“Tell them they shall be excellently treated,” said he, seizing my elbow.  “When we shall have won this war the British will no longer be able to force natives of India to fight their battles for them.”

I judged it well to repeat that word for word.  There are over ten applicants for every vacancy in such a regiment as ours, and until Ranjoor Singh ordered our surrender, we were all free men—­free givers of our best; whereas the Germans about us were all conscripts.  The comparison did no harm.

We saw no more of our wounded until some of them were returned to us healed, weeks later; but from them we learned that their treatment had been good.  With us, however, it was not so, in spite of the promise the German officer had made.  We were hustled along a wide trench, and taken over by another guard, not very numerous but brutal, who kicked us without excuse.  As we went the trenches were under fire all the time from the British artillery.  The guards swore it was our surrender that had drawn the fire, and belabored us the more on that account.

At the rear of the German lines we were herded in a quarry lest we observe too much, and it was not until after dark that we were given half a loaf of bread apiece.  Then, without time to eat that which had been given to us, we were driven off into the darkness.  First, however, they took our goatskin overcoats away, saying they were too good to be worn by savages.  A non-commissioned officer, who could speak good English, was sent for to explain that point to us.

After an hour’s march through the dark we were herded into some cattle trucks that stood on a siding behind some trees.  The trucks did not smell of cattle, but of foul garments and unwashed men.  Two armed German infantrymen were locked into each truck with us, and the pair in the truck in which I was drove us in a crowd to the farther end, claiming an entire half for themselves.  It was true that we stank, for we had been many days and nights without opportunity to get clean; yet they offered us no means of washing-only abuse.  I have seen German prisoners allowed to wash before they had been ten minutes behind the British lines.

We were five days in that train, sahib—­five days and nights.  Our guards were fed at regular intervals, but not we.  Once or twice a day they brought us a bucket of water from which we were bidden drink in a great hurry while the train waited; yet often the train waited hours on sidings and no water at all was brought us.  For food we were chiefly dependent on the charity of people at the wayside stations who came with gifts intended for German wounded; some of those took pity on us.

At last, sahib, when we were cold and stiff and miserable to the very verge of death, we came to a little place called Oeschersleben, and there the cruelty came to an unexpected end.  We were ordered out of the trucks and met on the platform by a German, not in uniform, who showed distress at our predicament and who hastened to assure us in our own tongue that henceforward there would be amends made.