lish. Also quite a number of them spoke English after a fashion.
There was in these men none of the soldier's usual tolerance or
good-natured pity for an enemy who had fought well and had then
succumbed to the fortunes of war. Instead, a blind and vicious rage
which took no account of our helpless condition.

They cuffed us, they buffeted us, they pricked us cruelly with their
saw bayonets and then laughed and sneered as we flinched and dodged
awkwardly aside. Then they cursed us.

Shortly, we were led into the presence of a man whom I shall remember
if I live to be a hundred. He wore glasses and on his upper lip there
bloomed such a dainty moustache as is affected by "Little Willie" as
Tommy calls the German Crown Prince. He had the eye of a rat. It
snapped so cruel a hate that one's blood stopped.

He seized me by the right shoulder with his left hand: "You Corporal!
You Corporal!" as though that fact of itself condemned me, and at the
same time tugging at his holster until he found his revolver, which he
placed against my temple. Then and there I fervently prayed that he
would pull the trigger and end it all. I was fed up. The all-day
bombardment, the last terrible slaughter of helpless men, the rain and
cold, combining with the pain of the raw wound in my side, had gotten
on my nerves. With the revolver still at my head I turned to Scarfe:
"They're going to do us in, Charlie. I only hope they'll do it proper.
None of that bayonet stuff. Bullets for me." Already the Prussians
were crowding round us threateningly again, with their saw-edged
bayonets ready, some fixed in the rifle, others clasped short, like
daggers, for such a butchering as they had had earlier in the
afternoon, when I had been so nearly axed.

"Might as well kill us outright as scare us to death," complained
Scarfe bitterly.

Nevertheless our hearts leaped when a moment later our mysterious
black officer friend hove in sight. Life is sweet.

He asked them what they did with us. The tableau answered for itself
before the words had left his lips. And then we had to listen to our
fate discussed in language and gesture so eloquent and so fraught with
terrible importance to us that our sensitized minds could miss no
smallest point of each fine shade of cruel meaning.

"Little Willie" thought it scarce worth their while to bother with so
small a bag; that it would not be worth the trouble to send a
miserable ten of _Verdamnt Englaender_ back to the