I had just finished a good breakfast of bacon and toast and cocoa, prepared by the Italian “batman” and was standing before the windows enjoying a cigar with M——. The door was bolted against beggars who knocked incessantly from early morning till late at night.
I heard a shuffling outside and a timid tapping on the door; a pause and another tap; a longer pause, and then a shuffling away.
“Un italien,” observed M——, still gazing out the window. Another visitor walked up, thumped once on the door, and walked away again, almost without pausing.
“Un anglais. You can always tell.”
“Rotten cigars,” he continued, dismissing the subject of the poor fellows who had gone away from the door, “but you’ll have a chance to try a real one when Louis comes in. He has a box of Perfectos stuck away somewhere. What? Still worrying about our unadmitted visitors?”
I was. I was wondering if that last chap was one of my battalion. How could M—— take it so coolly?
“If you stay long in the camps,” he went on sagely, “you’ll learn that you can’t afford to weep everytime you see a hungry man. We wept for ourselves in 1914, and afterwards we wept a lot for other chaps, but when one’s been in the midst of suffering men for three years, one learns to keep from thinking about it—or else one would go mad. We give them what we can spare and then try to think of something else.”
CHAPTER IV
La Glorieuse Armée Britannique
The scene on which we gazed through the window was a typical one for a prison camp. The path along the barbed wire formed a sort of wretched promenade along which the sufficiently nourished took their constitutionals. A few English sergeants, two bearded French ajutants, and a group of vivacious young Russian officiers aspirants were pacing monotonously back and forth as one does on board ship.
“Pane![1] Pane, Kamarad!”