To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners were brought; and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a Sunday morning, when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky overhead and good visibility for German guns and ours.
There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment, a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of misery, while a few of our fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with fixed bayonets. They were the men who had surrendered from deep dugouts in the trenches between us and Loos and from the cellars of Loos itself. They had seen many of their comrades bayoneted. Some of them had shrieked for mercy. Others had not shrieked, having no power of sound in their throats, but had shrunk back at the sight of glinting bayonets, with an animal fear of death. Now, all that was a nightmare memory, and they were out of it all until the war should end, next year, the year after, the year after that—who could tell?