And, as I looked, my mind went back to a wet morning when, the German
sentry's back being turned, a French soldier, working on the camp road,
dug his way near to the door of my hut and, still digging, told me that
there was an Englishman in the French camp, who wanted particularly to
see me. So that afternoon I walked boldly into the French camp as if I
had important business there, and found my way to the further hut. There
lying on a straw mattress, incredibly lousy and sandwiched between a
Turco from Morocco and a Senegalese negro soldier, I found a white man,
who jumped up to see me and was extraordinarily glad to find that his
message had borne fruit. Clad in the tattered but still unmistakable
uniform of a French artilleryman, three months' beard upon his face,
with white wax-like cheeks, blue nose and a dreadfully hunted
expression, stood this six emaciated feet of England. Drawing me aside
to a sheltered corner he told me his story; how, despairing of a job in
our Flying Corps at the commencement of the war, he had joined the
French Aviation Corps as a mechanic, and how he had been taken prisoner
early in September, 1914, when the engine of his aeroplane failed and he
descended to earth in the middle of a marching column of the enemy. Of
the early months of captivity from September to December in Minden he
told me many things. He and all the others lived in an open field
exposed to all the Westphalian winter weather, with no blankets, nothing
but what he now wore. They lived in holes in a wet clay field like rats
and--like rats they fought for the offal and pigwash on which the German
jailors fed them twice a day. Now he had been moved into a long hut,
open on the inner side that looked to the enclosed central square of the
lager, but well enclosed outside by a triple barbed wire fence.

"Why do they put you in with coloured men?" I asked, as I looked at his
bedfellows.