You will doubtless recall Mr. Shaw’s comedy, and the characteristic “realistic” fun he has with his Romans and Christian martyrs, and the lion who, remembering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had once pulled a sliver from his foot, danced out of the arena with him instead of eating him.  And you can imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the dialogue between Mr. Shaw’s meek but witty Christians and their might-is-right Roman captors, spoken by British prisoners in the spring of 1915, in a German prison camp before a German commandant sitting up like a statue with his hands on his sword!

The Roman captain was a writer, the centurion a manufacturer, Androcles a teacher of some sort, the call-boy for the fights in the arena a cabin-boy from a British merchant ship, and the tender-hearted lion some genius from the “halls.”  Even after months of this sodden camp it was possible to find a youth to play Lavinia, with so pretty a face, such a velvet voice, such a pensive womanliness that the flat-capped, ribald young cockneys in the front row blushed with embarrassment.  A professor of archaeology, or something, said that he had never seen more accurate reproductions of armor, though this was made but of gilded and silvered cardboard—­in short, if Mr. Shaw’s fun was ever better brought out by professional players, they must have been very good indeed.

It was an island within an island that night, there under the Ruhleben grand stand—­English speech and Irish wit in that German sea.  You should have seen the two young patricians drifting in, with the regulation drawl of the Piccadilly “nut”—­“I say!  He-ah’s some Christians—­let’s chaff them!” The crowd was laughing, the commandant was laughing, the curtain closed in a whirl of applause, one had forgotten there was a war.  The applause continued, the players straggled out, faltering back from the parts in which they had forgotten themselves into normal, self-conscious Englishmen.  There was a moment’s embarrassed pause, then the rattle of a sabre as the tall man in gray-blue rose to his feet.

“Danke Ihnen, meine Herren!  Aeusserst nett!” he said briskly. ("Thanks, gentlemen!  Very clever indeed!”) He turned to us, nodded in stiff soldierly fashion.  “Sehr nett!  Sehr nett!” he said, and led the way out between a lane of Englishmen suddenly become prisoners again.

Chapter VIII

In The German Trenches At La Bassee

We had come down from Berlin on-one of those excursions which the German General Staff arranges for the military observers and correspondents of neutral countries.  You go out, a sort of zoo—­our party included four or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian, a diminutive Spaniard, and a tall, preoccupied Swede—­under the direction of some hapless officer of the General Staff.  For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling through a closely articulated programme almost as personally