what I think and say, and many
others like me."

It was not easy to forget his tears and final words as he came up on the
platform at Hanover, and, looking around to see that no one overheard,
whispered hoarsely: "Fangen sie ihre Propagande an, junger Mann, und
Gott starke ihre Bemuhungen"--"Start your peace propaganda, young man,
and Heaven help the undertaking."

The southern part of this trip was not without its crop of stories, some
humorous, and some atrocious. It was impossible to verify the statement
of the Bavarian travelers who boasted of the treatment of English
prisoners en route to the detention camp. On one occasion sixty were
captured, they said, and only five brought home alive. The Bavarian
soldiers guarding them said with a laugh, "But they were tired, so we
had to shoot the rest"; and the officer answered with a wink, "What
happens to English prisoners need never be reported." One never needed
more one's sense of the probabilities.

And there was the good-natured cavalry lieutenant who said the Germans
had found a way to keep their prisoners in training. "You see," he
explained, "we lock twenty of the 'red-trousers' [Frenchmen] and twenty
Englishmen in the same room at night and shut the windows. You know a
Frenchman can't stand air, and a Kitchener will die without it. So we
stand outside to watch the fun. First a window goes up, and then it
goes down, and pretty soon there are growls, grumbles, and oaths. In
ten minutes a terrible fight ensues; in half an hour the Frenchmen are
badly beaten,--they always are,--and twenty battered English heads come
sticking out the window for a breath of air."

And finally there was the Landwehr captain's letter, a thing in keeping
with the tales which come across the Polish border. Westward, in
Belgium and in France, the fight was modern and of the day. Move
eastward from Berlin and you got the mediaeval note. It was not to be
found at the English prisoners' camp at Doeberitz, where the Germans
stare with infinite contempt and satisfaction at Tommy Atkins behind his
triple row of wire gratings. But wander among the thousands of captured
Cossacks building their own prisons at the camp at Zossen, hear them
muttering "Nichevo"--"this is fate"--"I do not care," and, listening to
the stories of their captors, you felt the atmosphere of centuries gone
by. One such was called to my attention in the form of a Prussian
captain's letter, which was, I believe