to that bill of fare, and I think by the time the waiter came around
I almost knew it by heart. One drink that almost made me laugh out
loud was listed as "Lemonades Gazeuses," but I might just as well have
introduced myself to the German officers by my right name and rank as to
have attempted to pronounce it.
When the waiter came to me, therefore, I said "Bock" as casually as I
could, and felt somewhat relieved that I got through this part of the
ordeal so easily.
While the waiter was away I had a chance to examine the bill of fare,
and I observed that a glass of beer cost eighty centimes. The smallest
change I had was a two-mark paper bill.
Apparently the German officers were similarly fixed, and when they
offered their bill to the waiter he handed it back to them with a remark
which I took to mean that he couldn't make change.
Right there I was in a quandary. To offer him my bill after he had just
told the officers he didn't have change would have seemed strange, and
yet I couldn't explain to him that I was in the same boat and he would
have to come to me again later. The only thing to do, therefore, was to
offer him the bill as though I hadn't heard or noticed what had happened
with the Germans, and I did so. He said the same thing to me as he had
said to the officers, perhaps a little more sharply, and gave me back
the bill. Later on he returned to the table with a handful of change and
we closed the transaction. I gave him twenty-five centimes as a tip--I
had never yet been in a place where it was necessary to talk to do that.
During my first half-hour in that theater, to say I was on pins and
needles is to express my feelings mildly. The truth of the matter is
I was never so uneasy in my life. Every minute seemed like an hour,
and I was on the point of getting up and leaving a dozen times. There
were altogether too many soldiers in the place to suit me, and when the
German officers seated themselves right at my table I thought that was
about all I could stand. As it was, however, the lights went out shortly
afterward and in the dark I felt considerably easier.
After the first picture, when the lights went up again, I had regained
my composure considerably and I took advantage of the opportunity to
study the various types of people in the place.
From my seat I had a splendid chance to see them all. At one table there
was a German medical corps officer with three Red Cross nurses. That
was the only time I had ever seen a German nurse, for when I was in the
hospital I had seen only men orderlies. Nurses don't work so near the
first-line trenches.
The German soldiers at the different tables were very quiet and orderly.
They drank Bock beer and conversed among themselves, but there was no
hilarity or rough-housing of any kind.
As I sat there, within an arm's reach of those German officers and
realized what they would have given to know what a chance they had to
capture an escaped British officer, I could hardly help smiling to
myself, but when I thought of the big risk I was taking, more or less
unnecessarily, I began to wonder whether I had not acted foolishly in
undertaking it.
Nevertheless, the evening passed off uneventfully, and when the show
was over I mixed with the crowd and disappeared, feeling very proud of
myself and with a good deal more confidence than I had enjoyed at the
start.
I had passed a night which will live in my life as long as I live. The
bill of fare, program, and a "throw-away" bill advertising the name of
the attraction which was to be presented the following week, which was
handed to me as I came out, I still have and they are among the most
valued souvenirs of my adventure.
XV
OBSERVATIONS IN A BELGIAN CITY
One night, shortly before I left this city, our airmen raided the place.
I didn't venture out of the house at the time, but the next night I
thought I would go out and see what damage had been done.
When it became dark I left the house, accordingly, and, mixing with the
crowd, which consisted largely of Germans, I went from one place to
another to see what our "strafing" had accomplished. Naturally I avoided
speaking to any one. If a man or woman appeared about to speak to me, I
just turned my head and looked or walked away in some other direction.
I must have been taken for an unsociable sort of individual a good many
times, and if I had encountered the same person twice I suppose my
conduct might have aroused suspicion.
I had a first-class observation of the damage that was really done by
our bombs. One bomb had landed very near the main railroad station, and
if it had been only thirty yards nearer would have completely demolished
it. As the station was undoubtedly our airman's objective, I was very
much impressed with the accuracy of his aim. It is by no means an easy
thing to hit a building from the air when you are going at anywhere from
fifty to one hundred miles an hour and are being shot at from beneath
from a dozen different angles--unless, of course, you are taking one of
those desperate chances and flying so low that you cannot very well miss
your mark, and the Huns can't very well miss you, either!
