been taken by surprise. They would have time to learn English as
prisoners of war. They had plenty of food and tobacco.

When the next batch of them arrived I was able to get into a closed
truck, among the private soldiers. They were quite comfortable in
there, and were more cheery than the officers in the other train. I was
surprised by their cleanliness, by the good condition of their uniforms,
and by their good health and spirits. The life of the trenches had not
left its marks upon them, though mentally, perhaps, they had gone to
the uttermost limit of endurance. Only one man fired up savagely
when I said that they were lucky in being captured. "It is good to fight
for the Fatherland," he said. The others made no secret of their
satisfaction in being out of it all, and all of them described the attack
on Neuve Chapelle as a hellish thing which had caught them by
surprise and swept their ranks.

I went back to my billet in General Headquarters wishing that I had
seen something of that affair which had netted all these men. It had
been a "day out" for the British troops, and we had not yet heard of
the blunders or the blood that had spoilt its success. It was hard to
have seen nothing of it though so near the front. And then a promise
of seeing something of the operations on the morrow came as a
prospect for the next day. It would be good to see the real business
again and to thrill once more to the awful music of the guns.

Along the road next day it was obvious that "things" were going to
happen. As we passed through towns in our motor-cars there were
signs of increased activity. Troops were being moved up. Groups of
them in goatskin coats, so that English Tommies looked like their
Viking ancestors, halted for a spell by the side of their stacked arms,
waiting for orders. Long lines of motor-lorries, with supplies to feed
the men and guns, narrowed the highway for traffic. Officers
approached our cars at every halt, saluted our staff officer, and asked
anxious questions: "How are things going? Is there any news?"

In the open country we could see the battle front, the low-lying
marshlands with windmills waving their arms on the far horizon, the
ridges and woods in which British and German batteries were
concealed, and the lines of trenches in which our men lay very close
to their enemy. We left the cars and, slithering in sticky mud, made
our way up a hillock on which one of these innumerable windmills
stood di