They had been soaked to the skin in the night and their gray uniforms were still soddened. Many of them were sleeping, in huddled, grotesque postures, like dead men, some lying on their stomachs, face downward. Others were awake, sitting hunched up, with drooping heads and a beaten, exhausted look. Others paced up and down, up and down, like caged animals, as they were, famished and parched, until we could distribute the rations. Many of them were dying, and a German ambulanceman went among them, injecting them with morphine to ease the agony which made them writhe and groan. Two men held their stomachs, moaning and whimpering with a pain that gnawed their bowels, caused by cold and damp. They cried out to me, asking for a doctor. A friend of mine carried a water jar to some of the wounded and held it to their lips. One of them refused. He was a tall, evil-looking fellow, with a bloody rag round his head--a typical “Hun,” I thought. But he pointed to a comrade who lay gasping beside him and said, in German, “He needs it first.” This man had never heard of Sir Philip Sidney, who at Zutphen, when thirsty and near death, said, “His need is greater than mine,” but he had the same chivalry in his soul. The officer in charge of their escort could not speak German and had no means of explaining to the prisoners that they were to take their turn to get rations and water at a dump nearby. It was a war correspondent, young Valentine Williams, afterward a very gallant officer in the Irish Guards who gave the orders in fluent and incisive German. He began with a hoarse shout of “Achtung!” and that old word of command had an electrical effect on many of the men. Even those who had seemed asleep staggered to their feet and stood at attention. The habit of discipline was part of their very life, and men almost dead strove to obey. The non-commissioned officers formed parties to draw and distribute the rations, and then those prisoners clutched at hunks of bread and ate in a famished way, like starved beasts. Some of them had been four days hungry, cut off from their supplies by our barrage fire, and intense hunger gave them a kind of vitality when food appeared. The sight of that mass of men reduced to such depths of human misery was horrible. One had no hate in one's heart for them then. “Poor devils!” said an officer with me. “Poor beasts! Here we see the `glory' of war! the `romance' of war!” I spoke to some of them in bad German, and understood their answer. “It is better here than on the battlefield,” said one of them. “We are glad to be prisoners.” One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns which were firing ceaselessly. “I pity our poor people there,” he said. One of them, who spoke English, described all he had seen of the battle, which was not much, because no man at such a time sees more than what happens within a yard or two.