I walked by the station and mingled with the crowds which stood in the
entrances. They paid no more attention to me than they did to real
Belgians, and the fact that the lights were all out in this city at
night made it impossible, anyway, for any one to get as good a look at
me as if it had been light.
During the time that I was in this city I suppose I wandered from one
end of it to the other. In one place, where the German staff had its
headquarters, a huge German flag hung from the window, and I think I
would have given ten years of my life to have stolen it. Even if I could
have pulled it down, however, it would have been impossible for me to
have concealed it, and to have carried it away with me as a souvenir
would have been out of the question.
As I went along the street one night a lady standing on the comer
stopped me and spoke to me. My first impulse, of course, was to answer
her, explaining that I could not understand, but I stopped myself in
time, pointed to my ears and mouth, and shook my head, indicating that
I was deaf and dumb, and she nodded understandingly and walked on.
Incidents of this kind were not unusual, and I was always in fear that
the time would come when some inquisitive and suspicious German would
encounter me and not be so easily satisfied.
There are many things that I saw in this city which, for various
reasons, it is impossible for me to relate until after the war is over.
Some of them, I think, will create more surprise than the incidents I
am free to reveal now.
It used to amuse me, as I went along the streets of this town, looking
in the shop windows, with German soldiers at my side looking at the same
things, to think how close I was to them and they had no way of knowing.
I was quite convinced that if I were discovered my fate would have been
death, because I not only had the forged passport on me, but I had been
so many days behind the German lines after I had escaped that they
couldn't safely let me live with the information I possessed.
One night I walked boldly across a park. I heard footsteps behind me
and, turning around, saw two German soldiers. I slowed up a trifle to
let them get ahead of me. It was rather dark and I got a chance to see
what a wonderful uniform the German military authorities have picked
out. The soldiers had not gone more than a few feet ahead of me when
they disappeared in the darkness like one of those melting pictures on
the moving-picture screen.
As I wandered through the streets I frequently glanced in the café
windows as I passed. German officers were usually dining there, but
they didn't conduct themselves with anything like the light-heartedness
which characterizes the Allied officers in London and Paris. I was
rather surprised at this, because in this part of Belgium they were much
freer than they would have been in Berlin, where, I understand, food is
comparatively scarce and the restrictions are very rigid.
As I have said, my own condition in this city was in some respects worse
than it had been when I was making my way through the open country.
While I had a place to sleep and my clothes were no longer constantly
soaking, my opportunities for getting food were considerably less than
they had been. Nearly all the time I was half famished, and I decided
that I would get out of there at once, since I was entirely through with
Huyliger.
My physical condition was greatly improved. While the lack of food
showed itself on me, I had regained some of my strength, my wounds
were healed, my ankle was stronger, and, although my knees were still
considerably enlarged, I felt that I was in better shape than I had been
at any time since my leap from the train, and I was ready to go through
whatever was in store for me.
XVI
I APPROACH THE FRONTIER
To get out of the city it would be necessary to pass two guards. This
I had learned in the course of my walks at night, having frequently
traveled to the city limits with the idea of finding out just what
conditions I would have to meet when the time came for me to leave.
A German soldier's uniform, however, no longer worried me as it had at
first. I had mingled with the Huns so much in the city that I began to
feel that I was really a Belgian, and I assumed the indifference that
the latter seemed to feel.
I decided, therefore, to walk out of the city in the daytime when the
sentries would be less apt to be on the watch. It worked splendidly. I
was not held up a moment, the sentries evidently taking me for a Belgian
peasant on his way to work.
