en those prisoners clutched at hunks of bread and ate
in a famished way, like starved beasts. Some of them had been four days
hungry, cut off from their supplies by our barrage fire, and intense
hunger gave them a kind of vitality when food appeared. The sight of
that mass of men reduced to such depths of human misery was horrible.
One had no hate in one's heart for them then.

"Poor devils!" said an officer with me. "Poor beasts! Here we see the
`glory' of war! the `romance' of war!"

I spoke to some of them in bad German, and understood their answer.

"It is better here than on the battlefield," said one of them. "We are
glad to be prisoners."

One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns which were firing
ceaselessly.

"I pity our poor people there," he said.

One of them, who spoke English, described all he had seen of the battle,
which was not much, because no man at such a time sees more than what
happens within a yard or two.

"The English caught us by surprise when the attack came at last," he
said. "The bombardment had been going on for days, and we could not
guess when the attack would begin. I was in a deep dugout, wondering
how long it would be before a shell came through the roof and blow us
to pieces. The earth shook above our heads. Wounded men crawled into the
dugout, and some of them died down there. We sat looking at their bodies
in the doorway and up the steps. I climbed over them when a lull came.
A friend of mine was there, dead, and I stepped on his stomach to get
upstairs. The first thing I saw was a crowd of your soldiers streaming
past our trenches. We were surrounded on three sides, and our position
was hopeless. Some of our men started firing, but it was only asking for
death. Your men killed them with bayonets. I went back into my dugout
and waited. Presently there was an explosion in the doorway and part of
the dugout fell in. One of the men with me had his head blown off, and
his blood spurted on me. I was dazed, but through the fumes I saw an
English soldier in a petticoat standing at the doorway, making ready to
throw another bomb.

"I shouted to him in English:

"'Don't kill us! We surrender!'

"He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he would throw his
bomb. Then he said:

"'Come out, you swine.'

"So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, your Highlanders,
with bayonets. They wanted to kill us, but one man argued with them in
words I could no