camp monument. On the wall was a sign in Latin and French--"Unhappy the
spirit which worries about the future," a facetious warning that any one
who loafed there longer than three minutes was likely to be killed, and
the following artistic creed from "La Fontaine:"

"Ne for fans point noire talent. Nous ne ferions rien avec grace. Jamais
un lourdaud quoiqu'il fosse, ne saurait passer pour gallant."

("Don't strain your talent or you'll do nothing gracefully. The boor
won't pass for a gallant gentleman, no matter what he does.")

The Germans, at different times in their history, have conquered the
French and humbly looked up to and imitated them. Generally speaking,
they study and try to understand the French, and their own
intellectuality and idealism are things French-men might be expected to
like or, at any rate, be interested in. Yet it is one of history's or
geography's ironies that the Frenchman goes on his way, neither knowing
nor wanting to know the blond beasts over the Rhine--"Jamais un lourdaud
quoiqu'il fasse" . . the young sculptor must have smiled when he tacked
that verse on the wall of his prison!

Ruhleben is a race-track on the outskirts of Berlin, and a detention
camp for English civilians. This is quite another sort of menagerie.
You can imagine the different kinds of Englishmen who would be caught in
Germany by the storm--luxurious invalids taking the waters at
Baden-Baden; Gold Coast negro roust-abouts from rusty British tramps at
Hamburg; agents, manufacturers, professors, librarians, officers from
Channel boats, students of music and philosophy.

All these luckless civilians--four thousand of them--had been herded