word of the approaching
police. So with his rifle and three cartridges to sustain him, often
delirious with fever, and the inflammation in his leg, he commandeered
the men of a native village and persuaded them, such was the prestige of
his name, to carry him twenty-eight days in the "machela" to a friendly
mission station on Lake Nyasa. Here the kindly English sisters nursed
him back to life and health again.

Best was not so lucky, for he was taken prisoner. But there was no
German gaol that could hold so resourceful a prisoner as this. In due
time he made his escape, and was to be found later looping the loop
above Turkish camps in the Sinai Peninsula.

One German, of whom our information had been that "his company did
little else but rape women and loot goats," fell into my hands when we
took the English Universities Mission at Korogwe. Could this be he, I
thought, as I saw an officer of mild appearance and benevolent aspect
speaking English so perfectly and peering at me through big spectacles?
Badly wounded and with a fracture of the thigh, he had begged me to look
after him, saying the most disloyal things about the character and
surgical capacity of the German doctor whom we had left behind to look
after German wounded. Not that the _Oberstabsarzt_ did not deserve them,
but it was so gratuitously beastly to say them to me, an enemy. He
deplored, too, with such unctuous phrases, the fact that war should ever
have occurred in East Africa. How it would spoil the years of toil,
toward Christianity, of many mission stations! How the simple native had
been taught in this war to kill white men; hitherto, of course, the
vilest of crimes. How the march of civilisation had been put back for
twenty-five years. How the prestige of the white man had fallen, for had
not natives seen white men, on both sides, run away before them? Many
such pious expressions issued from his lips. But the true Hun character
came out when he asked whether the hated Boers were coming? The most
vindictive expression, that even the benevolent spectacles could only
partly modify, clouded his face, and he complained to me most bitterly
of the black ingratitude of the Boers toward Germany. "All my life, from
boyhood," he complained, "have I not subscribed my pfennigs to provide
Christmas presents for the poor Boers suffering under the heel of
England. Did not German girls," he whined, "knit stockings for the women
of that nation that was so akin to