Four p.m. Gerbeaux, who was allowed to go out foraging, under escort
of a guard, has returned with a rope of dried onions; a can of alphabet
noodles; half a pound of stale, crumbly macaroons; a few fresh string
beans; a pot of strained honey, and several clean collars of assorted
sizes. The woman of the-house is now making soup for us out of the
beans, the onions and the noodles. She has also produced a little
grated Parmesan cheese from somewhere.

Four-twenty p.m. That was the best soup I ever tasted, even if it was
full of typographical errors from the jumbling together of the little
alphabet noodles. Still, nobody but a proofreader could have found
fault with that. There was only one trouble with that soup: there was
not enough of it--just one bowl apiece. I would have traded the finest
case of vintage wine in the Chimay vaults for another bowl.

Just as the woman brought in the soup Mittendorfer appeared, escorting a
French lieutenant who was taken prisoner this morning. The prisoner was
a little, handsome, dapper chap not over twenty-two years old, wearing
his trim blue-and-red uniform with an air, even though he himself looked
thoroughly miserable. We were warned not to speak with him, or he with
us; but Gerbeaux, after listening to him exchanging a few words with the
lieutenant, said he judged from his accent that the little officer was
from the south of France.

We silently offered him a bowl of the soup as he sat in a corner fenced
off from the rest of us by a small table; but he barely tasted it, and
after a bit he lay down in his corner, with his arm for a pillow, and
almost instantly was asleep, breathing heavily, like a man on the verge
of exhaustion. A few minutes later we heard, from Sergeant Rosenthal,
that the prisoner's brother-in-law had been killed the day before, and