The play began at six o’clock, for the camp lights are out at nine, and it was in the dusk of another one of Berlin’s rainy days, after slithering through the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete apartment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab swung to the right, lurched down the lane of mud, and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben.  Inside was a sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen—­ professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons, men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with a Thermos bottle, and crisp “Right you are!”—­a good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic cross-section of the London streets, drifting about here in the German mud.

There were still a few minutes before the play began, and we walked through some of the barracks with the commandant, a tall, bronzed officer of middle age, with gracious manners, one of those Olympian Germans who resemble their English cousins of the same class.  Each barrack had its captain, and over these was a camp-captain—­formerly an English merchant of Berlin—­who went with us on our rounds.

The stables were crowded with bunks and men—­like a cattleship forecastle.  One young man, fulfilling doubtless his English ritual of “dressing for dinner,” was punctiliously shaving, although it was now practically dark; in another corner the devotee of some system of how to get strong and how to stay so, stripped to the skin, was slowly and with solemn precision raising and lowering a pair of light dumb-bells.  Some saluted as private soldiers would; some bowed almost as to a friend, with a cheery “Guten Abend, Herr Baron!” There seemed, indeed, to be a very pleasant relation between this gentleman soldier and his gentlemen prisoners, and the camp-captain, lagging behind, told how one evening when they had sung “Elijah,” the men had stood up and given three English cheers for the commandant, while his wife, who had come to hear the performance, stood beside him laughing and wiping her eyes.

As you get closer to war you more frequently run across such things.  The fighting men kill ruthlessly, because that, they think, is the way to get their business over.  But for the most part they kill without hate.  For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms you must go back to the men who are not fighting, to the overdriven and underexercised journalists, sizzling and thundering in their swivel-chairs.

The dimly lit hall under the grand stand was already crowded as we were led to our seats on a rostrum facing the stage with the commandant and one of his officers.  There was a red draw curtain, footlights made with candles and biscuit tins, and so strung on a wire that at a pull, between the acts, they could be turned on the spectators.  A programme had been printed on the camp mimeograph, the camp orchestra was tuning up, and a special overture had been composed by a young gentleman with the beautiful name of “Quentin Morvaren.”