Robinson Crusoe on his island was not more ignorant of the truth about the great world than that man, for, while he had learnt a few daily expressions in German, he was unable to read it.  The only information he could gather was from the French, Belgian, and Russian prisoners with him, and some he got by bribing one of the Landsturm Guards with a little margarine or sugar out of his parcel from England.  He was full of the battle of Mons and how badly he and his comrades in Germany felt at the way they had been left unsupported there.  None the less, though alone, with no Englishman for miles, living almost entirely on his parcels, absolutely cut off from the real facts of the war, hearing little but lies, he was as calmly confident of the ultimate victory of the Allies as I am.

I asked him if he heard from home.

“Yes,” he said, “now and then, but the folks tell me nothing and I can tell them nothing.  If you get back to England you tell the people there not to believe a word that comes from English prisoners.  Those who write favourably do so because they have to.  Every truthful letter is burned by the military censor.  Tell the people to arrange the parcels better and see that every man gets a parcel at least once a week—­not send five parcels to one man and no parcels to some poor bloke like me who is alone.  How is the war going on, guv’nor?” he asked.  I gave him my views.  “I think it’s going badly for the Germans—­not by what they tell me here or what I gets in that awful Continental Times paper, but from what I notice in the people round about, and the officers who visit us.  The people are not so abusive to the English as they used to be.  The superior officers do not treat us like dogs, as they did, and as for the Landsturmers—­well, look at old Heinrich here.”

At that moment a heavy, shabby old Landsturm soldier came round the corner, and the Cockney prisoner treated him almost as though he were a performing bear.

“You’re all right, ain’t you, Heiny, so long as I give you a bit of sugar now and then?” he said to his decrepit old guardian in his German gibberish.

This state of affairs was a revelation to me, but I was soon to find that if the British prisoners are weary of their captivity their old German guardians are much more weary of their task.  These high-spirited British lads, whom two years of cruelty have not cowed, are an intense puzzle to the German authorities.

“You see,” remarked a very decent German official connected with the military censorship department, “everyone of these Britishers is different.  Every one of them sticks up for what he calls his ‘rights’:  many of them decline to work on Sunday, and short of taking them out on Sunday morning at the point of the bayonet we cannot get them to do it.  We have to be careful, too, with these Englishmen now.  As a man of the world, you will realise that though our general public here do not know that the English have captured many Germans lately, and the fact is never mentioned in the communiques, we have had a hint from Headquarters that the British prisoners may one day balance ours, and that hardship for these verfluchte Englander may result in hardship for our men in England.”