Traveling faster than I had ever done before since my escape, I was soon
out in the open country, and the first Belgian I came to I approached
for food. He gave me half his lunch and we sat down on the side of the
road to eat it. Of course, he tried to talk to me, but I used the old
ruse of pretending I was deaf and dumb and he was quite convinced that
it was so. He made various efforts to talk to me in pantomime, but I
could not make out what he was getting at, and I think he must have
concluded that I was not only half-starved, deaf, and dumb, but "luny"
into the bargain.
When night came I looked around for a place to rest. I had decided to
travel in the daytime as well as night, because I understood that I was
only a few miles from the frontier, and I was naturally anxious to get
there at the earliest possible moment, although I realized that there I
would encounter the most hazardous part of my whole adventure. To get
through that heavily guarded barbed and electrically charged barrier was
a problem that I hated to think of, even, although the hours I spent
endeavoring to devise some way of outwitting the Huns were many.
It had occurred to me, for instance, that it would not be such a
difficult matter to vault over the electric fence, which was only
nine feet high. In college, I know, a ten-foot vault is considered a
high-school boy's accomplishment, but there were two great difficulties
in the way of this solution. In the first place, it would be no easy
matter to get a pole of the right length, weight, and strength to serve
the purpose. More particularly, however, the pole-vault idea seemed to
be out of the question because of the fact that on either side of the
electric fence, six feet from it, was a six-foot barbed-wire barrier. To
vault safely over a nine-foot electrically charged fence was one thing,
but to combine with it a twelve-foot broad vault was a feat which even a
college athlete in the pink of condition would be apt to flunk. Indeed,
I don't believe it is possible.
Another plan that seemed half-way reasonable was to build a pair of
stilts about twelve or fourteen feet high and walk over the barriers
one by one. As a youngster I had acquired considerable skill in
stilt-walking, and I have no doubt that with the proper equipment it
would have been quite feasible to have walked out of Belgium as easily
as possible in that way, but whether or not I was going to have a chance
to construct the necessary stilts remained to be seen.
There were a good many bicycles in use by the German soldiers in
Belgium, and it had often occurred to me that if I could have stolen
one, the tires would have made excellent gloves and insulated coverings
for my feet in case it was necessary for me to attempt to climb over the
electric fence bodily. But as I had never been able to steal a bicycle,
this avenue of escape was closed to me.
I decided to wait until I arrived at the barrier and then make up my
mind how to proceed.
To find a decent place to sleep that night I crawled under a barbed-wire
fence, thinking it led into some field. As I passed under, one of the
barbs caught in my coat, and in trying to pull myself free I shook the
fence for several yards.
Instantly there came out of the night the nerve-racking command, "Halt!"
Again I feared I was done for. I crouched close down on the ground in
the darkness, not knowing whether to take to my legs and trust to the
Hun's missing me in the darkness if he fired, or stay right where I was.
It was foggy as well as dark, and although I knew the sentry was only a
few feet away from me I decided to stand, or rather lie still. I think
my heart made almost as much noise as the rattling of the wire in the
first place, but it was a tense few moments for me.
I heard the German say a few words to himself, but didn't understand
them, of course, and then he made a sound as if to call a dog, and I
realized that his theory of the noise he had heard was that a dog had
made its way through the fence.
For perhaps five minutes I didn't stir, and then, figuring that the
German had probably continued on his beat, I crept quietly under
the wire again, this time being mighty careful to hug the ground so
close that I wouldn't touch the wire, and made off in a different
direction. Evidently the barbed-wire fence had been thrown around an
ammunition-depot or something of the kind and it was not a field at all
that I had tried to get into.
I figured that other sentries were probably in the neighborhood and I
proceeded very gingerly.
After I had got about a mile away from this spot I came to a humble
Belgian house, and I knocked at the door and applied for food in my
usual way, pointing to my mouth to indicate I was hungry and to my ears
and mouth to imply that I was deaf and dumb. The Belgian woman who lived
in the house brought me a piece of bread and two cold potatoes, and as I
sat there eating them she eyed me very keenly.
I haven't the slightest doubt that she realized I was a fugitive.
