“You speak English?” I asked.  “Fluently?”

“Yes, sir!”

“How do you like being a prisoner?”

“I don’t like it.  It’s very degrading.”

“Your companions look pretty happy.  Any complaints?”

“No, sir!  None!”

“What are the Germans fighting for?  What do you hope to gain?”

“The freedom of the seas!”

“But you had that before the war broke out!”

“We haven’t got it now.”

I laughed at that.

“Certainly not,” I said.  “Give us credit for doing something!  But how are you going to get it again?”

“Our submarines will get it for us.”

“Still,” I said, “you must be fighting for something else, too?”

“No,” he said, doggedly.  “Just for the freedom of the seas.”

I couldn’t resist telling him a bit of news that the censor was keeping very carefully from his fellow-Germans at home.

“We sank seven of your submarines last week,” I said.

He probably didn’t believe that.  But his face paled a bit, and his lips puckered, and he scowled.  Then, as I turned away, he whipped his hand to his forehead in a stiff salute, but I felt that it was not the most gracious salute I had ever seen!  Still, I didn’t blame him much!

Captain Godfrey meant to show us another village that day.

“Rather an interesting spot,” he said.  “They differ, these French villages.  They’re not all alike, by any means.”

Then, before long, he began to look puzzled.  And finally he called a halt.

“It ought to be right here,” he said.  “It was, not so long ago.”

But there was no village!  The Hun had passed that way.  And the village for which Godfrey was seeking had been utterly wiped off the face of the earth!  Not a trace of it remained.  Where men and women and little children had lived and worked and played in quiet happiness the abominable desolation that is the work of the Hun had come.  There was nothing to show that they or their village had ever been.

The Hun knows no mercy!

CHAPTER XXVII

There had been, originally, a perfectly definite route for the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour—­as definite a route as is mapped out for me when I am touring the United States.  Our route had called for a fairly steady progress from Vimy Ridge to Peronne—­like Bapaume, one of the great unreached objectives of the Somme offensive, and, again like Bapaume, ruined and abandoned by the Germans in the retreat of the spring of 1917.  But we made many side trips and gave many and many an unplanned, extemporaneous roadside concert, as I have told.

For all of us it had been a labor of love.  I will always believe that I sang a little better on that tour than I have ever sung before or ever shall again, and I am sure, too, that Hogge and Dr. Adam spoke more eloquently to their soldier hearers than they ever did in parliament or church.  My wee piano, Tinkle Tom, held out staunchly.  He never wavered in tune, though he got some sad jouncings as he clung to the grid of a swift-moving car.  As for Johnson, my Yorkshireman, he was as good an accompanist before the tour ended as I could ever want, and he took the keenest interest and delight in his work, from start to finish.