WITH THE GERMAN WRECKING CREW
When we came out of the little _taverne_ at Beaumont, to start--as
we fondly supposed--for Brussels, it was pitch dark in the square
of the forlorn little town. With us the polite and pleasant fiction
that we were guests of the German authorities had already worn seedy,
not to say threadbare, but Lieutenant Mittendorfer persisted in
keeping the little romance alive. For, as you remember, we had been
requested--requested, mind you, and not ordered--to march to the
station with the armed escort that would be in charge of the prisoners
of war, and it had been impressed upon us that we were to assist in
guarding the convoy, although no one of us had any more deadly weapon
in his possession than a fountain pen; and finally, according to our
instructions, if any prisoner attempted to escape in the dark we were
to lay detaining hands upon him and hold him fast.
This was all very flattering and very indicative of the esteem in
which the military authorities of Beaumont seemed to hold us. But we
were not puffed up with a sense of our new responsibilities. Also we
were as a unit in agreeing that under no provocation would we yield
to temptations to embark on any side-excursions upon the way to the
railroad. Personally I know that I was particularly firm upon this
point. I would defy that column to move so fast that I could not keep
up with it.
In the black gloom we could make out a longish clump of men who stood
four abreast, scuffling their feet upon the miry wet stones of the
square. These were the prisoners--one hundred and fifty Frenchmen and
Turcos, eighty Englishmen and eight Belgians. From them, as we drew
near, an odor of wet, unwashed animals arose. It was as rank and raw
as fumes from crude ammonia. Then, in the town house of the Prince de
Caraman-Chimay just alongside, the double doors opened, and the light
streaming out fell upon the naked bayonets over the shoulders of the
sentries and made them look like slanting lines of rain.
There were eight of us by now in the party of guests, our original
group of five having been swollen by the addition of three others--the
Frenchman Gerbeaux, the American artist Stevens and the Belgian
court-photographer Hennebert, who had been under arrest for five
days. We eight, obeying instructions--no, requests--found places for
ourselves in the double files of guards, four going one side of the
column and four the other. I slipped into a gap on the left flank,
alongside four of the English soldiers. The guard immediately behind
me was a man I knew. He had been on duty the afternoon previous in
the place where we were being kept, and he had been obliging enough
to let me exercise my few words of German upon him. He grinned now in
recognition and humorously patted the stock of his rifle--this last,
I take it, being his effort to convey to my understanding that he was
under orders to shoot me in the event of my seeking to play truant
during the next hour or so. He didn't know me--wild horses could not
have dragged us apart.
A considerable wait ensued. Officers, coming back from the day's
battle lines in automobiles, jumped out of their cars and pressed up,
bedraggled and wet through from the rain which had been falling, to
have a look at the prisoners. Common soldiers appeared also. Of these
latter many, I judged, had newly arrived at the front and had never
seen any captured enemies before. They were particularly interested in
the Englishmen, who as nearly as I could tell endured the scrutinising
pretty well, whereas the Frenchmen grew uneasy and self-conscious under
it. We who were in civilian dress--and pretty shabby civilian dress at
that--came in for our share of examination too. The sentries were kept
busy explaining to newcomers that we were not spies going north for
trial. There was little or no jeering at the prisoners.
Lieutenant Mittendorfer appeared to feel the burden of his authority
mightily. His importance expressed itself in many bellowing commands to
his men. As he passed the door of headquarters, booming like a Prussian
night-bittern, one of the officers there checked him with a gesture.
"Why all the noise, Herr Lieutenant?" he said pleasantly in German.
"Cannot this thing be done more quietly?"
The young man took the hint, and when he climbed upon a bench outside
the wine-shop door his voice was much milder as he admonished the
prisoners that they would be treated with due honors of war if they
obeyed their warders promptly during the coming journey, but that the
least sign of rebellion among them would mean but one thing--immediate
death. Since he spoke in German, a young French lieutenant translated
the warning for the benefit of the Frenchmen and the Belgians, and a
British noncom. did the same for his fellow countrymen, speaking with
a strong Scottish burr. He wound up with an improvisation of his own,
which I thought was typically British. "Now, then, boys," he sang out,
"buck up, all of you! It might be worse, you know, and some of these
German chaps don't seem a bad lot at all."
