The two younger men answered some of my questions, sullenly at first, but afterwards with more friendliness, against which their pride struggled.  But they had not much to say.  They were tired.  They had been taken by surprise.  They would have time to learn English as prisoners of war.  They had plenty of food and tobacco.

When the next batch of them arrived I was able to get into a closed truck, among the private soldiers.  They were quite comfortable in there, and were more cheery than the officers in the other train.  I was surprised by their cleanliness, by the good condition of their uniforms, and by their good health and spirits.  The life of the trenches had not left its marks upon them, though mentally, perhaps, they had gone to the uttermost limit of endurance.  Only one man fired up savagely when I said that they were lucky in being captured.  “It is good to fight for the Fatherland,” he said.  The others made no secret of their satisfaction in being out of it all, and all of them described the attack on Neuve Chapelle as a hellish thing which had caught them by surprise and swept their ranks.

I went back to my billet in General Headquarters wishing that I had seen something of that affair which had netted all these men.  It had been a “day out” for the British troops, and we had not yet heard of the blunders or the blood that had spoilt its success.  It was hard to have seen nothing of it though so near the front.  And then a promise of seeing something of the operations on the morrow came as a prospect for the next day.  It would be good to see the real business again and to thrill once more to the awful music of the guns.

Along the road next day it was obvious that “things” were going to happen.  As we passed through towns in our motor-cars there were signs of increased activity.  Troops were being moved up.  Groups of them in goatskin coats, so that English Tommies looked like their Viking ancestors, halted for a spell by the side of their stacked arms, waiting for orders.  Long lines of motor-lorries, with supplies to feed the men and guns, narrowed the highway for traffic.  Officers approached our cars at every halt, saluted our staff officer, and asked anxious questions:  “How are things going?  Is there any news?”

In the open country we could see the battle front, the low-lying marshlands with windmills waving their arms on the far horizon, the ridges and woods in which British and German batteries were concealed, and the lines of trenches in which our men lay very close to their enemy.  We left the cars and, slithering in sticky mud, made our way up a hillock on which one of these innumerable windmills stood distinct.  We were among the men who were in the actual fighting lines and who went into the trenches turn and turn about, so that it became the normal routine of their lives.