I gave the lad an order and we held up our hands. I will not labour the apology. The back verandah of the pill-box—so it looked—was bristling with amazed and animated Huns. Cut off from retreat, unarmed and utterly flabbergasted, what would you? I stammered out a few words in bad French to their officer and then asked leave to sit down. I was exhausted and quite overwhelmed. So this was the result of my fourteen months of cumulative experience. What a culmination! To walk over No Man’s Land on a bye-day in broad daylight into a German nest! Such a thing had never come into our ken that I could remember. And if it had, I should have been the first to pass uncharitable comment. What hideous irony! I looked at the boy I had led unwittingly into captivity. What sort of an officer did _he_ think I was now? He would bless me before it was all over, if all one heard, had read of, was true. Suddenly one began to see the prisoner-of-war question in a new light. What was it like really? And all the time I racked and racked my brains to think whose fault it was, where the mistake had lain. I knew the range on the map to “The Rectory,” which I had just left, and the range of our S.O.S. barrage. Three hundred yards to play with. I had come barely a hundred. Perhaps they hadn’t known of this pill-box. To know, O Lord, if only to know—and I couldn’t[1]. [Footnote 1: I did learn later, at Stralsund Camp in Germany, where I met the Colonel I was then trying to find. He told me his H.Q. on that day had been 100 yards _north_ of “The Rectory,” which they had found too hot to stay in.] That day seemed an eternity. In the evening I heard the shells from my own battery come whizzing over. I was to have observed them, five rounds of battery fire on the German front line at 5 p.m. Since the push this had been the only method, except by visual; no wires had lived a day up till then. My tie alone proclaimed me as an officer. I had left my tunic and all my impedimenta, with—fortunately—my notebooks and important papers, in the pill-box on the ridge. The orderly in his rough way was comforting. I felt sorry for the boy. It wasn’t his fault anyway.