“I shouted to him in English:
“'Don't kill us! We surrender!'
“He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he would throw his bomb. Then he said:
“'Come out, you swine.'
“So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, your Highlanders, with bayonets. They wanted to kill us, but one man argued with them in words I could not understand-a dialect-and we were told to go along a trench. Even then we expected death, but came to another group of prisoners, and joined them on their way back. Gott sei dank!”
He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, who had been a clerk in a London office. He had the truthfulness of a man who had just come from great horrors.
Many of the men around him were Silesians-more Polish than German. Some of them could not speak more than a few words of German, and were true Slavs in physical type, with flat cheek-bones.
A group of German artillery officers had been captured and they were behaving with studied arrogance and insolence as they smoked cigarettes apart from the men, and looked in a jeering way at our officers.
“Did you get any of our gas this morning?” I asked them, and one of them laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“I smelled it a little. It was rather nice... The English always imitate the German war-methods, but without much success.”