In another place--a prison in St.-Omer--I had a conversation with two other officers of the German army who were more courteous than the gunners. They had been taken at Hooge and were both Prussians--one a stout captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, jovial manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which he had just escaped, and his hatred of us; the other a young, slim fellow, with clear-cut features, who was very nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with his heels together, as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high officers came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. One of our mines had exploded under him, flinging a heap of earth over him. The fat man by his side--his captain--had been buried, too, in the dugout. They had scraped themselves out by clawing at the earth. They were cautious about answering questions on the war, but the younger man said they were prepared down to the last gaiter for another winter campaign and--that seemed to me at the time a fine touch of audacity--for two more winter campaigns if need be. The winter of '16, after this autumn and winter of '15, and then after that the winter of '17! The words of that young Prussian seemed to me, the more I thought of them, idiotic and almost insane. Why, the world itself could not suffer two more years of war. It would end before then in general anarchy, the wild revolutions of armies on all fronts. Humanity of every nation would revolt against such prolonged slaughter... It was I who was mad, in the foolish faith that the war would end before another year had passed, because I thought that would be the limit of endurance of such mutual massacre. In a room next to those two officers--a week before this battle, the captain had been rowing with his wife on the lake at Potsdam--was another prisoner, who wept and wept. He had escaped to our lines before the battle to save his skin, and now was conscience-stricken and thought he had lost his soul. What stabbed his conscience most was the thought that his wife and children would lose their allowances because of his treachery. He stared at us with wild, red eyes. “Ach, mein armes Weib! Meine Kinder!... Ach, Gott in Himmel!” He had no pride, no dignity, no courage. This tall, bearded man, father of a family, put his hands against the wall and laid his head on his arm and wept. XII During the battle, for several days I went with other men to various points of view, trying to see something of the human conflict from slag heaps and rising ground, but could only see the swirl and flurry of gun-fire and the smoke of shells mixing with wet mist, and the backwash of wounded and prisoners, and the traffic of guns, and wagons, and supporting troops. Like an ant on the edge of a volcano I sat among the slag heaps with gunner observers, who were listening at telephones dumped down in the fields and connected with artillery brigades and field batteries.