“Cheer up!” one girl said to us. “The war’ll soon be over. You will be back in four months.” It was the same here as behind the line. Peace--nothing else mattered. The Germans had suffered so much personally that they had ceased to nourish the collective loyalties of world power and empire. They no longer wanted to conquer the world, they wanted to be at peace; and to this end their victories in the field seemed the shortest way. The short snatches of conversation that we had with civilians on Heidelberg Station were all in this key. Peace would come in four months. Beyond that they had no ambitions. They no longer shared the megalomania of their rulers. CHAPTER III KARLSRUHE AND MILTON HAYES After the discomforts of the trenches and the tedium of a fortnight’s travelling, Karlsruhe provided a delightful haven. Here all the material needs were satisfied; there was a Red Cross issue of tin foods three times a week: the beds were moderately comfortable, and one’s clothes could be disinfected: and there was a library. After a fortnight’s exile from books there is no joy comparable to the sight of a printed page. And in the evenings we were allowed out till eleven o’clock. There were big arc lamps under the trees, and in this romantic atmosphere the greater part of the camp lay out reading in deck chairs. It was easy then to cast a false glamour over imprisonment; to see in it a succession of harmonious days; a quiet backwater in which the mind was free to work. It was easy to bathe the emotions in the ordered periods of George Moore’s prose, and reflect that there “lay no troublous thing before.” It was the reaction natural after the turgid experiences of the last eight months, and it certainly made that one week at Karlsruhe lyrical with content. Karlsruhe was a distributing station through which all officer prisoners passed on their way to permanent camps. But there was always retained a small committee of officers to superintend the activities of this fluid community. There were officers to look after the issue of relief parcels, to run the library, to control general discipline. In charge of the Red Cross Committee was Tarrant. Fourteen months of captivity had not made much impression either on his cheerfulness or on his health. In fact he looked and felt so fit that it caused him some alarm. “I’m too well,” he said, “I’m thinking of trying a fast.” “He’s been saying that every day for the last month,” remarked Stone, his room companion. “Oh, no, old man, really,” protested Tarrant, “I’ve only been waiting for it to get a bit warmer.” After the wearisome discussions about the incidental aspects of the war, it was an enormous delight to meet two people to whom the events of the last year had been a matter chiefly of conjecture and report. “You will get awfully sick of all this, of course, after fourteen months,” said Tarrant, “but it’s really a capital place to get one’s ideas settled.”