No, I am in Bavaria. I am a prisoner. I am at Fort Orff, at the edge of the Swabian forest, among gloomy villages where I know no one, where they believe that we are slaughtering their sons with dum-dum bullets, and that we were the aggressors. A Franconian blackguard is the man who feeds me. Then there is a little good-for-nothing schoolmaster from Hof, a pedant stuffed with German idealism, who appeals to honour and humanity in season and out of season, who, having caught _flagrante delicto_ a weaver of watch-chains snatching a few hairs from a horse’s tail, gives him three days’ close arrest, saying gravely, “A most inhumane act”—and it is this whipper-snapper, this round-shouldered and short-sighted impotent beast, who is my _Feldwebel_, “my superior officer”! He is a mean creature. Knowing that I am on good terms with von Stengel, he begged Dutrex to present me. Dutrex did so, saying: “_Hier ist unser Schriftsteller_ [This is our author]”—“I am much honoured, monsieur; I have read an article on you in the _Nürnberger Zeitung_.” He bowed and scraped again and again. He stood there, his ugly little moustache bristling with smiles, looking as great a booby as if he had been before the commandant. The quartermaster is a bad lot, but the _Feldwebel_ is grotesque. And I am dependent upon the caprices of such men! I am a thing in the hands of these contemptible fellows, these hypocrites, who loudly voice their patriotism and boast of the German virtues, while they are shamming rheumatism and heart-weakness to avoid being sent to the fighting-line. Sometimes I am seized with a longing to spit out my contempt in their very faces. Before Baron von Stengel one feels like a man; a noble master ennobles those subject to his orders. But before these subordinates all human nobility withers, wretched instruments who treat us as instruments in turn. Empowered to dominate and to humiliate us, to abuse us as much as they please, their favours are even worse than their severities; it is the brutal landowner in Latium amusing himself with a Græculus; it is the _Donaubauer_, the fat Danubian peasant, caressing his dog. I prefer their hatred. * * * * * The good Badoy, with his huge round head, his snub nose, his little curly beard, his large fatherly eyes, bends forward over the board, humps his back, and clenches his fists between his short legs, saying: “When will it come to an end?” “Which, the game or the imprisonment?” asks Laloux quietly, as he takes Badoy’s queen. “How can you ask?” Then, as if speaking to himself: “Oh! my wife and my three little ones, when shall I see them again? Still no letters! It’s terrible.”