Many a night did I lie awake in Berlin cogitating how to get into touch with some of these men.  I learned something on a previous visit in 1914, when I saw the British prisoners at one of the camps.  At that time it was impossible to get into conversation with them.  They were efficiently and continually guarded by comparatively active soldiers.

On this occasion I came across my first British prisoner quite by accident, and, as so often happens in life, difficult problems settle themselves automatically.  In nothing that I write shall I give any indication of the whereabouts of the sixty prisoners with whom I conversed privately, but there can be no harm in my mentioning the whereabouts of my public visit, which took place in one of the regular neutral “Cook’s tours” of the prisoners in Germany.

The strain of my work in so suspicious a place as Berlin, the constant care required to guard one’s expressions, and the anxiety as to whether one was being watched or not got on my nerves sometimes, and one Sunday I determined to take a day off and go into the country with another neutral friend.  There, by accident, I came across my first private specimen of Tommy in Germany.

We were looking about for a decent Gasthaus in which to get something to eat when we saw a notice high up in large type on a wall outside an old farmhouse building, which read:—­

  Jeder Verkehr der Zivilbevolkerung mit den
  Kriegsgefangenen ist STRENG VERBOTEN,

“Any intercourse of the civil population with the prisoners of war is strictly forbidden.”

These notices, which threaten the civilian population with heavy penalties if they exchange any words with the prisoners, are familiar all over Germany, but I did not expect to find them in that small village.

My neutral friend thought it would make a nice photograph if I would stand under the notice, which I did after a cautious survey showed that the coast was clear.

As I did so a Russian came out of the barn and said, in rather bad German, “Going to have your photograph taken?” I replied, in German, “Yes.”

He heard me speaking English to my friend, and then, looking up and down the street each way to see if we were being watched, he addressed me in English with a strong Cockney accent.

“You speak English, then?” I said.

“I am English,” he replied.  “I’m an English prisoner.”

“Then what are you doing in a Russian uniform?”

“It is the only thing I could get when my own clothes wore out.”  Keeping a careful eye up and down the street, he told us his story.  He was one of the old Expeditionary Force; was taken at Mons with five bullet wounds in him, and, after a series of unpublishable humiliations, had been drafted from camp to camp until he had arrived at this little village, where, in view of the German policy of letting all the population, see an Englishman, he was the representative of his race in that community.  “The local M.P.” he called himself, in his humorous way.