ght better they had been told that the British
gave no quarter. Out of hell, with shells no longer bursting overhead or
bullets whimpering and hissing past, they were conscious only that they
were alive, and being alive, though they had risked life as if death
were an incident, now freed of discipline and of the exhilaration of
battle, their desire to live was very human in the way that hands shot
up if a sharp word were spoken to them by an officer. They were wholly
lacking in military dignity as they filed by; but it returned as by a
magic touch when a non-commissioned officer was bidden to take charge of
a batch and march them to an inclosure. Then, in answer to the command
shoulders squared, heels rapped together, and the instinct of long
training put a ramrod to their backbones which stiffened mere tired
human beings into soldiers. Distinct gratitude was evident when their
papers were taken for examination over the return of their
identification books, which left them still docketed and numbered
members of "system" and not mere lost souls as they would otherwise have
considered themselves.

"All kinds of Boches in our exhibit!" said a British soldier.

As there were, in truth: big, hulking, awkward fellows, beardless
youths, men of forty with stoops formed in civil life, professional men
with spectacles fastened to their ears by cords and fat men with the
cranial formation and physiognomy in keeping with French comic pictures
of the "type Boche."

Mixed with the British wounded they came, tall and short, thin and
portly, the whole a motley procession of friend and foe in a strange
companionship which was singularly without rancor. I saw only one
incident of any harshness of captor to prisoner. A big German ran
against the wounded arm of a Briton, who winced with pain and turned and
gave the German a punch in very human fashion with his free arm. Another
German with his slit trousers' leg flapping around a bandage was leaning
on the arm of a Briton whose other arm was in a sling. A giant Prussian
bore a spectacled comrade pickaback. Germans impressed as litter-bearers
brought in still forms in khaki. Water and tobacco, these are the
bounties which no man refuses to another at such a time as this. The
gurgle of a canteen at a parched mouth on that warm July day was the
first gift to wounded Briton or German and the next a cigarette.

Every returning Briton was wounded, of course, but many of the Germans
were unwo