"Hello, Hastings," he said. "You have been in on this from the start, and I thought you would be interested in our prisoners."
John hurried over to the hospital, where in one of the wards there was a squad of soldiers with fixed bayonets, and two of the giants on the beds. One had a shoulder wound and one a thigh wound from high-explosive fragments. Both wounds were very slight.
"Mr. Hastings," said the pathologist, presenting him to a man bending over one of the prisoners, "Professor Haven is from Creighton University, and is the head of the Latin Department. He is trying to talk to these men."
Professor Haven shook his head.
"These men speak Latin but I don't," he sighed. "I've studied it a lifetime, but I can't speak it. And they speak a very impure, corrupted Latin. But, I'm making out, somehow."
He spoke slowly, in ponderous syllables to the prisoner. The man grumbled surlily. In the meantime, the pathologist called John away.
"One of the prisoners died," he said, "and we are doing a post-mortem. Just a slight flesh-wound; no reason under the sun why it shouldn't heal easily. He seemed to have no vitality, no staying power."
The post-mortem failed to make clear what had been the cause of death; the slight bullet wound in the shoulder could not have caused it. No other abnormality was found. They went back to the ward, and found another of the prisoners dead.
"Strange," the pathologist muttered. "They can't resist anything. And there is some odd quality about their tissues, both anatomical and physiological, that I can't put my finger on. But they're different."
"They're certainly stupid," the Latin professor said. "I have succeeded in making myself understood to this man. I asked him, who are they, what they wanted, why they were fighting us, where they come from. He does not know. 'Non scio, non scio, non scio!' That's all I got out of either one of them, except that they are hungry and would prefer to lie on the floor rather than on the bed. They give me the impression of being feeble-minded."