to the circumstances of the day. To describe the organisation would
be impolitic. But it included every dodge. And the stores, entombed
in safety, comprised all things. I remember, for example, stacks of
hundreds of lamp-chimneys. Naught lacked to the completeness of
the scene of war. There were even prisoners. I saw two young
Germans under guard in a cabin. They said that they had got lost in
the labyrinth of trenches, and taken a wrong turning. And I believe
they had. One was a Red Cross man--probably a medical student
before, with wine and song and boastings, he joined his Gott, his
Kaiser, and his comrades in the great mission of civilisation across
Belgium. He was dusty and tired, and he looked gloomily at the
earthen floor of the cabin. Nevertheless, he had a good carriage
and a passably intelligent face, and he was rather handsome. I
sympathised with this youth, and I do not think that he was glad to
be a prisoner. Some people can go and stare at prisoners, and
wreak an idle curiosity upon them. I cannot. A glance, rather
surreptitious, and I must walk away. Their humiliation humiliates me,
even be they Prussians of the most offensive variety.

A little later we saw another prisoner being brought in--a miserable,
tuberculous youth with a nervous trick of the face, thin, very dirty,
enfeebled, worn out; his uniform torn, stained, bullet-pierced, and
threadbare. Somebody had given him a large hunk of bread, which
he had put within the lining of his tunic; it bulged out in front like a
paunch. An officer stopped to question him, and while the cross-
examination was proceeding a curio-hunting soldier came up behind
and cut a button off the tunic. We learnt that the lad was twenty-one
years of age, and that he had been called up in December 1914.
Before assisting in the conquest of France he was employed in a
paper factory. He tried to exhibit gloom, but it was impossible for him