In some thousands of years, excavations, undertaken by these horribly learned, spectacled Boches, will bring to light in a good state of preservation the frames of the wheelbarrows that a French prisoner made such good use of. The learned doctor, excited by such a find, will dress up in a Latin name these rediscovered objects, and, writing in that language a long and learned treatise, will prove that the wheelbarrow existed at the time of Cicero, and with fierce invective will denounce the Frenchman Pascal, who claimed the invention of this means of transport. He will make a gift of the least beautiful specimens to the museum of the province, and will send the rest to the Imperial Museum at Berlin, in recompense for which the eminent doctor will be admitted to the Boche Institute and be profoundly reverenced--unless between now and then the name of Germany will have taken its place in legend beside those of Troy and Carthage! [Illustration] [Illustration: THE COMPANY COMMANDER] CHAPTER X Certainly Bitter, the head of the 11th Company, could not be counted among those who cherished cordial feelings for the French. The authority who had put into his hands the fate of two hundred and fifty men might rejoice that he had never shown culpable weakness towards any of the prisoners. He was a small man, with a worn face; he had a weak heart, and before the war was exempt from military service; he had only been recalled a few months since. His illness made him sometimes as pale as death, and sometimes purple. His wicked little eyes were black, his hair, reduced to the least possible limit by a military hair-cutting machine, and his bristling moustache was also black. He was a private soldier. He had never been under fire, and therefore was far more pitiless than those who had been to the front. It is generally agreed that the sufferings endured in fighting, far from filling the hearts of the combatants with bitterness, bring them together through the remembrance of common hardships. One of Bitter’s habits was to break into the huts in the early hours, when the men were still in bed, and make the place noisy with his angry voice. His company held the record for punishments, and it was a torture to be put into it. Bitter insisted that all the N.C.O.’s, the adjutant included, should salute him and stand at attention in his presence. Blinded by the position of authority into which he had been put, he exercised on those in his power a veritable tyranny.