first good look at these
prospective fellow-travelers of ours who were avowedly prisoners.

Considered in the aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle. A
soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden
a pitiable, almost a contemptible object. You think instinctively of an
adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of
teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more
impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in
the first place. These similes are poor ones, I'm afraid, but I find it
difficult to put my thoughts exactly into words.

These particular soldiers were most unhappy looking, all except the half
dozen Turcos among the Frenchmen. They spraddled their baggy white legs
and grinned comfortably, baring fine double rows of ivory in their brown
faces. The others mainly were droopy figures of misery and shame. By
reason of their hair, which they wore long and which now hung down in
their eyes, and by reason also of their ridiculous loose red trousers
and their long-tailed awkward blue coats, the Frenchmen showed
themselves especially unkempt and frowzy-looking. Almost to a man they
were dark, lean, slouchy fellows; they were from the south of France, we
judged. Certainly with a week's growth of black whiskers upon their
jaws they were fit now to play stage brigands without further make-up.

"Wot a bloomin', stinkin', rotten country!" came, two rows back from
where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies. "There
ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to drink in it,
too."

A little whiny man alongside of me, whose chin was on his breast bone,
spake downward along his gray flannel shirt bosom:

"Just wyte," he said; "just wyte till England 'ears wot they done to us,
'erdin' us about like cattle. Blighters!" He spat his disgust upon the
ground.

We spoke to none of them directly, nor they to us--that also being a
condition imposed by Mittendorfer.

The train was composed of several small box cars and one second-class
passenger coach of German manufacture with a dumpy little locomotive at
either end, one to pull and one to push. In profile it would have
reminded you somewhat of the wrecking trains that go to disasters in
America. The prisoners were loaded aboard the box cars like so many
sheep, with alert gray shepherds behind them, carrying guns in lieu of
crooks; and, being entra