So, with that, Lieutenant Mittendorfer blew out his big chest and
barked an order into the night, and away we all swung off at a double
quick, with our feet slipping and sliding upon the travel-worn granite
boulders underfoot. In addition to being rounded and unevenly laid, the
stones were now coated with a layer of slimy mud. It was a hard job to
stay upright on them.
I don't think I shall ever forget that march. I know I shall never
forget that smell, or the sound of all our feet clumping over those
slick cobbles. Nor shall I forget, either, the appealing calls of
Gerbeaux' black chauffeur, who was being left behind in the now empty
guardhouse, and who, to judge from his tones, did not expect ever to
see any of us again. As a matter of fact, I ran across him two weeks
later in Liège. He had just been released and was trying to make his
way back to Brussels.
The way ahead of us was inky black. The outlines of the tall Belgian
houses on either side of the narrow street were barely visible, for
there were no lights in the windows at all and only dim candles or
oil lamps in the lower floors. No natives showed themselves. I do not
recollect that in all that mile-long tramp I saw a single Belgian
civilian--only soldiers, shoving forward curiously as we passed and
pressing the files closer in together.
Through one street we went and into another which if anything was even
narrower and blacker than the first, and presently we could tell by the
feel of things under our feet that we had quit the paved road and were
traversing soft earth. We entered railway sidings, stumbling over the
tracks, and at the far end of the yard emerged into a sudden glare of
brightness and drew up alongside a string of cars.
After the darkness the flaring brilliancy made us blink and then it
made us wonder there should be any lights at all, seeing that the
French troops, in retiring from Beaumont four days before, had done
their hurried best to cripple the transportation facilities and had
certainly put the local gas plant out of commission. Yet here was
illumination in plenty and to spare. At once the phenomenon stood
explained. Two days after securing this end of the line the German
engineers had repaired the torn-up right-of-way and installed a
complete acetylene outfit, and already they were dispatching trains of
troops and munitions clear across southeastern Belgium to and from the
German frontier. When we heard this we quit marveling. We had by now
ceased to wonder at the lightning rapidity and unhuman efficiency of
the German military system in the field.
Under the sizzling acetylene torches we had our first good look
at these prospective fellow-travelers of ours who were avowedly
prisoners. Considered in the aggregate they were not an inspiring
spectacle. A soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes,
becomes of a sudden a pitiable, almost a contemptible object. You think
instinctively of an adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat
that, being shorn of teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is
now a more helpless, more impotent thing than if it had been created
without teeth and claws in the first place. These similes are poor
ones, I'm afraid, but I find it difficult to put my thoughts exactly
into words.
These particular soldiers were most unhappy looking, all except the
half dozen Turcos among the Frenchmen. They spraddled their baggy white
legs and grinned comfortably, baring fine double rows of ivory in
their brown faces. The others mainly were droopy figures of misery and
shame. By reason of their hair, which they wore long and which now hung
down in their eyes, and by reason also of their ridiculous loose red
trousers and their long-tailed awkward blue coats, the Frenchmen showed
themselves especially unkempt and frowzy-looking. Almost to a man they
were dark, lean, slouchy fellows; they were from the south of France,
we judged. Certainly with a week's growth of black whiskers upon their
jaws they were fit now to play stage brigands without further make-up.
"Wot a bloomin', stinkin', rotten country!" came, two rows back from
where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies. "There
ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to drink in it,
too."
A little whiny man alongside of me, whose chin was on his breast bone,
spake downward along his gray flannel shirt bosom:
"Just wyte," he said; "just wyte till England 'ears wot they done to
us, 'erdin' us about like cattle. Blighters!" He spat his disgust upon
the ground.
We spoke to none of them directly, nor they to us--that also being a
condition imposed by Mittendorfer.
The train was composed of several small box cars and one second-class
passenger coach of German manufacture with a dumpy little locomotive
at either end, one to pull and one to push. In profile it would have
reminded you somewhat of the wrecking trains that go to disasters in
America. The prisoners were loaded aboard the box cars like so many
sheep, with alert gray shepherds behind them, carrying guns in lieu of
crooks; and, being entrained, they were bedded down for the night upon
straw.
The civilians composing our party were bidden to climb aboard the
passenger coach, where the eight of us, two of the number being of
augmented superadult size, took possession of a compartment meant to
hold six. The other compartments were occupied by wounded Germans,
except one compartment, which was set aside for the captive French
lieutenant and two British subalterns. Top-Sergeant Rosenthal was in
charge of the train with headquarters aboard our coach. With him, as
aides, he had three Red Cross men.
