Karlsruhe was a distributing station through which all officer prisoners passed on their way to permanent camps. But there was always retained a small committee of officers to superintend the activities of this fluid community. There were officers to look after the issue of relief parcels, to run the library, to control general discipline. In charge of the Red Cross Committee was Tarrant.
Fourteen months of captivity had not made much impression either on his cheerfulness or on his health. In fact he looked and felt so fit that it caused him some alarm.
“I’m too well,” he said, “I’m thinking of trying a fast.”
“He’s been saying that every day for the last month,” remarked Stone, his room companion.
“Oh, no, old man, really,” protested Tarrant, “I’ve only been waiting for it to get a bit warmer.”
After the wearisome discussions about the incidental aspects of the war, it was an enormous delight to meet two people to whom the events of the last year had been a matter chiefly of conjecture and report.
“You will get awfully sick of all this, of course, after fourteen months,” said Tarrant, “but it’s really a capital place to get one’s ideas settled.”
One is always extraordinarily polite to a person one meets for the first time. After three days the need for politeness goes. But on that first occasion the opinions of the other are treated with a laborious respect. Conversation takes a turn of, “Of course that’s quite true, but I must say that personally ...” and that was the way that Tarrant listened to my heresies on the first evening. Long before I had vanished from Karlsruhe, however, the respectful tone had degenerated into, “Won’t do, old man, won’t do,” and there have been times since, when I have emerged sadly tattered from some war of dialectic, that I have longed wistfully for those early days.
The next afternoon Tarrant was in a chastened mood.
“I’ve begun my fast,” he explained. “It was not so bad after breakfast. But by lunch time it got pretty awful, and by now....”