"A Godsend to the farmers, they're going to be," pronounced Mr. Price at the dinner hour one day when the corn was still in cutting. The noise of the motor-tractors filled the country as if with the hum of a hundred giant locusts, while the sheaves fell in lines behind the cutter-and-binder. In one field the Germans were setting up the sheaves in fives.
"What we should do without those boys presently I don't know," declared Mr. Price from his end of the table. "I'm sure we ought all to be very grateful to them!"
"What? To them dirty Huns?" This exclamation burst from Vic as she sat heartily devouring suet-pudding at my side. "Grateful to them, Mr. Price?"
Indignation flushed the handsome, sunburnt, Cockney face that she turned upon our employer.
Mildly his blue eyes met her scandalized dark ones.
"Why not, Vic?" he asked.
"Why! I should think it's they who ought to be jolly well grateful to us," retorted Vic warmly, "for allowing 'em to be alive at all, once we got hold of 'em. After all they done!
"Huh!" she continued. "Why I can't pass the gang of 'em working in the fields there without thinking, 'Yes! There you are, my lads! It's cost us Lord knows how many of the best to take you, and there you are alive and jolly in the nice fresh air, working just as you've a mind to, having everybody as decent as pie to you. It's a woman they ought to have as Commandant, not a soft-hearted man!"
The gentle giant continued to look mildly across the table at this indignant one. I could see that he could not understand her outburst on this subject. Those four men in his field there—they were Huns, yes, but captured Huns. Fighting no longer against us. Working for us. No longer enemies of ours. They were helpless and in our hands, and we could not be hard upon them! This was how it appeared to him. And his whole, kindly, home-worshipping Welsh heart spoke in his simple answer to Vic's tirade.
"Poor boys," he said. "Far from their homes!"