It is touching to watch this grand old man, lofty of stature, with a solid prognathous chin, irreproachably dressed, when he stops to speak to a soldier suffering from despondency. “Fous êtes triste?” he asks in his slow and broken French, gently pulling the man by the ear. The prisoner does not misunderstand; he knows that though the major can read French he is unable to speak it, and that in this laconic phrase he desires to condense an entire friendly conversation. A few days ago, having learned that a loaf of bread priced at thirty pfennig had been sold at one mark fifty pfennig to a prisoner by a soldier of the guard, he was greatly enraged, and in the presence of Durupt, who was helping him to write up the register of money orders, he exclaimed, “There is but one price for bread, and I shall proceed with the utmost rigour against anyone, be he French or German, who asks a higher price. It is disgraceful to rob prisoners in this way!” The joke is that officially we are not supposed to buy anything at all. The day before yesterday there was a fall of sleet. The men were loitering up and down the corridors. In front of the _Kommandantur_ there was a great clatter of hobnailed shoes, and the noise was reinforced by light songs, laughter, and chatter. The commandant was reading our eleven hundred letters. Two days earlier he had sent them to Ingolstadt. Headquarters, cantankerous as usual, had returned them, under some pretext, to be re-read. This was something calculated to put the gentlest of men out of humour. Scrupulously obedient to orders, he was now for the second time reading these poor papers, badly written in pencil, insipid, and all exactly alike. On the other side of the door, the procession of prisoners passed and repassed unceasingly. The clatter of nails on the cement got on his nerves. “Oh, the noise, the noise!” he said, as if speaking to himself. D’Arnoult was there and rose from his seat, intending to ask the comrades to be a little quieter. The commandant stopped him, saying, “No, monsieur d’Arnoult, do not go out. _Mein Zimmer ist doch nur eine Kanzlei_—after all, my room is only an office!” And once more he immersed himself in his reading. Withal, in the major’s innermost being, the natural man invariably acts and governs. The other, the German, merely utters professions of faith.