From one trench a German officer signalled to one of our own lieutenants: 

“I have six of your men in my trench.  What shall I do with them?”

The lieutenant signalled back.

“I have two of yours.  This is ridiculous.”

The English officer spoke to the two Germans: 

“Look here, you had better clear out.  Otherwise I shall have to make you prisoners.”

“We want to be prisoners,” said the Germans, who spoke English with the accent of the Tottenham Court Road.

It appears that the lieutenant would not oblige them, and begged them to play the game.

So with occasional embarrassments like this to break the deadly monotony of life, and to make men think about the mystery of human nature, coerced to massacre by sovereign powers beyond their ken, the winter passed, in one long wet agony, in one great bog of misery.

10

It was in March, when the roads had begun to dry up, that our troops resumed the offensive at several points of the line.  I was at General Headquarters when the first news of the first day’s attack at Neuve Chapelle was brought in by dispatch riders.

We crowded again round a table where a staff officer had spread out his map and showed us the general disposition of the troops engaged in the operation.  The vague tremor of distant guns gave a grim significance to his words, and on our own journey that day we had seen many signs of organized activity bearing upon this attack.

But we were to see a more impressive demonstration of the day’s success, the human counters which had been won by our side in this game of life and death.  Nearly a thousand German prisoners had been taken, and were being brought down from the front by rail.  If we liked we might have a talk with these men, and see the character of the enemy which lies hidden in the trenches opposite our lines.  It was nearly ten o’clock at night when we motored to the railway junction through which they were passing.

Were they glad to be out of the game, away from the shriek of shells and out of the mud?  I framed the question in German as I clambered on to the footboard at a part of the train where the trucks ended and where German officers had been given the luxury of first-class carriages.

Two of them looked up with drowsy eyes, into which there came a look of surprise and then of displeasure as I spoke a few words to them.  Opposite me was a fair young man, with soft blond hair and a silky moustache.  He looked like a Saxon, but told me afterwards that he came from Cologne.  Next to him was a typical young aristocrat of the Bavarian type, in the uniform of a Jaeger regiment In the same carriage were some other officers sleeping heavily.  One of them, with a closely-cropped bullet head and the low-browed face of, a man who fights according to the philosophy of Bernhardi, without pity, sat up abruptly, swore a fierce word or two, and then fell back and snored again.