I leave the Hôtel Kron Prinz and wait outside the station for two hours before the train is due to leave. I fight literally and fearfully for—not a seat—but just standing-room. My first-class ticket procures me a few inches of space in a first-class corridor where the squash is so great that the surrounding faces touch mine and I cannot move hand or foot. There are fifteen people in each compartment. The corridors even are so full that men and women are standing in the lavatories. The order is given to close the windows while we go over the Rhine. I remember nothing more until I come to with my back against the wall and my mouth sweet with the delicious odour and purifying feel of peppermint. A kind German is popping little peppermint comfits into my mouth. Blessed Teuton! We travel like that for hours. It seems days. We have leisure to study the methods of the army of men working at the fortifications outside Cologne. The express pants along at a walking pace for a few miles, stops at a wayside station and fat market women fight their way in and stick their bulging baskets—faute de mieux—on our heads. One woman gets wedged in the lavatory door, adding suffocation to the other trials of the poor souls within. We arrive at Duisburg. The train will stop here seven hours. Seven minutes I had understood previously. I alight. The peppermint-providing Teuton and a charming German girl who has been already forty-seven hours on the journey, take me in tow. We wander through the town, we enjoy cream-laden chocolate, ice in a café, we speak of anything and everything except the war.
At the station we admire the wonderful organisation of the Red Cross. Then we dine together. An obsequious waiter brings the menu—in French. A storm-cloud gathers on the faces of my two companions.
“Take it away. We don’t speak French any more,” he says roughly. We are reduced to Wienerschnitzel and beer. I dislike both. The train comes in bringing German wounded, all pale and very silent except one who is able to stand on the platform and becomes instantly the centre of a thrilled audience.
I offer my fruit to the silent, white-faced men who are making shift to find comfort on the hard cushions. “Why not?” says one indifferently reaching out his hand for the purple grapes. The others stare at me but are seemingly past interest.
The train starts. Our first-class compartment is as full as before, but instead of the beating sun, a blessed coolness has come to us with the darkness. My German friend meets her mother at Wesel. They all implore me to stay the night with them ... as many nights as I like. I am touched but must get on. I may yet be stopped on the frontier. Two soldiers, bayonets fixed, descend on me and demand papers. For the moment I have mislaid them. A crowd collects. Spy-baiting is always fun.
There is decided depression when I produce my passport and the Commandant’s papers. They let me pass. I enter the train for Goch and a talkative guard comes to keep me company. He was in charge of the train which has brought many prisoners through—thousands of French and only two English so far. “And very glad the French are to be here out of the fighting. They were all laughing as they came by,” he says.
At Goch I fall out. I can afford to sleep here, since I am in safety. And sleep I do in a small wayside hotel.
Little old ladies regale me at breakfast with tales of “hideous Belgian atrocities.” I catch a train to Flushing.
I hold in my lap all the way a French lady of eighty-six, who has already been seven days in the train. I am desperately afraid she will die in my arms. The rest of the carriage is filled with Japanese fleeing from Germany after their declaration of war. For once I bless their smallness of stature. They curl themselves up on the floor, in corners, on hand-bags. I am sure if need be they would travel quite contented in the rack. I notice their only European language is German. When I address them in French and English they cannot understand.
I get on the boat at Flushing. It all seems too good to be true. Two ladies plump down beside me and tell of their “terrible adventures,” in leaving Germany. These harrowing tales resolve themselves into the loss of some pretty frocks. It suddenly occurs to me that I too have lost all my clothes.