The lighting apparatus of the car did not operate. On the ledge of
our window sat a small oil lamp, sending out a rich smell and a pale,
puny illumination. Just before we pulled out Rosenthal came and blew
out the lamp, leaving the wick to smoke abominably. He explained that
he did this for our own well-being. Belgian snipers just outside the
town had been firing into the passing trains, he said, and a light in a
car window was but an added temptation. He advised us that if shooting
started we should drop upon the floor. We assured him in chorus that
we would, and then after adding that we must not be surprised if the
Belgians derailed the train during the night he went away, leaving us
packed snugly in together in the dark. This incident had a tendency to
discourage light conversation among us for some minutes.
Possibly it was because daylight travel would be safer travel, or it
may have been for some other good and sufficient reason, that after
traveling some six or eight miles joltingly we stopped in the edge of a
small village and stayed there until after sunup. That was a hard night
for sleeping purposes. One of our party, who was a small man, climbed
up into the baggage net above one row of seats and stretched himself
stiffly in the narrow hammocklike arrangement, fearing to move lest he
tumble down on the heads of his fellow-sufferers. Another laid him down
in the little aisle flanking the compartment, where at least he might
spraddle his limbs and where also, persons passing the length of the
car stepped upon his face and figure from time to time. This interfered
with his rest. The remaining six of us mortised ourselves into the
seats in neck-cricking attitudes, with our legs so intertwined and
mingled that when one man got up to stretch himself he had to use great
care in picking out his own legs. Sometimes he could only tell that it
was his leg by pinching it. This was especially so after inaction had
put his extremities to sleep while the rest of him remained wide awake.
After dawn we ran slowly to Charleroi, the center of the Belgian iron
industry, in a sterile land of mines and smelters and slag-heaps, and
bleak, bare, ore-stained hillsides. The Germans had fought here, first
with organized troops of the Allies, and later, by their own telling,
with bushwhacking civilians. Whole rows of houses upon either side of
the track had been ventilated by shells or burned out with fire, and
their gable ends, lacking roofs, now stood up nakedly, fretting the
skyline like gigantic saw teeth. As we were drawing out from between
these twin rows of ruins we saw a German sergeant in a flower plot
alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a
clump of tall red geraniums. That he could find time in the midst of
that hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically
German bit of sentimentalism. Just then, though, he stood erect and we
were better informed. He had been talking over a military telephone,
the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter
snuggling beneath the geraniums. The flowers even were being made to
contribute their help in forwarding the mechanism of war. I think,
though, that it took a composite German mind to evolve that expedient.
A Prussian would bring along the telephone; a Saxon would bed it among
the blossoms.
We progressed onward by a process of alternate stops and starts,
through a land bearing remarkably few traces to show for its recent
chastening with sword and torch, until in the middle of the blazing hot
forenoon we came to Gembloux, which I think must be the place where
all the flies in Belgium are spawned. Here on a siding we lay all day,
grilled in the heat and pestered by swarms of the buzzing scavenger
vermin, while troop trains without number passed us, hurrying along
the sentry-guarded railway to the lower frontiers of Belgium. Every
box-car door made a frame for a group-picture of broad German faces
and bulky German bodies. Upon nearly every car the sportive passengers
had lashed limbs of trees and big clumps of field flowers. Also with
colored chalks they had extensively frescoed the wooden walls as high
up as they could reach. The commonest legend was "On to Paris," or for
variety "To Paris Direct," but occasionally a lighter touch showed
itself. For example, one wag had inscribed on a car door: "Declarations
of War Received Here," and another had drawn a highly impressionistic
likeness of his Kaiser, and under it had inscribed "Wilhelm II, Emperor
of Europe."
Presently as train after train, loaded sometimes with guns or supplies
but usually with men, clanked by, it began to dawn upon us that these
soldiers were of a different physical type from the soldiers we had
seen heretofore. They were all Germans, to be sure, but the men along
the front were younger men, hard-bitten and trained down, with the
face which we had begun to call the Teutonic fighting face, whereas
these men were older, and of a heavier port and fuller fashion of
countenance. Also some of them wore blue coats, red-trimmed, instead
of the dull gray service garb of the troops in the first invading
columns. Indeed some of them even wore a nondescript mixture of uniform
and civilian garb. They were _Landwehr_ and _Landsturm_, troops of the
third and fourth lines, going now to police the roads and garrison
the captured towns, and hold the lines of communication open while
the first line, who were picked troops, and the second line, who were
reservists, pressed ahead into France.
