Two minutes of silence, broken only by the gentle throbbing of the engines. Then from the blackness near the street gate came the sound of hurrying feet. I could make out three stumbling figures, apparently urged along by a fourth. "Who are they?" I asked the steward.
"They must be the three Tommies who escaped from Germany. Brave lads they are. A couple more days and we'll have them hack in England."
"A couple of days?" I exclaimed. "Why, it's only eight hours to the Thames estuary, isn't it?"
"Eight hours in peace time; and eight hours for Dutch boats now—when the Germany don't kidnap them away to Zeebrugge. But the course to the Thames is not our course. The old fourteen-hour trip to Hull often takes us forty now. Every passage is different, too. It isn't only on the sea that the Germans try to bother us; they also keep after us when we are in port here. Only yesterday the Dutch inspectors did us a good turn by arresting five spies monkeying around the boat—three Germans and two Dutchmen."
The little vessel was headed into the stream now, the three Tommies had gone inside, followed a little later by the two men who were on the deck when I arrived, men who talked French. When the steward left I was alone on the deck.
I watched the receding lights of Rotterdam till they flickered out in the distance. The night was misty and too dark to make out anything on shore. My thoughts went back to the last time, nearly a year before, when I had been on that river. I saw it then, in flood of moonlight as I stepped on the boat deck of the giant liner Rotterdam. The soft strains of a waltz floated up from the music room, adding enchantment to the windmills and low Dutch farmhouses strung out below the level of the water.
At that time my thoughts were full of my coming attempt to get into Germany, a Germany which was smashing through Serbia, and already planning the colossal onslaught against Verdun, the onslaught which she hoped would put France out of the war. I had got into Germany, but for a long time I had almost despaired of getting out; twice I had been turned back courteously but firmly from the frontiers, once when I tried to cross to Switzerland and again when I started for Denmark. A reliable friend had told me that the Wilhelmstrasse had suspected me but could prove nothing against me. The day before I felt Germany I was called to the Wilhelmstrasse, where I received the interesting and somewhat surprising information that the greatest good that a correspondent could do in the world be to use his influence to bring the United States and Germany to a better understanding. I made neither comment nor promise. I was well aware that the same Wilhelmstrasse, while laying the wires for an attempt to have my country play Germany's game, was sedulously continuing its propaganda of Gott strafe Amerika among the German people. As in the hatred sown against Great Britain hate against America was sown so that the Government would have a united Germany behind them in case of war.
I was at last out of Germany, but the lights of the Hook of Holland reminded me that a field of German activity lay ahead—floating mines, torpedoes, submarines, and swift destroyers operating from Ostend and Zeebrugge. They are challenging British supremacy in the southern part of the North Sea, through the waters of which we must now feel our way.
We were off the Hook running straight to the open sea. The nervous feeling of planning and delay of the last few days gave way now to the exhilaration which comes of activity in danger. If the Germans should get us, the least that would happen to me would be internment until the end of the war. I was risking everything on the skill and pluck of the man who paced the bridge above my head, and on the efficiency of the British patrol of the seas.
The little steamer suddenly began to plunge and roll with the waves washing her decks when I groped my way, hanging to the rail, to the snug cabin where six men sat about the table. The pallor of their faces made them appear wax-like in the yellow light of the smoking oil lamp which swung suspended overhead. Three of them were British, two were Belgian, and one was French, but there was a common bond which drew them together in a comradeship which transcends all harriers of nationality, for they had escaped from a common enemy.