They strip you naked as a worm, and dress you again in a uniform which obliterates you; they mark your neck with a number.

The uniform even enters into your flesh, for you are shaped and cut out by the stamping-machine of exercises.
Brightly clad strangers spring up about you, and encircle you.

You recognize them--they are not strangers.

It is a carnival, then,--but a fierce and final carnival, for these are your new masters, they the absolute, proclaiming on their fists and heads their gilded authority.
Such of them as are near to you are themselves only the servants of others, who wear a greater power painted on their clothes.

It is a life of misery, humiliation and diminution into which you fall from day to day, badly fed and badly treated, assailed throughout your body, spurred on by your warders' orders.