I spoke to him in German. He never took his eyes off my face as he heard again the familiar sounds of his mother-tongue. I asked him his name. He told me. I have forgotten it, but I remember he said he was a farmer from near Hanover. His voice was very, very weak, and the intonation was indescribably sad. I asked him how he felt. “_Es geht mit mir zu Ende!_” (I am all but finished), he replied slowly. I asked him if he was in need of anything. He shook his big brown head, and answered: “_Man ist sehr gut zu mir_” (They are very good to me). Had he relatives? I asked. Could I write to anybody for him? “_Ich habe niemand_,” came the reply in his sad voice. A widower, all his children dead, this old German had left his farm on being mobilized, and had gone all through Belgium with the German Army until they had abandoned him, wounded, on the retreat from the Marne. When I left him, with a phrase about keeping a good heart, for he would soon be well (how senseless it must have sounded to that man who for days had seen the Black Angel hovering at his bedside!), he shook his head, and said: “_Ich glaub’ es nicht!_” I never saw him again or learnt his fate, for I left Paris that same afternoon. But I have often thought since then of the peaceful life of that humble Hanoverian farmer sacrificed to the insensate arrogance of the neurasthenic who wears the purple of the Hohenzollerns. Apart from prisoners, the first German I encountered at the front in this war was in the space between the lines. His work for “_Kaiser und Reich_” was done. With hundreds of his fellows he lay stiff and stark in the moonlight before our trenches at Neuve Chapelle. He looked like a waxen image as he lay on his back in the grass, in his grey uniform all splashed with mud, his helmet, clotted with blood (I have it as a memento of that night), still on his head, his rifle with its rusting bayonet grasped in one hand flung wide. All around him lay his comrades as the machine-guns of the Indians had mowed them down. By the light of the flares I could see the grass dotted with these sprawling figures, so inert and limp that one would have said it was a group in a wax-work show rather than an actual picture of war. I have looked down on the villages of Messines and Wytschaete, built upon the slope of the ridge that bears their names, where the Germans dwell in desolate cities and in houses which no man inhabiteth, which are ready to become heaps. I have seen the smoke of their _Mittagessen_ rising into the air from the cellars and dug-outs in which they live by day, and once I caught a glimpse of a figure, grey against a red wall, slipping in and out of the ruins.