But I could get some things from the canteen by bribing the German
orderly who brought our midday food, and I had some books. So the sun
shone, for a time, on Minden.

Nor was this fellow alone in these unhappy surroundings. There with him
were English civilian prisoners, clerks and school-teachers, technical
and engineering instructors, who once taught in German schools and
worked at Essen or in the shipyards. These wretched civilians, until
they were removed to Ruhleben, were not in much better case; but they
might, at least, sleep together on indescribable straw palliasses. Then
they were together; there was comfort in that at least.

By a strange turn of Fortune's wheel this very camp was placed upon the
site of the battlefield of Minden, when, as our guards would tell us, an
undegenerate England fought with the great Frederick against the French.

Moved to another camp this fellow had escaped by crawling under the
barbed wire on a dirty wet night in winter when the sentry had turned
his well-clothed back against the northern gale.




A MORAL DISASTER


All the Army is looking for the gunnery lieutenant, H.M.S. ----. Time
indeed may soften the remembrance of the evil he has done us, and in the
dim future, when we get to Dar-es-Salaam, we may even relent
sufficiently to drink with him; but now, just halfway along the dusty