ess. He thereupon marched straight for the shed (treading quite
noiselessly in his gum-boots) and, pulling out his electric torch,
flashed it, not on some cringing Picard peasant, as he had expected,
but on three unshorn, unwashed, villainous, whopping big Bosch
infantrymen! It would be difficult to say who was the most staggered
for the moment, the Huns blinking in the sudden glare of the torch
or the Babe well aware that he was up against a trio of escaped and
probably quite desperate prisoners of war. "Victory," says M. HILAIRE
BELLOC (or was it NAPOLEON? I am always getting them mixed) "is to him
who can bring the greatest force to bear on a given position." That
is as may be, but, after personal participation in one or two of
the major disputes in the late lamented war, I put it this way. Two
opposing factions bump, utter chaos reigns supreme and the side which
recovers first wins. In this case the Babe was the first to recover. A
year before the War he found himself in a seminary in the suburbs of
Berlin, learning to cough his vowels, roll his r's and utter German
phonetically. Potsdam was near at hand, and many a pleasant hour did
the Babe spend on a bench outside the old Stadt Palast, watching young
recruits of the Prussian Guard having their souls painfully extracted
from them by _Feldwebels_ of great muzzle velocity and booting force.
The sight of those three Hun uniforms standing before him must have
pricked a memory, which in turn set some sub-conscious mechanism to
work, for suddenly the Babe heard a voice bawling orders in German. It
was fully five seconds, he swears, before he recognised it as his own.
"Attention!" snarled the voice in proper Potsdammer style. "Quick
march! Right wheel!" The three great hooligans trembled all over,
clicked their heels and stepped off the mark as punctiliously as
though on the Tempelhofer Feld at the Spring Parade.

In two minutes the Babe, snarling like a Zoo tiger at dinner-time,
had manoeuvred them across a hundred yards of bog and filed them,
goose-stepping, into a Nissen Hut full of sleeping Atkinses. The
Atkinses rolled, gaping, off their beds at the Babe's first shout, and
the game was up.

Ten minutes later the Bosch gentlemen were _en route_ for the main
guard under strong, if _deshabille_, escort.

It turned out that one of them spoke English quite badly and on
reaching the Guard Room he opened out.

They had escaped from a prison camp at Abbeville, he said,