t understand-a dialect-and we were told to go along
a trench. Even then we expected death, but came to another group of
prisoners, and joined them on their way back. Gott sei dank!"

He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, who had been a
clerk in a London office. He had the truthfulness of a man who had just
come from great horrors.

Many of the men around him were Silesians-more Polish than German. Some
of them could not speak more than a few words of German, and were true
Slavs in physical type, with flat cheek-bones.

A group of German artillery officers had been captured and they were
behaving with studied arrogance and insolence as they smoked cigarettes
apart from the men, and looked in a jeering way at our officers.

"Did you get any of our gas this morning?" I asked them, and one of them
laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

"I smelled it a little. It was rather nice... The English always imitate
the German war-methods, but without much success."

They grinned and imitated my way of saying "Guten Tag" when I left them.
It took a year or more to tame the arrogance of the German officer. At
the end of the Somme battles he changed his manner when captured, and
was very polite.

In another place--a prison in St.-Omer--I had a conversation with two
other officers of the German army who were more courteous than the
gunners. They had been taken at Hooge and were both Prussians--one a
stout captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, jovial
manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which he had just escaped,
and his hatred of us; the other a young, slim fellow, with clear-cut
features, who was very nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with his heels
together, as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high officers
came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. One of our mines
had exploded under him, flinging a heap of earth over him. The fat man
by his side--his captain--had been buried, too, in the dugout. They had
scraped themselves out by clawing at the earth.

They were cautious about answering questions on the war, but the younger
man said they were prepared down to the last gaiter for another
winter campaign and--that seemed to me at the time a fine touch of
audacity--for two more winter campaigns if need be. The winter of '16,
after this autumn and winter of '15, and then after that the winter of
'17! The words of that young Prussian seemed to me, the more I thought
of the