PRISONERS FROM ST. ELOI.
By PHILIP GIBBS.
BRITISH HEADQUARTERS, Tuesday.
The German prisoners who were captured near St. Eloi by the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusilíers on Saturrday last, after we had wrecked their trenches by a series of mine explosions, were paraded to-day, before being taken down to the Base, in a Flemish Village behind the lines.
These men were lucky in their escape from death. The explosion of our mines was so terrific that it shook the ground six miles away, and its effect upon the German trenches was volcanic.
Tons of earth were flung up hundreds of feet high, carrying away trenches and dug-outs and sandbags.
A Jaeger regiment. which was holding this part of the line suffered heavy losses. A captured officer Says that two companies of his battalion were blown to pieces.
Another disaster happened to the enemy. The earth about them was so dísrupted that the communication trenches were choked up, and there was no possibility of escape for the men who remained alive in the first and Second lines of this sector, nor for any supports to be sent up to prevent the occrupation of the craters and trenches by the Fusíliers, who still hold this ground.
The German survivors were caught in a trap, and in their dazed condition were taken pri- soners easily enough. The exact number of them is still uncertain, as men were still being brought down to-day, but it ia about 200, with several officers.
They are sturdy young men, averaging, I should say, about 28 years of age. They do not belong to the Prussian type. Them were no close-cropped, bullet-headed, Hunnish-faced fellows among them. These men, strange as it seems to say so, seemed to be of our kith and kin.
If they had been in our brown khâki instead of in the German grey, and kept silent in those clothes, no British ofiicer passing them would have guessed that these were enemy soldiers. He would have thought, rather, ” Those are fine lads – from Norfolk or Suffolk, by the look of them.”

“OUR KITH AND KIN.”

They are, in fact., of our kith and kin, for they come from the Danish frontier hy Schles- wig-Holstein. and something in their appear- ance–their fresh complexions and blue eyes, and English look – seemed to have struck the British soldiers who were guarding them.
“Wonderfully well-behaved fellows,” said one of our Sergeants. ” It’s hard to think of them as Germans. They seem different From some others I have seen.”
They were glad to Be out of all the horror, and their cheerfulness and gaiety were due, no doubt, to this supreme good-luck. A few of them were wounded, and others seemed still a, little dazed – and no wonder after the shock of being blown up with a mass of earth and falling again into the midst of an eartbquake. What is amazing, rather, is that men so fresh from the greatest terror of this war, a mine explosion, should so quickly recover their nerve.
They were grateful for the kíndness of their treatment – especiaIly grateful that they were allowed to keep their family photographs and little souvenirs from home. Most of them had plenty of money in their pockets, having arrived reoently at the front and coming from good middle-class families. They were not inclined to discuss the problems or ethics of the war, but agreed unanimoualy that all their comrades are eager for peace. There was no sign of poor diet in their physique, and not from thase men could one say that Germany is getting exhausted.
It is only by studying the character and statements of prisoners taken at many points of the line that our men come to any general conclusion, and this, as I know, is in favour of the hope that the German army is weakeníng a little, and that her reserves of strangth are not inexhaustible.