HOW TO CURE THE BOSCH.

"Yes, I seen a good bit o' the Bosch, one way and another, before he
got me in the leg," said Corporal Digweed. "Eighteen months I had
with 'im spiteful, and four months with 'im tame. Meaning by that four
months guarding German prisoners."

"And what do you think of him at the end of it?" I asked.

Digweed leant back with a heavily judicial air.

"Some o' these Peace blighters seem to think he's a little angel,
basin' their opinion, I suppose, on something I must 'a' missed during
my time out. On the other hand there's a tidy few thinks that one
German left will spoil the earth. Now me, I holds they're both wrong.
The second's nearer than what the first is, I don't deny. But a
incident what occurred in that Prisoners' Camp set me thinking that
you might make something o' Fritz yet, if you only had the time and
the patience.

"We had a batch of prisoners come in what I saw at once was
a different brand to the usual. There wasn't that--well, that
distressin' lack o' humility that you mostly finds showin' itself
after we've had them a week or two. There seemed about 'em almost a
sort o' willingness to learn that put 'em in a class by themselves.
I sez to the interpreter, 'There's something odd about that lot. You
find out what it is;' which he does. And what do you think it was?
_They was convicts_. All men in for a long term, what had served five
years and more o' their sentences and was let out to fight.