She lived so near the border that it was more than likely that other
fugitives had come to her before, and for that reason I appreciated more
fully the extent of the risk she ran, for no doubt the Germans were
constantly watching the conduct of these Belgians who lived near the
line.
My theory that she realized that I was not a Belgian at all, but
probably some English fugitive, was confirmed a moment later when, as
I made ready to go, she touched me on the arm and indicated that I was
to wait a moment. She went to a bureau and brought out two pieces of
fancy Belgian lace, which she insisted upon my taking away, although at
that particular moment I had as much use for Belgian lace as an elephant
has for a safety-razor, but I was touched with her thoughtfulness and
pressed her hand to show my gratitude. She would not accept the money I
offered her.
I carried that lace through my subsequent experiences, feeling that it
would be a fine souvenir for my mother, although, as a matter of fact,
if she had known that it was going to delay my final escape for even a
single moment, as it did, I am quite sure she would rather I had never
seen it.
On one piece of lace was the Flemish word "_Charité_" and on the
other the word "_Espérance_." At the time, I took these words to mean
"Charity" and "Experience," and all I hoped was that I would get as
much of the one as I was getting of the other before I finally got
through. I learned subsequently that what the words really stood for was
"Charity" and "Hope," and then I was sure that my kind Belgian friend
had indeed realized my plight and that her thoughtful souvenir was
intended to encourage me in the trials she must have known were before
me.
I didn't let the old Belgian lady know, because I did not want to alarm
her unnecessarily, but that night I slept in her backyard, leaving early
in the morning before it became light.
Later in the day I applied at another house for food. It was occupied
by a father and mother and ten children. I hesitated to ask them for
food without offering to pay for it, as I realized what a task it must
have been for them to support themselves without having to feed a hungry
man. Accordingly, I gave the man a mark and then indicated that I wanted
something to eat. They were just about to eat, themselves, apparently,
and they let me partake of their meal, which consisted of a huge bowl of
some kind of soup which I was unable to identify and which they served
in ordinary wash-basins! I don't know that they ever used the basins to
wash in as well, but whether they did or not did not worry me very much.
The soup was good and I enjoyed it very much.
All the time I was there I could see the father and the eldest son, a
boy about seventeen, were extremely nervous. I had indicated to them
that I was deaf and dumb, but if they believed me it didn't seem to make
them any more comfortable.
I lingered at the house for about an hour after the meal, and during
that time a young man came to call on the eldest daughter, a young woman
of perhaps eighteen. The caller eyed me very suspiciously, although
I must have resembled anything but a British officer. They spoke in
Flemish and I did not understand a word they said, but I think they were
discussing my probable identity. During their conversation, I had a
chance to look around the rooms. There were three altogether, two fairly
large and one somewhat smaller, about fourteen feet long and six deep.
In this smaller room there were two double-decked beds, which were
apparently intended to house the whole family, although how the whole
twelve of them could sleep in that one room will ever remain a mystery
to me.
From the kitchen you could walk directly into the cow-barn, where two
cows were kept, and this, as I have pointed out before, is the usual
construction of the poorer Belgian houses.
I could not make out why the caller seemed to be so antagonistic to me,
and yet I am sure he was arguing with the family against me. Perhaps
the fact that I wasn't wearing wooden shoes--I doubt whether I could
have obtained a pair big enough for me--had convinced him that I was not
really a Belgian, because there was nothing about me otherwise which
could have given him that idea.
At that time--and I suppose it is true to-day--about ninety per cent. of
the people in Belgium were wearing wooden shoes. Among the peasants I
don't believe I ever saw any other kind of footwear, and they are more
common there than they are in Holland. The Dutch wear them more as a
matter of custom. In Belgium they are a dire necessity because of the
lack of leather. I was told that during the coming year practically all
the peasants and poorer people in Germany, too, will adopt wooden shoes
for farm-work, as that is one direction in which wood can be substituted
for leather without much loss.
