The Germans cheered and laughed, but we made never a sound.  We were bewildered—­sick from the stink and weariness and thirst and lack of food.  Yet I swear to you, sahib, on my honor that it had not entered into the heart of one of us to surrender.  That we who had been first of the Indian contingent to board a ship, first to land in France, first to engage the enemy, should now be first to surrender in a body seemed to us very much worse than death.  Yet Ranjoor Singh bade us leave our rifles and climb out of the trench, and we obeyed him.  God knows why we obeyed him.  I, who had been half-hearted hitherto, hated him in that minute as a trapped wolf hates the hunter; yet I, too, obeyed.

We left our dead for the Germans to bury, but we dragged the wounded out and some of them died as we lifted them.  When we reached the German trench and they counted us, including Ranjoor Singh and three-and-forty wounded there were two-hundred-and-three-and-fifty of us left alive.

They led Ranjoor Singh apart.  He had neither rifle nor saber in his hand, and he walked to their trench alone because we avoided him.  He was more muddy than we, and as ragged and tired.  He had stood in the same foul water, and smelt the same stench.  He was hungry as we.  He had been willing to surrender, and we had not.  Yet he walked like an officer, and looked like one, and we looked like animals.  And we knew it, and he knew it.  And the Germans recognized the facts.

He acted like a crowned king when he reached the trench.  A German officer spoke with him earnestly, but he shook his head and then they led him away.  When he was gone the same officer came and spoke to us in English, and I understanding him at once, he bade me tell the others that the British must have witnessed our surrender.  “See,” said he, “what a bombardment they have begun again.  That is in the hope of slaying you.  That is out of revenge because you dared surrender instead of dying like rats in a ditch to feed their pride!” It was true that a bombardment had begun again.  It had begun that minute.  Those truly had been ranging shells.  If we had stayed five minutes longer before surrendering we should have been blown to pieces; but we were in no mood to care on that account.

The Germans are a simple folk, sahib, although they themselves think otherwise.  When they think they are the subtlest they are easiest to understand.  Understanding was reborn in my heart on account of that German’s words.  Thought I, if Ranjoor Singh were in truth a traitor then he would have leaped at a chance to justify himself to us.  He would have repeated what that German had urged him to tell us.  Yet I saw him refuse.

As they hurried him away alone, pity for him came over me like warm rain on the parched earth, and when a man can pity he can reason, I spoke in Punjabi to the others and the German officer thought I was translating what he told me to say, yet in truth I reminded them that man can find no place where God is not, and where God is is courage.  I was senior now, and my business was to encourage them.  They took new heart from my words, all except Gooja Singh, who wept noisily, and the German officer was pleased with what he mistook for the effect of his speech.