Part 27 (1/2)
The two men whom, I had heard talking French on the deck were Belgians. The one had been a soldier at Liege, and had managed to scramble across a ditch after his three days' tramp to Holland, although the sentry's bullet whistled uncomfortably close. He said that his strongest wish was to rejoin the Belgian army so that he might do his part to avenge the death of seven civilian hostages who had been shot before his eyes.
The other Belgian was just over military age, but he wanted to reach England to volunteer. His nerve and resource are certainly all right. He knew of the electrified wire along the Belgian-Dutch frontier, so he brought two pieces of gla.s.s with him, and thus held the current of death away from his body while he wriggled through to freedom.
We talked until after midnight. The French captain, formerly an instructor of artillery at Saint Cyr--the West Point and the Sandhurst of France--taken prisoner in the first autumn of the war, was the last to tell his story.
At Torgau, Saxony, in the heart of Germany, be plunged into the Elbe in the darkness of night, stemmed the swift waters, and on landing, half-drowned, rose speedily and walked fast to avoid a fatal chill.
For twenty-nine days he struggled on towards liberty. Nothing but the tremendous impulse of the desire for freedom could have carried him on his own two feet across Germany, without money, through countless closely-policed villages and great cities, in a country where everyone carries an ident.i.ty book (with which, of course, he was unprovided), without a friend or accomplice at any point of the journey, with only a map torn from a railway time-table, and no other guides than the sun, moon, and stars and direction posts. I will give the rest of the man's story in his own words.
”I came to the conclusion that my brain would not stand the captivity. I knew some of the difficulties before me, but I doubt whether I would have started if I had known them all. I lived on unthreshed wheat and rye, apples, blackberries, bilberries, carrots, turnips and even raw potatoes. I did not taste one morsel of cooked food or anything stronger than water till I arrived in Holland. I did not speak one word to any human being. On two occasions I marched more than thirty miles in the twenty-four hours. I slept always away from the roadside, and very often by day, and as far as possible from any inhabited house. I am, as you see, weak and thin, practically only muscle and bone, and during the last three days, while waiting in Holland for the boat, I have had to eat carefully to avoid the illness that would almost certainly follow repletion.”
After I had lain down for a few hours' sleep, I thought, as I had often thought during the past thirty months, that although this is a war of machinery there is plenty of the human element in it, too.
People who tell only of the grim-drab aspect of the great struggle sometimes forget that romances just as fine as were ever spun by Victor Hugo happen around, them every day.
At dawn I hung to the rail of the wildly tossing s.h.i.+p, looking at the horizon from which the mists were clearing. Two specks began to grow into the long low black lines of destroyers. Our most anxious moment of the voyage had come. We waited for the shot that would show them to be German.
”They're all right. They're the escort!” came a voice on the winds that swept over the bridge.
They grew rapidly large, lashed the sea white as they tore along one on each side of us, diving through the waves when they could not ride them. When abreast of us they seemed almost to stop in their own length, wheel and disappear in the distance. Somehow the way they wheeled reminded me of the way the Cossacks used to pull their horses sharply at right angles when I saw them covering the rearguard in the retreat through the Bukovina.
The rough soldier at my side looked after them, with a mist in his eyes that did not come from the sea. ”I'll be able to see my wife again,” he said, more to the waves than to me. ”I didn't write, because I didn't want to raise any false hopes. But this settles it, we're certain to get home safe now. I suppose I'll walk in and find her packing my food parcel for Germany--the parcel that kept me alive, while some of them poor Russian chaps with n.o.body to send them parcels are going under every day.”
We ran close to two masts sticking up out of the water near the mouth of the Humber, the mast of our sister s.h.i.+p, which had gone down with all on board when she struck a mine.
That is the sort of sight which makes some critics say, ”What is the matter with the British Navy?” Those critics forget to praise the mine-sweepers that we saw all about, whose bravery, endurance and n.o.ble spirit of self-sacrifice lead them to persevere in their perilous work and enable a thousand s.h.i.+ps to reach port to one that goes down.
On that rough voyage across the North Sea, through the destroyer and armed motor launch patrol, maintained by men who work unflinchingly in the shadow of death, I felt once again the power of the British Navy. I cast my lot with that Navy when I left Holland. I know what its protection means, for I could not have crossed on a neutral Dutch vessel.
It is all very well to complain about a few raiders that manage in thirty months to pierce the British patrols, or the hurried dash of swift destroyers into the Channel, but when you look from the white chalk cliffs of the Kentish coast at hundreds of vessels pa.s.sing safely off the Downs, when you sail the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and see only neutral and Allied s.h.i.+ps carrying on commerce, when you cross the Rhine and stand in food lines hour after hour and day after day, where men and women who gloried in war now whine at the hards.h.i.+ps it brings, when you see a mighty nation disintegrating in the shadow of starvation, and then pa.s.s to another nation, which, though far less self-sustaining in food, has plenty to eat, you simply have to realise that there are silent victories which are often farther reaching than victories of _eclat_.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE LITTLE s.h.i.+PS
I have been particularly impressed with two misconceptions which have existed, and to some extent still exist, not only in Germany but in neutral countries. The first is that England lacks virility, is degenerate, has had her day of greatness; the second, that in the present war she is continuing what is alleged to have been her policy in the past, namely, pulling the strings and reaping the benefit while other nations do the fighting. Through personal investigation I find these contentions so thoroughly refuted that to develop the point would be to commence another book instead of finis.h.i.+ng this one.
As I write I can look from my desk in the Alexandra Hotel, Bridlington, on to the North Sea where it washes the ”Frightfulness Coast,” for Bridlington lies between Hull and Scarborough.
I see trawlers fis.h.i.+ng and mine-sweeping whenever I raise my eyes from my writing. Their crews know that they work in the shadow of death in what they describe in the dock-side taverns as the greatest sport in the world. Praise of the big s.h.i.+ps often causes us to forget the little s.h.i.+ps. I admire the one and reverence the other. For if the men on the humbler craft could be intimidated, the doctrine of Frightfulness would be justified by victory.