When the young man left I left shortly afterward, as I was not at all
comfortable about what his intentions were regarding me. For all I knew,
he might have gone to notify the German authorities that there was a
strange man in the vicinity--more, perhaps, to protect his friends from
suspicion of having aided me than to injure me.
At any rate, I was not going to take any chances and I got out of that
neighborhood as rapidly as I could.
That night found me right on the frontier of Holland.
XVII
GETTING THROUGH THE LINES
Waiting until it was quite dark, I made my way carefully through a field
and eventually came to the much-dreaded barrier.
It was all that I had heard about it. Every foot of the border-line
between Belgium and Holland is protected in precisely the same manner.
It is there to serve three purposes: first, to keep the Belgians from
escaping into Holland; second, to keep enemies, like myself, from
making their way to freedom; and, third, to prevent desertions on the
part of Germans themselves. One look at it was enough to convince any
one that it probably accomplished all three objects about as well as
any contrivance could, and one look was all I got of it that night,
for while I lay on my stomach gazing at the forbidding structure I
heard the measured stride of a German sentry advancing toward me, and I
crawled away as fast as I possibly could, determined to spend the night
somewhere in the fields and make another and more careful survey the
following night.
The view I had obtained, however, was sufficient to convince me that
the pole-vault idea was out of the question even if I had a pole
and were a proficient pole-vaulter. The three fences covered a span
of at least twelve feet, and to clear the last barbed-wire fence it
would be necessary to vault not only at least ten feet high, but at
least fourteen feet wide, with certain knowledge that to touch the
electrically charged fence meant instant death. There would be no second
chance if you came a cropper the first time.
The stilt idea was also impracticable because of the lack of suitable
timber and tools with which to construct the stilts.
It seemed to me that the best thing to do was to travel up and down
the line a bit in the hope that some spot might be discovered where
conditions were more favorable, although I don't know just what I
expected along those lines.
It was mighty disheartening to realize that only a few feet away lay
certain liberty and that the only thing that prevented me from reaching
it were three confounded fences. I thought of my machine and wished that
some kind fairy would set it in front of me for just one minute.
I spent the night in a clump of bushes and kept in hiding most of the
next day, only going abroad for an hour or two in the middle of the
day to intercept some Belgian peasant and beg for food. The Belgians
in this section were naturally very much afraid of the Germans, and I
fared badly. In nearly every house German soldiers were quartered, and
it was out of the question for me to apply for food in that direction.
The proximity of the border made every one eye one another with more or
less suspicion, and I soon came to the conclusion that the safest thing
I could do was to live on raw vegetables, which I could steal from the
fields at night as I had previously done.
That night I made another survey of the barrier in that vicinity, but it
looked just as hopeless as it had the night before, and I concluded that
I only wasted time there.
I spent the night wandering west, guided by the North Star, which had
served me so faithfully in all my traveling. Every mile or two I would
make my way carefully to the barrier to see if conditions were any
better, but it seemed to be the same all along. I felt like a wild
animal in a cage, with about as much chance of getting out.
The section of the country in which I was now wandering was very heavily
wooded and there was really no very great difficulty in keeping myself
concealed, which I did all day long, striving all the time to think of
some way in which I could circumvent that cursed barrier.
The idea of a huge step-ladder occurred to me, but I searched hour after
hour in vain for lumber or fallen trees out of which I could construct
one. If I could only obtain something which would enable me to reach a
point about nine feet in the air, it would be a comparatively simple
matter to jump from that point over the electric fence.
Then I thought that perhaps I could construct a simple ladder and lean
it against one of the posts upon which the electric wires were strung,
climb to the top and leap over, getting over the barbed-wire fences in
the same way.
This seemed to be the most likely plan, and all night long I sat
constructing a ladder for this purpose.
I was fortunate enough to find a number of fallen pine-trees from ten
to twenty feet long. I selected two of them which seemed sufficiently
strong and broke off all the branches, which I used as rungs, tying them
to the poles with grass and strips from my handkerchief and shirt as
best I could.