‘Peter, old man,’ I said, ’we’re on trek again, and this is a very snug little rondavel.  We’ve had many good yarns, but this is going to be the best.  First of all, how about your health?’

’Good, I’m a strong man again, but slow like a hippo cow.  I have been lonely sometimes, but that is all by now.  Tell me of the big battles.’

But I was hungry for news of him and kept him to his own case.  He had no complaint of his treatment except that he did not like Germans.  The doctors at the hospital had been clever, he said, and had done their best for him, but nerves and sinews and small bones had been so wrecked that they could not mend his leg, and Peter had all the Boer’s dislike of amputation.  One doctor had been in Damaraland and talked to him of those baked sunny places and made him homesick.  But he returned always to his dislike of Germans.  He had seen them herding our soldiers like brute beasts, and the commandant had a face like Stumm and a chin that stuck out and wanted hitting.  He made an exception for the great airman Lensch, who had downed him.

‘He is a white man, that one,’ he said.  ’He came to see me in hospital and told me a lot of things.  I think he made them treat me well.  He is a big man, Dick, who would make two of me, and he has a round, merry face and pale eyes like Frickie Celliers who could put a bullet through a pauw’s head at two hundred yards.  He said he was sorry I was lame, for he hoped to have more fights with me.  Some woman that tells fortunes had said that I would be the end of him, but he reckoned she had got the thing the wrong way on.  I hope he will come through this war, for he is a good man, though a German . . .  But the others!  They are like the fool in the Bible, fat and ugly in good fortune and proud and vicious when their luck goes.  They are not a people to be happy with.’

Then he told me that to keep up his spirits he had amused himself with playing a game.  He had prided himself on being a Boer, and spoken coldly of the British.  He had also, I gathered, imparted many things calculated to deceive.  So he left Germany with good marks, and in Switzerland had held himself aloof from the other British wounded, on the advice of Blenkiron, who had met him as soon as he crossed the frontier.  I gathered it was Blenkiron who had had him sent to St Anton, and in his time there, as a disgruntled Boer, he had mixed a good deal with Germans.  They had pumped him about our air service, and Peter had told them many ingenious lies and heard curious things in return.

‘They are working hard, Dick,’ he said.  ’Never forget that.  The German is a stout enemy, and when we beat him with a machine he sweats till he has invented a new one.  They have great pilots, but never so many good ones as we, and I do not think in ordinary fighting they can ever beat us.  But you must watch Lensch, for I fear him.  He has a new machine, I hear, with great engines and a short wingspread, but the wings so cambered that he can climb fast.  That will be a surprise to spring upon us.  You will say that we’ll soon better it.  So we shall, but if it was used at a time when we were pushing hard it might make the little difference that loses battles.’