r leaves the mail or
takes on a load of deck-hands, and then fades away into a few twinkling
lights and the sound of a bell across the water. You may get permission
to see a prison camp, but may not stay there, and you are not expected,
generally, to talk to the prisoners. You can but walk past those rows
of eyes, with all their untold stories, much as you might go into a
theatre in the midst of a performance, tramp through the audience and
out again.

It is a strange experience and leaves one hoping that somebody--some
German shut away in the south of France, one of those quick-eyed
Frenchmen in the human zoo at Zossen--is keeping a diary. For while
there have always been prison camps, have there ever been--at least,
since Rome--such menageries as these! Behind the barbed-wire fence at
Zossen--Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin--there are some fifteen
thousand men. The greater number are Frenchmen, droves of those long
blue turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing sluggishly between
the rows of low barracks, Frenchmen of every sort of training and
temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity. I
do not remember any picture of the war more curious, and, as it were,
uncanny than the first sight of Zossen as our motor came lurching down
the muddy road from Berlin--that huge, forgotten eddy, that slough of
idle, aimless human beings against the gray March sky, milling slowly
round and round in the mud.

But the French are only part of Zossen. There are Russians--shaggy
peasants such as we see in cartoons or plays at home, and Mongol
Russians with flat faces and almond eyes, who might pass for Chinamen.
There are wild-eyed "Turcos" from the French African provinces,
chattering untamed Arabs playing leap-frog in front of their German
commandant as impudently as street boys back in their native bazaars.
There are all the tribes and castes of British Indians--"I've got twenty
different kinds of people in my Mohammedan camp," said the lieutenant
who was showing me about--squat Gurkhas from the Himalayas, minus their
famous knives--tall, black-bearded Sikhs, with the faces of princes.
There are even a few lone Englishmen, though most of the British
soldiers in this part of Germany are at Doberitz. Whether or not Zossen
could be called a "show" camp, it seemed, at any rate, about as well
managed as such a place could be. The prisoners were housed in new,
clean, one-story barracks; well