An obliging canteen attendant, a patriotic Alsatian amongst the parcel room staff, and half a dozen frankly neutral sentries completed the list of what might be called, from our point of view, the German effectives. The N.C.O.’s—to do them justice—were beyond suspicion. The majority of them would have been infinitely rather on the Western front than in their present uncongenial position. We never attempted to meddle with them, and indeed there was no need. The interpreters, although in every way friendly and obliging, were too closely occupied with the multitudinous tasks of their daily routine to invite overtures. There were only three of them in the camp; and what with acting as intermediaries in disputes, visiting the cells, distributing letters, and dancing attendance in and out of season on their German superiors, they were the most hard-worked people in the camp and had hardly a minute to call their own. Adders was a spotty-faced Dusseldorfian with a perpetual smile and a woman’s gait, and was regarded generally with perhaps unmerited distrust. Grau had been interned early in the war at Ahmednagar in India, and would do anything for anybody who came from India and whom he hoped might be instrumental in restoring him one day to his beloved Nilgiris. “I do not care for Germany,” he would say; “I do not care for England. My heart is in India.” Poor Grau! He stands very little chance of getting back there. He must pay for the misdeeds of his countrymen. And Wolff was a little cock-sparrow of a Frankfurter Jew, with an accent acquired on the other side of the Atlantic. They used to come to the theatrical shows and sit enraptured through the most scurrilous and thinly veiled allusions to Niemeyer and other ornaments of the Xth Army Corps. The fact that they were there solely as censors rather added zest to the humour of it. Sometimes, even, they lost dignity. Wolff in particular was not proof against the attractions of the chemical compound which in those days used to pass for Rhine wine; and after one entertainment at which the bottle passed somewhat freely he became violently intoxicated, and was found next morning asleep in an orchard on the other side of the town, having temporarily thrown off the bonds of barrack discipline and made a regular night of it.