[Illustration: “AT SEVEN O’CLOCK THE GERMANS CAME OVER.” [_To face page 16._ ] “Hawkins,” I said quietly, “you’ll go back to the gun-team to-morrow. We’ll find another cook.” “Very good, Sir.” And almost instantly the order was given a divine confirmation in the form of the cushiest of flesh wounds in Private Hawkins’s right arm. After a second’s gasp he bounded down the trench. “A blighty, Sir,” he cried, “a blighty. No, Sir, don’t want to be bound up or anything. They’ll do that at the dressing station. I’m orf.” Visions had risen before him of white sheets and whiter nurses. He saw himself being petted and made much of, the hero of the village; and as the Germans slowly filtered round the flank, Private Hawkins rushed down the communication trench, resolved to put at all cost the dressing station between them and him. He succeeded. Probably it was the one time he had ever tried to do anything in his life. CHAPTER II ON THE WAY TO THE RHINE § 1 At the back of the mind there always exists a sort of unconscious conception of the various contingencies that may lie round the corner. It is usually unformulated, but it is there none the less, and at the moment when I was captured I had a very real if confused idea of what was going to happen to me. The idea was naturally confused because the etiquette of surrender is not included in Field Service Regulations, and as it is not with that intention that one originally sets out for France, the matter had not bulked largely in the imagination. But the terrorist had supplied these deficiencies, and he had made it hard to rid oneself of the supposition that one had only to cross a few yards of unowned hollows to find oneself in a world of new values and formulæ. As a dim recollection of some previous existence I had carried the image of strange brutalities and assaults, of callous, domineering Prussians, of Brigadiers with Sadistic temperament. I was fully prepared to be relieved of my watch and cigarette-case, and to be prodded in the back by my escort’s bayonet. Instead of that, however, he presented me with a cigar and pretended to understand my French, which is on the whole the most insidious of all forms of compliment. There was also a complete absence of that machine-perfect discipline of which we had heard so much. Several of the German officers had not shaved, men stood to the salute with their heels wide apart, and the arrival of a silver epaulette was not the sign for any Oriental prostrations. Beyond the fact that the men wore grey uniforms and smoked ungainly pipes, they strangely resembled an English battalion that was carrying on a minor local engagement. The authorities who interviewed us and confiscated our correspondence displayed the characteristic magnanimity of the captor; after enlarging on the individual merits of the Entente soldier, they proceeded to explain why they themselves were winning the war.