ommandant," and click his heels.

I stood up and saluted. I was turned around, for, unknowingly, I had
gravely saluted the wall.

He spoke fairly good English:

"You quite blind?"

"Yes, quite."

"See no light--nothing, no?"

"Nothing whatever."

"Your health, vot, is your health goot--yah?"

"Very weak and shaky; I cannot sleep at night."

"Is there anything you want?"

"There are two orderlies here from my own regiment. Can I have one as
my personal attendant? Otherwise I am helpless; I am not yet
accustomed to blindness, and among so many people and in strange
surroundings, I shall become a nuisance."

"Yah; I will make arrangements."

That was how I came to get Private Cotton as my orderly. Cotton was a
fine lad; a well-educated, superior type of fellow, and we became very
much attached to each other during those long, dreary days.

He could speak French, and although he could speak no German, he
possessed that wonderful faculty peculiar to the private soldier, of
understanding and making himself understood in a language he did not
know.

He had been a civil servant in the War Office; but in the early part
of the war had volunteered his services with the colours, and fought
night and day in the trenches for a shilling a day; while the young
man who took his place in the War Office drew one and sixpence an hour
overtime after 4 o'clock. Yet Cotton never complained. But his duty
was the other man's opportunity.

As I write these lines Cotton is still a prisoner. I wonder if the
other man is still drawing overtime, and wearing a war-service badge?

Now Cotton was a gentleman both by birth and education; but he was a
private soldier, and seemed to make a hobby of being one. He was a
private, and I was a captain, and he insisted on that gulf being
maintained.

Whenever he bade me good-night, after he had laid me in my bed and
made me some cocoa--generally from his own supplies, for my parcels
went astray--I could always hear him click his heels, and I knew he
had saluted.

The second day after I had arrived at Osnabruck, he took me for
exercise up and down the yard outside the canteen. This was my first
appearance, and I was evidently an object of some curiosity, for wind
had got round the camp that a blind prisoner had been brought in.

As the French officers passed me, I used to hear them say: "Good
morning, Capitaine," or "Bon jour, mon camarade."

The English officers were splendid and alw