. . . . . . .

The great building must once have been a monastery.  Twilight softened its gaunt wings, in an angle of which were collected fifty prisoners, picked up among the hills behind the mists.

They stood in some sort of military formation preparatory to being marched off.  They were dressed in khaki, the colour of gassed grass, that might have belonged to any army.  Two wore spectacles, and I counted eight faces of the fifty which were asymmetrical—­out of drawing on one side.

“Some of their later drafts give us that type,” said the Interpreter.  One of them had been wounded in the head and roughly bandaged.  The others seemed all sound.  Most of them looked at nothing, but several were vividly alive with terror that cannot keep the eyelids still, and a few wavered on the grey edge of collapse.

They were the breed which, at the word of command, had stolen out to drown women and children; had raped women in the streets at the word of command; and, always at the word of command, had sprayed petrol, or squirted flame; or defiled the property and persons of their captives.  They stood there outside all humanity.  Yet they were made in the likeness of humanity.  One realized it with a shock when the bandaged creature began to shiver, and they shuffled off in response to the orders of civilized men.

V

LIFE IN TRENCHES ON THE MOUNTAIN SIDE

Very early in the morning I met Alan Breck, with a half-healed bullet-scrape across the bridge of his nose, and an Alpine cap over one ear.  His people a few hundred years ago had been Scotch.  He bore a Scotch name, and still recognized the head of his clan, but his French occasionally ran into German words, for he was an Alsatian on one side.

“This,” he explained, “is the very best country in the world to fight in.  It’s picturesque and full of cover.  I’m a gunner.  I’ve been here for months.  It’s lovely.”

It might have been the hills under Mussoorie, and what our cars expected to do in it I could not understand.  But the demon-driver who had been a road-racer took the 70 h.p.  Mercedes and threaded the narrow valleys, as well as occasional half-Swiss villages full of Alpine troops, at a restrained thirty miles an hour.  He shot up a new-made road, more like Mussoorie than ever, and did not fall down the hillside even once.  An ammunition-mule of a mountain-battery met him at a tight corner, and began to climb a tree.

“See!  There isn’t another place in France where that could happen,” said Alan.  “I tell you, this is a magnificent country.”

The mule was hauled down by his tail before he had reached the lower branches, and went on through the woods, his ammunition-boxes jinking on his back, for all the world as though he were rejoining his battery at Jutogh.  One expected to meet the little Hill people bent under their loads under the forest gloom.  The light, the colour, the smell of wood smoke, pine-needles, wet earth, and warm mule were all Himalayan.  Only the Mercedes was violently and loudly a stranger.