Sometimes the prisoners mistook me for a German; and I did not always undeceive them. Many of them were miserably ignorant creatures; and I formed the opinion that State interference with the education of either the Classes or the Masses is not such a benefit to the people of a country as many meddlesome faddists would like us to believe. Probably there are very few Germans who cannot read and write; but these are qualifications which may be much perverted if they are not "founded upon a rock." A great many of the prisoners taken by the Russians were men who would better be described as deserters than prisoners. Lots of them hated the military service, and had taken the earliest opportunity to run away from it--into the arms of their enemies. "I have a wife and six children in Magdeburg. If I'm killed who will look after them?" said one man. Another fellow remarked: "I was married about three months before I was called to the colours. I don't want my wife to be grabbed up by somebody else." These, and other remarks, show that all the people in Germany are not patriots. A soldier of the 54th regiment declared himself to be a Socialist, and said he did not like killing his fellow-men. Another declared that the only men he wished to kill were his officer and his sergeant-major, who had been cruel to him; and he added: "I came away to save myself from being killed by them." A large number of Jews surrendered because they would not fight against their fellow Jews, who, they had heard, were enlisting in large numbers in the French and English armies. The loss of men of these descriptions would not weaken the German Army; but many thousands of the genuine prisoners were inveterate in their hatred of Britain and everything British; and, strange as it seems, these were the men from whom I gained the most useful information. They were boastful and threatening: "Our Kaiser will be in your dirty country on such and such a day; and then you'll catch it!" "Nonsense," I would reply; "he hasn't got men enough to fight on this front, and invade England as well." "Oh yes, he has. All our best troops have gone to crush the English. Any men are good enough to defeat these red-snouted pigs. The Guard Corps has gone to destroy your Guards;" and then the fellow would go on to say where the various German corps were stationed, which was valuable information. In this way I first learned that the English Guards were in France; and many important details of the fighting there--details which it was troublesome to verify, but I did verify them: and so various and important was the information I gathered that I was, for a time, much employed in this work by the Russian staff.