It was a picture of misery and wretchedness such as it would be impossible to parallel.  I recalled the unhappy scenes I had witnessed around the railway terminus at Berlin under similar conditions, but that was paradise to the field at Sennelager Camp on the fateful night of September 11.  It appeared as if the Almighty Himself had turned upon us at last, and was resolved to blot us from the face of the earth.  We were transformed into a condition bordering on frigidity from rain-soaked clothes clinging to bodies reduced to a state of low vitality and empty stomachs.  Had we been in good health I doubt whether the storm and exposure would have wreaked such havoc among us.

While my friend and I were standing on a knoll pondering upon the utter helplessness and misery around us, singing and whistling were borne to us upon the wind.  We listened to catch fragments of a comic song between the gusts.  There was no mistaking those voices.  We picked our way slowly to beneath the trees whence the voices proceeded, glad to meet some company which could be merry and bright, even if the mood had to be assumed with a desperate effort.

Beneath the trees we found a small party of our indomitable compatriots.  They received us with cheery banter and joke and an emphatic assurance that “it is all right in the summer time.”  They were quite as wretched and as near exhaustion as anybody upon the field, but they were firmly determined not to show it.  A comic song had been started as a distraction, the refrain being bawled for all it was worth as if in defiance of the storm.  This was what had struck our ears.

This panacea being pronounced effective a comprehensive programme was rendered.  Every popular song that occurred to the mind was turned on and yelled with wild lustiness.  Those who did not know the words either whistled the air or improvised an impossible ditty.  Whenever there was a pause to recall some new song, the interval was occupied with “Rule, Britannia!” This was a prime favourite, and repetition did not stale its forceful rendition, especial stress being laid upon the words, “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!” to which was roared the eternal enquiry, “Are we down-hearted?” The welkin-smashing negative, crashing through the night, and not entirely free from embroidery, offered a conclusive answer.

It takes a great deal to destroy a Britisher’s spirits, but this terrible night almost supplied the crucial test.  We were not only combating Prussian atrocity but Nature’s ferocity as well, and the two forces now appeared to be in alliance.  The men sang, as they confessed, because it constituted a kind of employment at least to the mind, enabled them to forget their misery somewhat, and proved an excellent antidote to the gnawing pain in the vicinity of the waist-belt.  Once a singer started up the strains of “Little Mary,” but this was unanimously vetoed as coming too near home.  Then from absence of a better inspiration, we commenced to roar “Home, Sweet Home,” which I think struck just as responsive a chord, but the sentiment of which made a universal appeal.