They showed a childlike curiosity to see the prisoners in the box
cars behind us. They grinned triumphantly at the Frenchmen and the
Britishers, but the sight of a Turco in his short jacket and his dirty
white skirts invariably set them off in derisive cat-calling and
whooping. One beefy cavalryman in his forties, who looked the Bavarian
peasant all over, boarded our car to see what might be seen. He had
been drinking. He came nearer being drunk outright than any German
soldier I had seen to date. Because he heard us talking English he
insisted on regarding us as English spies.
"Hark! they betray themselves," we heard him mutter thickly to one
of his wounded countrymen in the next compartment. "They are damned
Englishers."
"_Nein!_ _Nein!_ All Americans," we heard the other say.
"Well, if they are Americans, why don't they talk the American language
then?" he demanded. Hearing this, I was sorry I had neglected in my
youth to learn Choctaw.
Still dubious of us, he came now and stood in the aisle, rocking
slightly on his bolster legs and eying us glassily. Eventually a
thought pierced the fog of his understanding. He hauled his saber out
of its scabbard and invited us to run our fingers along the edge and
see how keen and sharp it was. He added, with appropriate gestures,
that he had honed it with the particular intent of slicing off a few
English heads. For one, and speaking for one only, I may say I was, on
the whole, rather glad when he departed from among us.
When we grew tired of watching the troop trains streaming south we
fought the flies, and listened for perhaps the tenth time to the story
of Stevens' experience when he first fell into German hands, six days
before.
Stevens was the young American who accompanied Gerbeaux, the Frenchman,
and Hennebert, the Belgian, on their ill-timed expedition from Brussels
in an automobile bearing without authority a Red Cross flag. Gerbeaux
was out to get a story for the Chicago paper which he served as
Brussels correspondent, and the Belgian hoped to take some photographs;
but a pure love of excitement brought Stevens along. He had his
passport to prove his citizenship and a pass from General von Jarotzky,
military commandant of Brussels, authorizing him to pass through the
lines. He thought he was perfectly safe.
When their machine was halted by the Germans a short distance south
and west of Waterloo, Stevens, for some reason which he could never
understand, was separated from his two companions and the South-African
negro chauffeur. A sergeant took him in charge, and all the rest of the
day he rode on the tail of a baggage wagon with a guard upon either
side of him. First, though, he was searched and all his papers were
taken from him.
Late in the afternoon the pack-train halted and as Stevens was
stretching his legs in a field a first lieutenant, whom he described
as being tall and nervous and highly excitable, ran up and, after
berating the two guards for not having their rifles ready to fire, he
poked a gun under Stevens' nose and went through the process of loading
it, meanwhile telling him that if he moved an inch his brains would
be blown out. A sergeant gently edged Stevens back out of the danger
belt, and, from behind the officer's back another man, so Stevens said,
tapped himself gently upon the forehead to indicate that the Herr
Lieutenant was cracked in the brain.
After this Stevens was taken into an improvised barracks in a deserted
Belgian _gendarmerie_ and locked in a room. At nine o'clock the
lieutenant came to him and told him in a mixture of French and German
that he had by a court-martial been found guilty of being an English
spy and that at six o'clock the following morning he would be shot.
"When you hear a bugle sound you may know that is the signal for your
execution," the officer added.
While poor Stevens was still begging for an opportunity to be heard in
his own defense the lieutenant dealt him a blow in the side which left
him temporarily breathless. In a moment two soldiers had crossed his
wrists behind his back and were lashing them tightly together with a
rope.
Thus bound he was taken back indoors and made to sit on a bench. Eight
soldiers stretched themselves upon the floor of the room and slept
there; a sergeant slept with his body across the door. A guard sat on
the bench beside Stevens.
"He gave me two big slugs of brandy to drink," said Stevens, continuing
his tale, "and it affected me no more than so much water. After a
couple of hours I managed to work the cords loose and I got one hand
free. Moving cautiously I lifted my feet, and by stretching my arms
cautiously down, still holding them behind my back, I untied one shoe.
