Cockney accent.

"You speak English, then?" I said.

"I am English," he replied. "I'm an English prisoner."

"Then what are you doing in a Russian uniform?"

"It is the only thing I could get when my own clothes wore out."
Keeping a careful eye up and down the street, he told us his story.
He was one of the old Expeditionary Force; was taken at Mons with
five bullet wounds in him, and, after a series of unpublishable
humiliations, had been drafted from camp to camp until he had
arrived at this little village, where, in view of the German policy
of letting all the population, see an Englishman, he was the
representative of his race in that community. "The local M.P." he
called himself, in his humorous way.

Robinson Crusoe on his island was not more ignorant of the truth
about the great world than that man, for, while he had learnt a few
daily expressions in German, he was unable to read it. The only
information he could gather was from the French, Belgian, and
Russian prisoners with him, and some he got by bribing one of the
Landsturm Guards with a little margarine or sugar out of his parcel
from England. He was full of the battle of Mons and how badly he
and his comrades in Germany felt at the way they had been left
unsupported there. None the less, though alone, with no Englishman
for miles, living almost entirely on his parcels, absolutely cut
off from the real facts of the war, hearing little but lies, he was
as calmly confident of the ultimate victory of the Allies as I am.

I asked him if he heard from home.

"Yes," he said, "now and then, but the folks tell me nothing and I
can tell them nothing. If you get back to England you tell the
people there not to believe a word that comes from English
prisoners. Those who write favourably do so because they have to.
Every truthful letter is burned by the military censor. Tell the
people to arrange the parcels better and see that every man gets a
parcel at least once a week--not send five parcels to one man and
no parcels to some poor bloke like me who is alone. How is the war
going on, guv'nor?" he asked. I gave him my views. "I think it's
going badly for the Germans--not by what they tell me here or what
I gets in that awful _Continental Times_ paper, but from what I
notice in the people round about, and the officers who visit us.
The people are not so abusive to the English as they used to be.
The superior officers do not treat us like dogs, as they