e, and he told me he was one of the twenty-five new men who
had been sent down the night we escaped. I was anxious to ask him
many things, but I knew he dared not tell me. However, he came in and
sat down beside me, and the soup that he brought was steaming hot,
and he had taken it from the bottom of the pot, where there were
actual traces of meat and plenty of vegetables. Instead of the usual
bowlful, he had brought me a full quart, and from the recesses of his
coat he produced half a loaf of white bread--"Swiss bread" we called
it--and it was a great treat for me. I found out afterwards that Ted
had received the other half. The guard told me to keep hidden what I
did not eat then, so I knew he was breaking the rules in giving it
to me.

He sat with his gun between his knees, muzzle upwards, and while I
ate the soup he talked to me, asking me where I came from, and what
I had been doing before the war.

When I told him I had been a carpenter, he said he was a
bridge-builder of Trieste, and he said, "I wish I was back at it;
it is more to my liking to build things than to destroy them."

I said I liked my old job better than this one, too, whereupon he
broke out impatiently, "We're fools to fight each other. What spite
have you and I at each other?"

I told him we had no quarrel with the German people, but we knew the
military despotism of Germany had to be literally smashed to pieces
before there could be any peace, and, naturally enough, the German
people had to suffer for having allowed such a tyrant to exist in
their country. We were all suffering in the process, I said.

"It's money," he said, after a pause. "It is the money interests that
work against human interests every time, and all the time. The big
ones have their iron heel on our necks. They lash us with the whip
of starvation. They have controlled our education, our preachers,
government, and everything, and the reason they brought on the war is
that they were afraid of us--we were getting too strong. In the last
election we had nearly a majority, and the capitalists saw we were
going to get the upper hand, so to set back the world, they brought
on the war--to kill us off. At first we refused to fight--some of
us--but they played up the hatred of England which they have bred
in us; and they stampeded many of our people on the love of the
Fatherland. Our ranks broke; our leaders were put in jail and some
were shot; it's hard to go back on your country