“Old deserters, you mean,” retorted the guard. “Now we know.”

The drill habit had been too strong for those two fugitives even after ten years.

The other night our Babe, as Orderly Officer, sat up alone in the Mess, consuming other people’s cigarettes and whisky until midnight, then, being knocked up by the Orderly Sergeant, gave the worthy fellow a tot to restore circulation, pulled on his gum-boots and sallied forth on the rounds.  By 12.45 he had assured himself that the line guards were functioning in the prescribed “brisk and soldierly manner,” and that the horses were all properly tucked up in bed, and so turned for home.

He paused at the cross-roads to hear the end of the Sergeant’s reminiscences of happy days when he, the Sergeant, (then full-private, full in more senses than one) had held the responsible position of beer-taster to a regiment at Jaipurbad ("an ideal drinkin’ climate, Sir"), then, dismissing the old connoisseur, continued on his way bedward.

It must have been one o’clock by then, a black wind-noisy night.  As the Babe turned into the home straight, he saw a light flash for an instant in a big cart-shed opposite the Mess—­just a flicker as of a match scratched and instantly extinguished.

This struck him as curious; it was no weather or hour for decent folk to be abroad.  The Babe then remembered that the mess-cart was in the shed, and it occurred to him that somebody might be monkeying with the harness.  He thereupon marched straight for the shed (treading quite noiselessly in his gum-boots) and, pulling out his electric torch, flashed it, not on some cringing Picard peasant, as he had expected, but on three unshorn, unwashed, villainous, whopping big Bosch infantrymen!  It would be difficult to say who was the most staggered for the moment, the Huns blinking in the sudden glare of the torch or the Babe well aware that he was up against a trio of escaped and probably quite desperate prisoners of war.  “Victory,” says M. HILAIRE BELLOC (or was it NAPOLEON?  I am always getting them mixed) “is to him who can bring the greatest force to bear on a given position.”  That is as may be, but, after personal participation in one or two of the major disputes in the late lamented war, I put it this way.  Two opposing factions bump, utter chaos reigns supreme and the side which recovers first wins.  In this case the Babe was the first to recover.  A year before the War he found himself in a seminary in the suburbs of Berlin, learning to cough his vowels, roll his r’s and utter German phonetically.  Potsdam was near at hand, and many a pleasant hour did the Babe spend on a bench outside the old Stadt Palast, watching young recruits of the Prussian Guard having their souls painfully extracted from them by Feldwebels of great muzzle velocity and booting force.  The sight of those three Hun uniforms standing before him must have pricked a memory, which in turn set some sub-conscious