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 _déshabillé_, 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, and were
heading for Holland, travelling by night.

Passing the farm at about midnight they espied our hooded mess-cart
and, feeling tired and footsore, had conceived the bright idea of
stealing a horse to fit the cart and driving to Holland in style and