days after securing this end of the line the German engineers had repaired the torn-up right-of-way and installed a complete acetylene outfit, and already they were dispatching trains of troops and munitions clear across southeastern Belgium to and from the German frontier.  When we heard this we quit marveling.  We had by now ceased to wonder at the lightning rapidity and un-human efficiency of the German military system in the field.

Under the sizzling acetylene torches we had our first good look at these prospective fellow-travelers of ours who were avowedly prisoners.

Considered in the aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle.  A soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden a pitiable, almost a contemptible object.  You think instinctively of an adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in the first place.  These similes are poor ones, I’m afraid, but I find it difficult to put my thoughts exactly into words.

These particular soldiers were most unhappy looking, all except the half dozen Turcos among the Frenchmen.  They spraddled their baggy white legs and grinned comfortably, baring fine double rows of ivory in their brown faces.  The others mainly were droopy figures of misery and shame.  By reason of their hair, which they wore long and which now hung down in their eyes, and by reason also of their ridiculous loose red trousers and their long-tailed awkward blue coats, the Frenchmen showed themselves especially unkempt and frowzy-looking.  Almost to a man they were dark, lean, slouchy fellows; they were from the south of France, we judged.  Certainly with a week’s growth of black whiskers upon their jaws they were fit now to play stage brigands without further make-up.

“Wot a bloomin’, stinkin’, rotten country!” came, two rows back from where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies.  “There ain’t nothin’ to eat in it, and there ain’t nothin’ to drink in it, too.”

A little whiny man alongside of me, whose chin was on his breast bone, spake downward along his gray flannel shirt bosom: 

“Just wyte,” he said; “just wyte till England ’ears wot they done to us, ‘erdin’ us about like cattle.  Blighters!” He spat his disgust upon the ground.

We spoke to none of them directly, nor they to us—­that also being a condition imposed by Mittendorfer.

The train was composed of several small box cars and one second-class passenger coach of German manufacture with a dumpy little locomotive at either end, one to pull and one to push.  In profile it would have reminded you somewhat of the wrecking trains that go to disasters in America.  The prisoners were loaded aboard the box cars like so many sheep, with alert gray shepherds behind them, carrying guns in lieu of crooks; and, being entrained, they were bedded down for the night upon straw.