Part 12 (1/2)

We found some potatoes in a field that night, dug them up with our bare hands and ate them raw. We were very sad when we thought of those packs.

It was, I remember, on the day following that we saw some of the lighter side of German life. The woods thereabouts were cut up into big blocks, as city streets are. We were laying to in one of them, thankful for the thickness of our shelter when we heard laughing voices and then a gust of laughter as a flying group of girls and boys romped past. They played about for half an hour, causing us great alarm by their youthful fondness for sudden excursions into unlikely spots, after nothing in particular. The oldest of the group, a sizable boy of seventeen or thereabouts and a pretty girl of near that age, hung back long after the younger children had pa.s.sed on. We had little to fear from them. They were quite evidently engrossed in one another.

He argued earnestly, while she listened with a half-smile. Once, he made as if to take her hand but she drew back and stiffened. He ignored the rebuff. A moment afterward he said something that pleased her so well that the last we saw of them his arm was about her waist as they went down the path together.

Parniewinkel lay forty to fifty miles northeast of Bremen, which in turn was one hundred and fifty miles from the Holland border. We reckoned on having to walk double that in covering the stretch, and figured on twenty-one days for the trip.

My diary for that day, August 22, 1916, reads: ”Still raining. Soaked and cold. Breakfast, dinner and supper: turnips and oats.” The night was a repet.i.tion of the preceding one, and made worse by the number of small swamps we had to struggle through. The next day's diary reads: ”Rain stopped and not so cold. Fair cover; still soaked but confident.”

We had our first narrow escape that day. We were lying in the corner of a hedge. It was so misty as to give almost the effect of night, but so long past day as to make travelling unduly dangerous. When the mist lifted we found ourselves within fifty yards of a thickly populated village with just a narrow strip of field between. We could hear all the early morning bustle of any village, the world over. This was about three o'clock. An old man followed by a dog made straight for us. I had just come off the watch, which we took turn about. Simmons whistled cautiously to me, the very sound a warning to be quiet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SALIENT DETAILS OF THE THIRD ESCAPE.]

I looked up. The old man wandered along the hedge and stood over him for several minutes.

It was very trying but he lay motionless, for fear of the dog. A blow would have sufficed for the old man. The latter remained so for a couple of minutes, standing over him, busy.

The meals for that day were peas and oats. It was a slow way of making a meal. We liked the oats the best and pulled some whenever we came to them, if our pockets were not already full, so that they should always be so. We ate them as we went, from the cupped hand, spilling some and spitting out the husks of the others which sometimes stuck in our throats, making them very raw.

For August twenty-fourth the diary reads: ”Very hard night. Crossed about five kilometres of swamps and numerous ca.n.a.ls. Bad accident.

Clothes went to the bottom, but recovered. We are soaked, as usual, and only made about eleven kilometres. Are outside town of Bremen.

Cover very poor. Meals for the day: Nix. Still confident.” The cover ranked before the food as an item of interest to us. Knowing the general direction of Bremen from the camp, and that it was much the largest town in the vicinity, we experienced no difficulty in locating it by the reflection of its lights against the sky.

”August twenty-fifth: More rain and cold. Hiding on the bank of the Weser. Better going last night. Going to look for boat to-night. River two hundred yards broad. Socks played out. Made pair out of a s.h.i.+rt.

Met a cow. Meals for day: turnips, carrots and milk.”

”August 26th: More rain. Found boat and crossed river. Hedges grown so close and so many of them, we have to go around them. Takes a lot of time. Otherwise going good. Meals for the day: turnip, peas and oats.

Met another cow. Frisked her. Cover none too good. Trying to dry our clothes in sun. More confident.” We always became more confident at the slightest semblance of warmth.

The socks we made out of a s.h.i.+rt which came from the clothes-line of some _haus-frau_. We made ”dutch” socks in Western fas.h.i.+on by cutting out large diamond shaped pieces of the cloth, which when the foot was placed on it, folded up nicely into a sock of a kind.

The cow, or rather, her milk, was the greatest treat of all.

It required some searching before we found a boat. We finally discovered a boat house which we broke into and by great good luck found inside it a boat which answered our purpose. Our chief concern was lest the owners might raise a hue and cry against the theft.

However, when we reached the further sh.o.r.e we gave the boat a good push out into the stream so that if they attempted to follow our trail they might find the boat a long ways down stream.

”August twenty-seventh: Rain left off. Trying to dry ourselves in sun.

Had a hard night keeping clear of town. Good cover in a wood. Meals: turnips and another obliging cow. Feet pretty sore. No socks. Still in the best otherwise.”

The town in question was the second one we pa.s.sed after leaving Bremen. We saw the reflection of its lights in the sky and thought that we should easily miss it. But suddenly from some high ground we found ourselves working directly down on the streets so close below us that we could discern people going to and fro. We turned and fled.

Swinging well round to the south we thought at last to clear the town easily, instead of which we again came up against it, in the outskirts this time. And we repeated that disheartening performance a couple of times before we cleared the obstacle and once more swung on our way.

It was such occurrences as this that disheartened us more than anything else, even the great hards.h.i.+ps. To labor and travail, to do the seemingly impossible, night after night and then in the snap of a finger to find all our pains, all our agony gone for nothing, reacted on us terribly at times.

On the following morning we met with our second narrow escape, under much the same circ.u.mstances as the first. We had crawled into a hedge toward the heel of the night, and rather earlier than usual on account of a thick mist which prevented us from holding to our course. When it lifted we made out the slope of a house roof shoving itself out of the grey fog directly in front of us. Our hedge divided two fields, in both of which labourers were already cutting the crops. In this hedge, on each side of us, were gateways so close together that when, as occasionally happened, people pa.s.sed through one, we were forced to crawl up to the other to avoid detection. We had done so again when, without warning, a drover came plodding up behind his sheep. We had no time in which to go back up the hedge. The sheep crowded from the rear and overflowed at the narrow gateway into the hedge where we lay and so ran over our bodies. We remained quiet, thinking he would pa.s.s on; but what with the frightened actions of his sheep and the yelping of the dog his attention was inevitably attracted to the spot where we lay. He came over, looked down at us, but said nothing and stalked on.

We were uncertain as to whether he had seen us or not. Numerous incidents of a similar nature had made us overconfident. We had previously escaped detection in some very tight corners by simply lying quiet. Casual travelers had all but walked on us upon several occasions, and at night we ourselves pa.s.sed many people and thought nothing of it.

A moment later the shepherd walked off directly toward the labourers, glancing back over his shoulder at us as he did so. We struck out at once, before the crowd could gather. We had, at the beginning of this, our third escape, agreed not to be taken alive to go through a repet.i.tion of the torture of mind and body which we had already undergone, and, perhaps for this time, worse. And it was understood that if one played out the other should carry on. Each of us had a stout club and could have made a tidy fight.