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!”

A few Italians had suddenly appeared from across the corner. I was astonished at their youth. Two of them were but children with blue eyes and pretty girlish faces.

“Fourteen years old, the one with the handkerchief around his neck,” explained M——. “The other is fifteen. They were claimed to have been helping the Italian Army and so were brought here along with the soldiers.”

“Pane! Brot!”[2] they persisted. I chucked them a handful of biscuits.

“No! No!” remonstrated M——. “You’ll fetch the whole tribe of them.”

His words were not long in coming true. A few stray Italians had seen the incident and were already coming for their share.

“Pane! Pane! Buono compagno![3] Pane!”

A crowd quickly gathered around the window.

“Allez! Allez! Macaroni, Garibaldi, Sacramento, allez!” and he tried vainly to wave them back.

“Pane, pane!” They were reaching their arms through the windows now. The Frenchman pushed their arms back and closed the window.

Presently another rabble appeared, a working party of two or three hundred starving men, urged on by cursing sentries. Slowly and listlessly they straggled by, hobbling painfully, most of them in their wooden “clogs.” (Boots and puttees had long gone for food.) Many of them were of my battalion and company, but they were so altered that it took a moment’s study to recognize them. There was the smart young battalion clerk, a well-paid accountant in civilian life, plodding along like a broken old man, with a full beard and a shabby costume of German and Russian cast-off clothes. There was “Smiley,” the company barber, never known to be out of humor. The smile still lingered on his pale features, but his jokes were lost on his saddened comrades. All had the hopeless, dejected look of constantly hungry men.

We watched the poor fellows until the last of the “rear guard” had hobbled past.

“La glorieuse Armée Britannique!” observed M——. I looked to see if he was smiling; but he wasn’t. He meant no sarcasm.

I will leave the first wretched months of captivity—which I like neither to remember nor to recall to other erstwhile Gefangener—for that simple, more tolerable life which most of us found on the German farms.

It was the night after my first day’s work on a farm, way up in the village of Kossebade, Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg. I lay nestled in a soft feather bed, for the first time in many months, thinking over the events of the past month and summing up the extent of my good luck.

I had found the people of the household, at first hand, to be reasonable creatures and I couldn’t grumble at the hardness of the work. I was particularly astonished at the five meals of substantial food a day!

I thought, too, of the men captured with me and how much worse they must be faring. Three hundred of them, I knew, had gone to Lille to work behind the German line. I had stood at the camp gate to bid them goodbye as they marched away, for I knew them almost to a man. Poor fellows, still without help from England, they hobbled away in their rags and “clogs,” and tattered uniforms (in the middle of January) with their three slices of bread for a two days’ journey, in one hand.

But could I believe my ears! They were singing!—for Tommy always sings when breaking camp—“Here We Are, Here We Are, Here We Are Again,” it was, and they sang it right lustily.

I thought less painfully of the comrades which I had left in my last camp—my room-mates, Fred, Charley and Jack. I wondered if Jack was still “cleaning up” at pontoon, if Fred was getting his parcels again, and if Charley was still making those famous “burgoo” puddings.

At last my thoughts drifted inevitably across the sea and home, and I dreamt of home afterward. Indeed, the next morning I could not tell where my thoughts had left off and my dream had begun.

Man carrying a bucket of pumpkins