling the terms of service. Officers, yes. The privileged class of commissioned officers can leave at any time after five years, although many choose to stay within a hierarchy which gives them unlimited power over others and a free hand to wield that authority. But not a single enlisted soldier. There can be no more certain fact than this single statistic to illustrate my claims: the Penal Levy has utterly failed as an institution, flagrantly disobeyed the terms of the charter set forth by the throne, and brought disgrace upon the Imperial Armed Forces as an institution.
 
  The abuses perpetrated by the Penal Levy upon its enlisted do not end even for veterans of battles. Not one regular soldier in the Penal Levy has been cited for courage or recommended for a medal, according to the Imperial Library. Second Lieutenant Ilsia Nennault, on the other hand (to name just one example out of many), is an officer who has been training new recruits for one year. By her own admission she has never served in an active combat zone, yet she wears one medal for conspicuous gallantry in the line of action and another for injuries sustained in battle. When I asked about this apparent incongruity, Lieutenant Nennault became defensive and referred the matter to the local commander. Raising the same inquiry with her superior, I was told that such awards were regularly earned by the brave women who regardless of personal safety worked tirelessly to resocialize the most hardened criminal elements of society into an effective military force in recognition of the daily dangers that they faced. Regardless of personal safety? What danger is a man four inches (or less!) tall who is ensorcelled to obey without the possibility of defiance any order that his trainer gives him? That sadists and torturers are being praised and medaled for their cruelty is an affront to the professional standing soldiers of the Imperial Armed Forces, and dare I say an affront to Her Majesty Herself.
 
  In one incident, I witnessed two officers of the Penal Levy feeding each other their soldiers. First they asked the sorceress attached to their particular unit to shrink the men further to a swallowable size. Having become thoroughly drunk, a young woman proceeded to dangle a soldier of her command over the lips of her equally intoxicated friend and drop him in, his despairing cry of protest echoing mournfully within the mouth of the other officer. The women seemed to find this exceedingly amusing and took turns feeding each other, daring each other to swallow their soldiers whole. That the enlisted men survived for some time within their stomachs is beyond doubt; diluted by wine, the stomach acids took longer to burn away the victims' lives. Their pained shrieks could be heard even by a bystander such as myself through the intervening layers of flesh. When I tried to intervene, the officers angrily accused me of ruining their sport and summoned the military constables to remove me. One of the young women, unable to hold the contents of her belly, vomited over the floor a writhing mass of a dozen men covered in revolting bile. Neither of the women made the least effort to aid their dying soldiers and I heard later that they all perished. I apologize if the lurid detail in my accounting offends Her Majesty's sensibilities, but I feel it is my duty to report these horrors as they occurred and finger the perpetrators for Her Majesty's righteous wrath. The dates of these events and the names of the parties responsible are all contained in the appendix to this report.
 
  Abuse of Chain of Command is rampant throughout the Penal Levy, including the senior leadership but most often by the junior officers who are directly over the enlisted. As commissioned officers whose authority is derived directly from Her Majesty, it is constantly impressed upon us that Chain of Command is a grave responsibility and a power to be used only the most dire of circumstances. No such ethical training seems to have been disseminated amongst the Penal Levy. There, recruits and regulars are often given impossible or suicidal orders. For cheap entertainment, one officer said to me, she would simply order one of her soldiers to touch another and then order the other man not to let the first touch him. The ensuing chase could last hours and ended only when one person physically could not continue due to fatigue and exhaustion. Officers regularly ordered their men to beat themselves or each other, to walk into rocks, to swim in freezing water, to crawl into anthills, or even to feed themselves slowly to predators. Pet cats and snakes are a terror to the enlisted men.
 
  Officers treated their men not as subordinates to be cared for and led by inspiration, but as disposable property. Senior leadership made no effort to discipline junior officers for getting their soldiers killed, incapacitated, or lost. The sight of two women sitting across from each other at a table with a chessboard in between and shrunken soldiers being used as pieces was a common one in the officers' halls of Fort Panthaganas. Sometimes, captured pieces were exchanged between the women, moving the soldiers into new squads. Sometimes the women simply swallowed pieces that they captured, ignoring the howling protests and wails of their soldiers. It was also not uncommon to wander through the halls and hear soldiers being traded from one woman to another, with phrases such as "so, number 13873 and number 45451 for 28377 and 28100?" being bandied about with less care than lending a pair of shoes or some cosmetics to a sister officer.
 
  In a culture such as this, where the enlisted men were treated as garbage or less, it is no surprise that resentment amongst the ranks was a near universal sentiment. I did not have much chance to interview the individual enlisted soldiers in private, as the soldiers are rarely to be found without their officers present, but I did watch their expressions carefully even so. Most soldiers quickly establish a pecking hierarchy amongst themselves within a group, driven by competition over scarce resources and the all-important need to avoid an officer's attention. When I did find some soldiers alone, they begged me to bring word of their plight to anyone outside who would listen. These soldiers are not able to appeal over their officers' heads to senior leadership, as their direct superiors block all contact. The enlisted men also acted afraid of female officers such as myself. Even in the gray uniform of a regular Army officer rather than the white uniforms of the Levy officer, enlisted men visibly cringed in my presence and flinched whenever I looked sharply at them.
 
  Senior leadership within the Penal Levy dismissed my concerns whenever brought up, often giving me veiled hints that a too inquisitive individual, even if a well-placed officer within the regular armed forces, might find herself "volunteering" for the Penal Levy one day. Voicing my concerns to my own command leadership proved no more fruitful; at least one superior explicitly refused to become involved, while others said that it was out of their jurisdiction and that I might appeal to the Office of the Question. As explained previously, my requests have all been denied without explanation.
 
  Therefore, as an officer of the Imperial Armed Forces, I appeal directly to Your Majesty as the supreme authority within the Ilraven Empire. Your Majesty's compassion and concern for her soldiers is well-known and I am confident that Your Majesty will not rest until this matter has been brought to light and the perpetrators duly punished.
 
  I, Lieutenant Colonel Jennivach Hollen, do solemnly affirm that the foregoing is true and factually correct to the best of my ability, and that I am aware that willful misrepresentation to Her Majesty the queen with intent to harm or defame carries the penalty under Title 5, Code 100 of the Imperial Legal Codex of digestecution.
 
  Witness here my signature,
 
  /J. Hollen/