The mauser rifles were not so very much unlike our own, and he set us to drilling with them, giving us patient instruction but very little rest until evening.  During the longest pause in the drill he sent for knapsacks and served us one each, filled down to the smallest detail with everything a soldier could need, even to a little cup that hung from a hook beneath one corner.  We were utterly worn out when he left us at nightfall, but there was a lot of talking nevertheless before men fell asleep.

“This is the second time he has trapped us in deadly earnest!” was the sum of the general complaint they hurled at me.  And I had no answer to give them, knowing well that if I took his part I should share his condemnation—­which would not help him; neither would it help them nor me.

“My thought, of going to the mines and being troublesome, was best!” said I.  “Ye overruled me.  Now ye would condemn me for not preventing you!  Ye are wind blowing this way and that!”

They were so busy defending themselves to themselves against that charge that they said no more until sleep fell on them; and at dawn Ranjoor Singh took hold of us again and made us drill until our feet burned on the gravel and our ears were full of the tramp—­tramp—­ tramp, and the ek—­do—­tin of manual exercise.

“Listen!” said he to me, when he had dismissed us for dinner, and I lingered on parade.  “Caution the men that any breach of discipline would be treated under German military law by drum-head court martial and sentence of death by shooting.  Advise them to avoid indiscretions of any kind,” said he.

So I passed among them, pretending the suggestion was my own, and they resented it, as I knew they would.  But I observed from about that time they began to look on Ranjoor Singh as their only possible protector against the Germans, so that their animosity against him was offset by self-interest.

The next day came a staff officer who marched us to the station, where a train was waiting.  Impossible though it may seem, sahib, to you who listen, I felt sad when I looked back at the huts that had been our prison, and I think we all did.  We had loathed them with all our hearts all summer long, but now they represented what we knew and we were marching away from them to what we knew not, with autumn and winter brooding on our prospects.

Not all our wounded had been returned to us; some had died in the German hospitals..  Two hundred-and-three-and-thirty of us all told, including Ranjoor Singh, lined up on the station platform—­fit and well and perhaps a little fatter than was seemly.

Having no belongings other than the rifles and knapsacks and what we stood in it took us but a few moments to entrain.  Almost at once the engine whistled and we were gone, wondering whither.  Some of the troopers shouted to Ranjoor Singh to ask our destination, but he affected not to hear.  The German staff officer rode in the front compartment alone, and Ranjoor Singh rode alone in the next behind him; but they conversed often through the window, and at stations where the two of them got out to stretch their legs along the platform they might have been brothers-in-blood relating love-affairs.  Our troopers wondered.