Four-twenty p.m.  That was the best soup I ever tasted, even if it was full of typographical errors from the jumbling together of the little alphabet noodles.  Still, nobody but a proofreader could have found fault with that.  There was only one trouble with that soup:  there was not enough of it—­just one bowl apiece.  I would have traded the finest case of vintage wine in the Chimay vaults for another bowl.

Just as the woman brought in the soup Mittendorfer appeared, escorting a French lieutenant who was taken prisoner this morning.  The prisoner was a little, handsome, dapper chap not over twenty-two years old, wearing his trim blue-and-red uniform with an air, even though he himself looked thoroughly miserable.  We were warned not to speak with him, or he with us; but Gerbeaux, after listening to him exchanging a few words with the lieutenant, said he judged from his accent that the little officer was from the south of France.

We silently offered him a bowl of the soup as he sat in a corner fenced off from the rest of us by a small table; but he barely tasted it, and after a bit he lay down in his corner, with his arm for a pillow, and almost instantly was asleep, breathing heavily, like a man on the verge of exhaustion.  A few minutes later we heard, from Sergeant Rosenthal, that the prisoner’s brother-in-law had been killed the day before, and that he—­the little officer—­had seen the brother-in-law fall.

Five p.m.  We have had good news—­two chunks of good news, in fact.  We are to dine and we are to travel.  The sergeant has acquired, from unknown sources, a brace of small, skinny, fresh-killed pullets; eight fresh eggs; a big loaf of the soggy rye bread of the field mess; and wine unlimited.  Also, we are told that at nine o’clock we are to start for Brussels—­not by automobile, but aboard a train carrying wounded and prisoners northward.

Everybody cheers up, especially after ma-dame promises to have the fowls and the eggs ready in less than an hour.

The Belgian photographer, who, it develops, is to go with our troop, has been brought in from the guardhouse and placed with us.  With the passing hours his fright has increased.  Gerbeaux says the poor devil is one of the leading photographers of Brussels—­that by royal appointment he takes pictures of the queen and her children.  But the queen would have trouble in recognizing her photographer if she could see him now—­ with straw in his tousled hair, and his jaw lolling under the weight of his terror, and his big, wild eyes staring this way and that.  Nothing that Gerbeaux can say to him will dissuade him from the belief that the Germans mean to shoot him.

I almost forgot to detail a thing that occurred a few minutes ago, just before the Belgian joined us.  Mittendorfer brought a message for the little French lieutenant.  The Frenchman roused up and, after they had saluted each other ceremoniously, Mittendorfer told him he had come to invite him to dine with a mess of German officers across the way, in the town hall.