“We can feed them—­yes,” she said, “but we have nothing to give them to smoke, and it is very hard on them.”

A little later a train arrived which brought three carloads of French prisoners and one carload of English.  Among the Frenchmen were many Alpine Rangers, so called—­the first men we had seen of this wing of the service—­and by reason of their dark blue uniforms and their flat blue caps they looked more like sailors than soldiers.  At first we took them for sailors.  There were thirty-four of the Englishmen, being all that were left of a company of the West Yorkshire Regiment of infantry.  Confinement for days in a bare box car, with not even water to wash their faces and hands in, had not altogether robbed them of a certain trim alertness which seems to belong to the British fighting man.  Their puttees were snugly reefed about their shanks and their khaki tunics buttoned up to their throats.

We talked with them.  They wanted to know if they had reached Germany yet, and when we told them that they were not out of France and had all of Belgium still to traverse, they groaned their dismay in chorus.

“We’ve ’ad a very ’ard time of it, sir,” said a spokesman, who wore sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves and who told us he came from Sheffield.  “Seventeen ’ours we were in the trench, under fire all the time, with water up to our middles and nothing to eat.  We were ’olding the center and when the Frenchies fell back they didn’t give our chaps no warning, and pretty soon the Dutchmen they ’ad us flanked both sides and we ’ad to quit.  But we didn’t quit until we’d lost all but one of our officers and a good ’alf of our men.”

“Where was this?” one of us asked.

“Don’t know, sir,” he said.  “It’s a blooming funny war.  You never knows the name of the place where you’re fighting at, unless you ’ears it by chance.”

Then he added: 

“Could you tell us, sir, ’ow’s the war going?  Are we giving the Germans a proper ’iding all along the line?”

We inquired regarding their treatment.  They didn’t particularly fancy the food—­narsty slop, the sergeant called it—­although it was reasonably plentiful; and, being true Englishmen, they sorely missed their tea.  Then, too, on the night before their overcoats had been taken from them and no explanations vouchsafed.

“We could ’ave done with them,” said the speaker bitterly; “pretty cold it was in this ’ere car.  And what with winter coming on and everything I call it a bit thick to be taking our overcoats off of us.”

We went and asked a German officer who had the convoy in charge the reason for this, and he said the overcoats of all the uninjured men, soldiers as well as prisoners, had been confiscated to furnish coverings for such of the wounded as lacked blankets.  Still, I observed that the guards for the train had their overcoats.  So I do not vouch for the accuracy of his explanation.