As a result of his friend’s negotiations Bob received news about the first of February which raised his spirits with a joyful leap from their tired level.
“It’s all fixed, Bob,” the surgeon told him, coming into the room, papers in hand. “You’re to go south at once, and what’s better, they have consented to your father’s request. You are to go to the convalescent hospital at Badheim, near Coblenz. Captain Leslie will travel with you on his way to England. This climate won’t do any longer for that foot of his.”
“Greyson, it’s you who fixed it all for me. I’ll never forget it!” Bob glowed with delighted anticipation, walking on his mended leg with sudden boldness and confidence. What were the eternal grey skies to him now, or the darkness of early afternoon that already began to fill the room? He forgot the hardships of the long journey before him, the weary painful days he had just passed through, as well as the lingering weakness of his body. “And Alan can go with me!” he exclaimed, hardly believing his own good fortune. “When do we start, Greyson? My leg feels as strong as iron.”
“Next week if all goes well. I shall send a Hospital Corps man with you. Remember you’re not a well man yet, and have a long way to travel. Do you feel strong enough to undertake it? From here to Moscow—to Warsaw—to Berlin?”
“Around the world, if you like, so that it lands me somewhere out of the Arctic Circle,” said Bob, undashed in spirit by any prospect of hardship ahead. “Greyson, I’d like to go where the sun’s hot enough to sunburn me, and where oranges would drop off the trees into my lap.”
“Coblenz won’t quite come up to that, but it’s a big improvement on Archangel.”
“I wish you were coming, Greyson. As Alan would say, 'Horrid beasts—Bolshies.’”
Ten days later Bob and Alan left Archangel to begin their journey south. Toward the end of February, after weeks of slow, interrupted, uncomfortable travel, they reached Berlin, and realized with a swift reaction after days of discouragement, that the worst of the way lay behind them.
“The longest part, you mean,” remarked Alan when Bob made this observation. “Don’t know about the worst.”
He said this as they emerged from the Friedrichstrasse station onto the broad avenue Friedrichstrasse.