h his heart would break. He was wearing some kind of
military great-coat with a yellow stripe running down the back.

"Pst!" I called to him, drawing my pistol from my pocket. As I did so,
Francis behind me touched my arm to let me know he was there.

"Pst!" I called again louder.

The man swung round on to his knees with a sudden, frightened spring.
When he saw my pistol, he jerked his hands above his head. Dirty and
unshaven, with the tears all wet on his face, he looked a woe-begone and
tragic figure.

"Kamerad! Kamerad!" he muttered stupidly at me. "Napoo! Kaput!
Englander!"

I gazed at the stranger, hardly able to believe my ears. That trench
jargon in this place!

"Are you English?" I asked him.

At the sound of my voice he stared about him wildly.

"Ay, I be English, zur," he replied with a strong West Country burr,
"God help me!" And, heedless of me and my pistol, he covered his face
with his hands and burst into a wild fit of sobbing again, rocking
himself to and fro in his grief.

"Go back to Monica!" I whispered to Francis. "I'll see to this fellow!"

I managed to pacify him presently. Habit is a tenacious ruler and,
grotesque figures though we were, the "zur" he had addressed to me
brought out the officer in me. I talked to him as I would have done to
one of my own men, and he quietened down at last and looked up at me.

He was only a lad--I could tell that by the clearness of his skin and
the brightness of his eyes--but his face was wan and wasted, and at the
first glance he looked like a man of forty. Under his great-coat, which
was German, he was clad in filthy rags which once had been a khaki
uniform, as the cut--and nothing else--revealed.

He told me his simple story in his soft Somersetshire accent, just the
plain tale of the fate that has overtaken thousands of our
fellow-countrymen since the war began. His name was Maggs, Sapper
Ebenezer Maggs, of the Royal Engineers, and he was captured near Mons in
August, 1914, when out laying a line with a party. With a long train of
British prisoners--"zum of 'em was terrible bad, zur, dying, as you
might say"--he had been marched off to a town and paraded to the railway
station through streets thronged with jeering German soldiery. In cattle
trucks, the fit, the wounded, the dying and the dead herded together,
without food or water, they had made their journey into Germany with
hostile mobs at every station, once the frontier was past, brutal men