His mother in Munich had sent him a case of Lion Brew, Otto explained, so he had brought it along.

We wassailed deep into that night and out the other side, and we liked our Otto more than ever.  We had plenty in common, the same loneliness, fevers, climate, and niggers to wrestle with; moreover he had been in England, and liked it; he smoked a pipe; he washed.  Also, as he privily confided to us in the young hours of one morning, he had his doubts as to the divinity of the KAISER, and was not quite convinced that RICHARD STRAUSS had composed the music of the spheres.

He was a bad Hun (which probably accounted for his presence at the uttermost, hottermost edge of the ALL-HIGHEST’S dominions), but a good fellow.  Anyhow, we liked him, Frobisher and I; liked his bull-mouthed laughter, his drinking songs and full-blooded anecdotes, and, on the occasions of his frequent visits, put our boredom from us, pretended to be on the most affectionate terms, and even laughed uproariously at each other’s funny stories.  Up at M’Vini, in the long long-ago, the gleam of pyjamas amongst the loquats, and “’Ere gomes ze Sherman invasion!” booming through the bush, became a signal for general good-will.

In the fulness of time Otto went home on leave, and, shortly afterwards, the world blew up.

And now I have met him again, a sodden, muddy, bloody, shrunken, saddened Otto, limping through a snowstorm in the custody of a Canadian Corporal.  He was the survivor of a rear-guard, the Canuck explained, and had “scrapped like a bag of wild-cats” until knocked out by a rifle butt.  As for Otto himself, he hadn’t much to say; he looked old, cold, sick and infinitely disgusted.  He had always been a poor Hun.

Only once did he show a gleam of his ancient form of those old hot, happy, pyjama days on the Equator.

A rabble of prisoners—­Jaegers, Grenadiers, Uhlans, what-nots—­came trudging down the road, an unshorn, dishevelled herd of cut-throats, propelled by a brace of diminutive kilties, who paused occasionally to treat them to snatches of flings and to hoot triumphantly.

Otto regarded his fallen compatriots with disgusted lack-lustre eyes, then turning to me with a ghost of his old smile, “’Ere gomes ze Sherman invasion,” said he.

* * * * *

CAUTIONARY TALES FOR THE ARMY.

II.

(Second-Lieutenant Humphrey Spence, who was slightly wounded through a lack of a proper sense of the rights of rank.)

  Second-Lieutenant Humphrey Spence
  Had no idea of precedence;
  To him his Colonel was no more
  Than any other messroom bore;
  And he would try to make a pal
  Not merely of a General,
  But even a horrified non-com
  He’d greet with “Tiddly-om-pom-pom!”
  Although in other ways quite nice,
  He was perverted by this vice.