A little later we saw another prisoner being brought in—­a miserable, tuberculous youth with a nervous trick of the face, thin, very dirty, enfeebled, worn out; his uniform torn, stained, bullet-pierced, and threadbare.  Somebody had given him a large hunk of bread, which he had put within the lining of his tunic; it bulged out in front like a paunch.  An officer stopped to question him, and while the cross-examination was proceeding a curio-hunting soldier came up behind and cut a button off the tunic.  We learnt that the lad was twenty-one years of age, and that he had been called up in December 1914.  Before assisting in the conquest of France he was employed in a paper factory.  He tried to exhibit gloom, but it was impossible for him quite to conceal his satisfaction in the fact that for him the fighting was over.  The wretched boy had had just about enough of world-dominion, and he was ready to let the Hohenzollerns and Junkers finish up the enterprise as best they could without his aid.  No doubt, some woman was his mother.  It appeared to me that he could not live long, and that the woman in question might never see him again.  But every ideal must have its victims; and bereavement, which counts chief among the well-known advantageous moral disciplines of war, is, of course, good for a woman’s soul.  Besides, that woman would be convinced that her son died gloriously in defence of an attacked Fatherland.

When we had got clear of prisoners and of the innumerable minor tools of war, we came to something essential—­namely, a map.  This map, which was shown to us rather casually in the middle of a wood, was a very big map, and by means of different coloured chalks it displayed the ground taken from the Germans month by month.  The yellow line showed the advance up to May; the blue line showed the further advance up to June; and fresh marks in red showed graphically a further wresting which had occurred only in the previous night.  The blue line was like the mark of a tide on a chart; in certain places it had nearly surrounded a German position, and shortly the Germans would have to retire from that position or be cut off.  Famous names abounded on that map—­such as Souchez, Ablain St. Nazaire, St. Eloi, Fonds de Buval.  Being on a very large scale, the map covered a comparatively small section of the front; but, so far as it went, it was a map to be gazed upon with legitimate pride.

The officers regarded it proudly.  Eagerly they indicated where the main pressures were, and where new pressures would come later.  Their very muscles seemed to be strained in the ardour of their terrific intention to push out and destroy the invader.  While admitting, as all the officers I met admitted, the great military qualities of the enemy, they held towards him a more definitely contemptuous attitude than I could discover elsewhere.  “When the Boches attack us,” said one of them, “we drive them back to their trench, and we take that trench.  Thus we advance.”  But, for them, there was Boche and Boche.  It was the Bavarians whom they most respected.  They deemed the Prussians markedly inferior as fighters to the Bavarians.  The Prussians would not hold firm when seriously menaced.  The Prussians, in a word, would not “stick it.”  Such was the unanimous verdict here.