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 scrutinizing
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 Liege. 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 un-human 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 super-adult 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 sun-up. 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 hammock-like 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
sightseeing 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 Liege, 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 on 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.