together in the stables, paddock, and stands of the Ruhleben track. The
place was not as suited for a prison as the high land of Zossen, the
stalls with their four bunks were dismal enough, and the lofts overhead,
with little light and ventilation, still worse.

Some had suffered, semi-invalids, for instance, unable to get along with
the prison rations, but the interesting thing about Ruhleben was not its
discomfort, but the remarkable fashion in which the prisoners had
contrived to make the best of a bad matter.

The musicians had their instruments sent in and organized an orchestra.
The professors began to lecture and teach until now there was a sort of
university, with some fifty different classes in the long room under the
grand stand. And on the evening when we had the privilege of visiting
Ruhleben it was to see a dramatic society present Bernard Shaw's
"Androcles and the Lion."

The play began at six o'clock, for the camp lights are out at nine, and
it was in the dusk of another one of Berlin's rainy days, after
slithering through the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete
apartment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab swung to the right,
lurched down the lane of mud, and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben.
Inside was a sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen--
professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young
fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in
faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons,
men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with a Thermos bottle, and
crisp "Right you are!"--a good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic
cross-section of the London streets, drifting about here in the German
mud.