I meant at the last to kick off my shoes and run for it. I was feeling
for the laces on my other shoe when another guard came to re-enforce
the first, and he watched me so closely that I knew that chance was
gone.
"After a while, strange as it seems, all the fear and all the horror of
death left me. My chief regret now was, not that I had to die, but that
my people at home would never know how I died or where. I put my head
down on the table and actually dozed off. But there was a clock in the
room and whenever it struck I would rouse up and say to myself, almost
impersonally, that I now had four hours to live, or three, or two, as
the case might be. Then I would go to sleep again. Once or twice a
queer sinking sensation in my stomach, such as I never felt before,
would come to me, but toward daylight this ceased to occur.
"At half-past five two soldiers, one carrying a spade and the other a
lantern, came in. They lit the lantern at a lamp that burned on a table
in front of me and went out. Presently I could hear them digging in the
yard outside the door. I believed it was my grave they were digging.
I cannot recall that this made any particular impression upon me. I
considered it in a most casual sort of fashion. I remember wondering
whether it was a deep grave.
"At five minutes before six a bugle sounded. The eight men on the floor
got up, buckled on their cartridge belts, shouldered their rifles and,
leaving their knapsacks behind, tramped out. I followed with my guards
upon either side of me. My one fear now was that I should tremble at
the end. I felt no fear, but I was afraid my knees would shake. I
remember how relieved I was when I took the first step to find my legs
did not tremble under me. I was resolved, too, that I would not be
shot down with my hands tied behind me. When I faced the squad I meant
to shake off the ropes on my wrists and take the volley with my arms at
my sides."
Stevens was marched to the center of the courtyard. Then, without a
word of explanation to him his bonds were removed and he was put in an
automobile and carried off to rejoin the other members of the unlucky
sight-seeing party. He never did find out whether he had been made the
butt of a hideous practical joke by a half-mad brute or whether his
tormentor really meant to send him to death and was deterred at the
last moment by fear of the consequences. One thing he did learn--there
had been no court-martial. Thereafter, during his captivity, Stevens
was treated with the utmost kindness by all the officers with whom
he came in contact. His was the only instance that I have knowledge
of where a prisoner has been tortured, physically or mentally, by a
German. It was curious that in this one case the victim should have
been an American citizen whose intentions were perfectly innocent and
whose papers were orthodox and unquestionable.
Glancing back over what I have here written down I find I have failed
altogether to mention the food which we ate on that trip of ours with
the German wrecking crew. It was hardly worth mentioning, it was so
scanty. We had to eat, during that day while we lay at Gembloux, a
loaf of the sourish soldiers' black bread, with green mold upon the
crust, and a pot of rancid honey which one of the party had bethought
him to bring from Beaumont in his pocket. To wash this mixture down
we had a few swigs of miserably bad lukewarm ration-coffee from a
private's canteen, a bottle of confiscated Belgian mineral water, which
a private at Charleroi gave us from his store, and a precious quart of
the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's commandeered wine--also a souvenir of
our captivity. Late in the afternoon a sergeant sold us for a five-mark
piece a big skin-casing filled with half-raw pork sausage. I've never
tasted anything better.
Even so, we fared better than the prisoners in the box cars behind and
the dozen wounded men in the coach with us. They had only coffee and
dry bread and, at the latter end of the long day, a few chunks of the
sausage. Some of the wounded men were pretty badly hurt, too. There
was one whose left forearm had been half shot away. His stiff fingers
protruded beyond his soiled bandages and they were still crusted with
dried blood and grained with dirt. Another had been pierced through
the jaw with a bullet. That part of his face which showed through
the swathings about his head was terribly swollen and purple with
congested blood. The others had flesh wounds, mainly in their sides
or their legs. Some of them were feverish; all of them sorely needed
clean garments for their bodies and fresh dressings for their hurts
and proper food for their stomachs. Yet I did not hear one of them
complain or groan. With that oxlike patience of the North-European
peasant breed, which seems accentuated in these Germans in time of
war, they quietly endured what was acute discomfort for any sound man
to have to endure. In some dim, dumb fashion of their own they seemed,
each one of them, to comprehend that in the vast organism of an army
at war the individual unit does not count. To himself he may be of
prime importance and first consideration, but in the general carrying
out of the scheme he is a mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm--an
infinitesimal, utterly inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without
thought. Thus we diagnosed their mental poses.
