One evening, towards the end of June, we had a delightful adventure. Outside the barbed wire a herd of wild deer—roebucks and fawns—used to assemble in their hundreds, and ran about as tame as goats. That evening, a darling little fawn, which had lost its mother, ran past the wire fence, and, attracted by our alluring calls, it cleverly wriggled through the defences into the camp. The fawn was surrounded and petted (the huntsmen growled), and lastly it was carried in triumph in the arms of a Lieutenant into the batmen’s room, where we intended to rear it. God knows how M—— heard of it. At any rate he sent for the German Camp Adjutant, and said in a voice that shook with anxiety: “Lieutenant S., is it true that there is an animal in the camp?” “Yes, sir; an animal.” “Has it come in through the wire entanglements?” “Yes; it simply crept through.” “Oh, this is dreadful!” remarked Mr. M——, and he seemed to lose his voice altogether. “I must at once see the hole through which the big beast has crawled. I am convinced that the German officers have cut the wire in order to escape. The animal must also be at once removed.” And so it happened. And—this is no joke—twenty men from the guard with fixed bayonets were sent for. The solitary German soldier with the innocent tiny fawn was taken into their midst. On the order “Quick march” the whole procession moved to the inside door of the fence. The latter was opened, the twenty men with the German soldier and the fawn stepped into the intervening space, the so-called “lock,” the inner portal, was carefully shut. Only then was the outer one opened, the soldier liberated the fawn, and after that the whole procession wended its way back. Oh, Mr. M—— what a laughing stock you made of yourself! After that all the entanglements were carefully examined, and, though it was impossible to find the smallest cleft through which a man could have crept, M—— could not quiet down for days. Apart from the post, the arrival of newspapers represented the chief interest of the day. We were allowed to receive the _Times_ and the _Morning Post_, and, though they were nearly exclusively filled with Entente victories, we knew them so well after a short time that we could read between the lines, and were able to conjecture the real state of affairs with approximate correctness. But what rage in the newspapers at the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and what anger when the Russians had to retire—of course only for strategic reasons! We had manufactured for ourselves several huge maps of the theatres of war, which were correct even to the slightest details, and each morning at eleven our “General Staff Officers” were hard at work moving the little flags. Often the English Colonel himself stood in front of them and thoughtfully shook his head. CHAPTER XII THE ESCAPE