_Thursday, December 10th._ Soon after the train left Berlin this
morning I judged that I was being shadowed. When it pulled out of the
station there were four people, including myself, in the six-place
compartment, the two middle seats being vacant, one on my left as I
sat next the window and the other diagonally facing me. Soon after the
train was well started two men came in and occupied these seats. This
in itself was suspicious, since people do not seek seats while a train
is in motion. Both moreover had the air of being detectives. I, by this
time, know the type well, for I have been constantly shadowed ever
since my arrival in Germany and am perfectly certain that my rooms have
several times been searched while I was absent. I simply continued to
behave with the greatest possible circumspection, the two detectives
meanwhile staring at me constantly with fixed intensity.
It was a bit unpleasant because I did not certainly know the nature
of the dispatches I carried, but realized that they were extremely
important. They were in a small leather mail pouch, padlocked and
sealed, which I had set on the floor between my feet and knees.
Everything went quietly for some two hours. I could not look out of
the window in towns and yards because I might have seen troop-trains,
factories, etc., and that would have been "indiscreet." The part of
Germany from Berlin to Holland is utterly flat and uninteresting,
so that there was no pleasure in looking at the countryside between
stations. I pretended to doze, or read three German weeklies which
I had bought. One of these finally precipitated matters. It was the
_Fliegende Blätter_, a comic paper of about the class of _Life_ or
_Punch_. There was in it a joke in German argot which had been too much
for my scant knowledge of the language and the courier who had escorted
me from the Embassy had by the merest hazard translated it for me. In
my desperate efforts to amuse myself I was looking through this sheet
again and encountering this joke thought, "If I don't write down the
English I shall forget it." Whereupon I took out a pencil and wrote the
translation interlinearly.
Soon afterwards one of the detectives got up, went out into the
corridor, and came back with three conductors who, in Germany, of
course, are military officials. The three civilians who had shared
the compartment left us as if they had been rehearsed. One of the
detectives then suddenly burst into a perfect berserker rage, getting
quite purple in the face, and snatching up the _Fliegende Blätter_
proceeded carefully to turn over the pages again and again, holding
each page against the light. It was altogether melodramatically
ridiculous. Taking the paper from me in this way, although inoffensive,
was perhaps within his rights since it concerned me only in a personal
and not in an official way, and so I sat quite calmly in my seat and,
biding my time, made no move of any kind. I paid no attention to the
conductors, judging the detective to be the kingpin and the conductors
merely dragged in as a matter of routine. None of them could read
English and they chose to regard the interlineation (one line of about
ten words) as extraordinarily suspicious.
The detective asked me for my passports and did so without going
through the customary formality of showing his police card. I demanded
as a matter of routine that he do this and began to draw out of my
pocket the large envelope in which I keep all my documents in order to
take out my Eagle-stamped German courier's paper. Without complying
with my request he grabbed for this envelope, while at the same moment
someone jerked at the bag which was between my knees. All this was
an affair totally different from that of the _Fliegende Blätter_. I
had thoroughly thought out what I would do in an emergency if German
officials should attempt to take my pouch from me, and had decided
that I should make enough of a resistance so that there should be no
possibility of disputing the fact that physical force had been used and
an assault committed. This would "let me out," since a dispatch-bearer
cannot be expected successfully to defend himself against the whole
German army. Incidentally I might add that interference in any way
with the dispatch-bearer of a neutral country is a very heinous
international and diplomatic sin. I therefore jerked my envelope of
papers rudely out of the detective's hand and gave him a vigorous
shove, resisting an almost overwhelming temptation to hit him with all
my might on his fat, unprotected jaw. I had half risen to my feet,
meanwhile keeping a grip on the dispatch bag with my knees, and at
the same time I vigorously swung my hips and freed myself from the
man below. The detective struck the opposite wall of the compartment
and bounced off toward the doorway, where he and the conductors stood
jabbering and waving their arms and ever getting more and more purple
in the face.