shoemaker's shop,
listening to him and others of the old 2nd Gordons recount their
terrible tales of the hill men on the march to Kandahar with "Bobs."
And now I felt that same tremendous sensation of fear which used to
send me trembling to my childish pallet in the croft, peering
fearfully through the darkness for the oiled body of a naked Pathan
with his corkscrew kris. Terror swept over me like a springtime flood.
He saw no one else. His eye fastened on me in crudest hate. But as he
stood over me with feet spread wide and the circle of his axe's swing
broadening for the finale, the thread of rabbit-like mesmerism broke
and I sprang nimbly aside as the blade buried itself deep in the mud
wall I had been cowering against. I endeavoured to dodge him by
putting some of my fellow prisoners between us. No use. He followed
me, shoving and cursing his way among them, swinging his axe. My hair
stood on end and I felt rather critical of their much-vaunted Prussian
discipline. Another endeavoured to bayonet Charlie Scarfe. The officer
at last stopped them both.

Our captors belonged to the Twenty-first Prussian Regiment and were,
so far as we knew, the first of their kind we had been up against,
all previous comers on our front having been Bavarians and latterly
of the army group of Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria--"Rupie," we called
him. They wore the baggy grey clothes and clumsy looking leather top
boots of the German infantryman. The spiked _pickelhauben_ was
conspicuous by its absence and was, we well knew, a thing only of
billets and of "swank" parades. In its place was the soft pancake
trench cap with its small colored button in the front.

The enemy were armed for the most part with pioneers' bayonets, as
well adapted by reason of their saw edges for sticking flesh and blood
as for sawing wood; and, if for the former, an unnecessarily cruel
weapon, since it was bound to stick in the body and badly lacerate it
internally in the withdrawal; especially if given a twist.

The trench front had been about-faced since its change of ownership
and the Germans were already casting our dead out of the shattered
trench, both in front and behind, and in many cases using them to stop
the gaps in the parapet; so that they now received the bullets of
their erstwhile comrades.

We were ordered up and out at the back of the parapet and then made to
lie there. The German artillery had ceased. We had none. Odd shots
from the remnant of ou