Along toward five o'clock a goodish string of cars was added to our
train, and into these additional cars seven hundred French soldiers,
who had been collected at Gembloux, were loaded. With the Frenchmen as
they marched under our window went, perhaps, twenty civilian prisoners,
including two priests and three or four subdued little men who looked
as though they might be civic dignitaries of some small Belgian town.
In the squad was one big, broad-shouldered peasant in a blouse, whose
arms were roped back at the elbows with a thick cord.
"Do you see that man?" said one of our guards excitedly, and he pointed
at the pinioned man. "He is a grave robber. He has been digging up dead
Germans to rob the bodies. They tell me that when they caught him he
had in his pockets ten dead men's fingers which he had cut off with a
knife because the flesh was so swollen he could not slip the rings off.
He will be shot, that fellow."
We looked with a deeper interest then at the man whose arms were bound,
but privately we permitted ourselves to be skeptical regarding the
details of his alleged ghoulishness. We had begun to discount German
stories of Belgian atrocities and Belgian stories of German atrocities.
I might add that I am still discounting both varieties.
To help along our train two more little engines were added, but even
with four of them to draw and to shove their load was now so heavy that
we were jerked along with sensations as though we were having a jaw
tooth pulled every few seconds. After such a fashion we progressed very
slowly. Already we knew that we were not going to Brussels, as we had
been promised in Beaumont that we should go. We only hoped we were not
bound for a German military fortress in some interior city.
It fell to my lot that second night to sleep in the aisle. In spite
of being walked on at intervals I slept pretty well. When I waked it
was three o'clock in the morning, just, and we were standing in the
train shed at Liège, and hospital corps men were coming aboard with
hot coffee and more raw sausages for the wounded. Among the Germans,
sausages are used medicinally. I think they must keep supplies of
sausages in their homes, for use in cases of accident and sickness.
I got up and looked from the window. The station was full of soldiers
moving about an various errands. Overhead big arc lights sputtered
spitefully, so that the place was almost as bright as day. Almost
directly below me was a big table, which stood on the platform and was
covered over with papers and maps. At the table sat two officers--high
officers, I judged--writing busily. Their stiff white cuff-ends showed
below their coat-sleeves; their slim black boots were highly polished,
and altogether they had the look of having just escaped from the hands
of a valet. Between them and the frowsy privates was a gulf a thousand
miles wide and a thousand miles deep.
When I woke again it was broad daylight and we had crossed the border
and were in Germany. At small way stations women and girls wearing long
white aprons and hospital badges came under the car windows with hot
drinks and bacon sandwiches for the wounded. They gave us some, too,
and, I think, bestowed what was left upon the prisoners at the rear.
We ran now through a land untouched by war, where prim farmhouses
stood in prim gardens. It was Sunday morning and the people were going
to church dressed in their Sunday best. Considering that Germany was
supposed to have been drained of its able-bodied male adults for
war-making purposes we saw, among the groups, an astonishingly large
number of men of military age. By contrast with the harried country
from which we had just emerged this seemed a small Paradise of peace.
Over there in Belgium all the conditions of life had been disorganized
and undone, where they had not been wrecked outright. Over here in
Germany the calm was entirely unruffled.
It shamed us to come as we were into such surroundings. For our car
was littered with sausage skins and bread crusts, and filth less
pleasant to look at and stenches of many sorts abounded. Indeed I shall
go further and say that it stank most fearsomely. As for us, we felt
ourselves to be infamous offenses against the bright, clean day. We
had not slept in a bed for five nights or had our clothes off for that
time. For three days none of us had eaten a real meal at a regular
table. For two days we had not washed our faces and hands.
The prisoners of war went on to Cologne to be put in a _laager_, but
we were bidden to detrain at Aix-la-Chapelle. We climbed off, a dirty,
wrinkled, unshaven troop of vagabonds, to find ourselves free to go
where we pleased. That is, we thought so at first. But by evening the
Frenchman and the Belgians had been taken away to be held in prison
until the end of the war, and for two days the highly efficient local
secret-service staff kept the rest of us under its watchful care. After
that, though, the American consul, Robert J. Thompson, succeeded in
convincing the military authorities that we were not dangerous.
I still think that taking copious baths and getting ourselves shaved
helped to clear us of suspicion.