“Never will I forget the ghastly horrors of that five-hour ride on that hospital train. The engine barely crawled along, bumping over rails which the Belgians had torn up in the early days of the war, and which had subsequently been re-laid by the Germans. Every railway coach was packed to suffocation with wounded, some of them so frightfully mangled as to appear scarcely human any longer.
“Groans and piteous cries for water or more air echoed in my ears both day and night. Each morning we stopped to put out three or four poor fellows who had died overnight. Some were delirious with pain and would scream, sing or curse frantically, defying the Red Cross nurses to come near them. The smell of blood, ether and arnica made the air sickening. I myself was wholly unnerved by it, but my soldier guards maintained the appearance of stolid indifference. Perhaps they had become used to seeing such suffering as that.
“Finally we arrived in Muhlbruck. I was completely fagged out by then, and really scarcely cared whether they shot me or not. My brain was numb with the horrors with which I had been surrounded. I couldn’t think, let alone invent a story that would plausibly account for my traveling about under an assumed name.
“When they hauled me up before old General Haberkampf, he hardly gave me a chance to defend myself. He is a soldier of the old, hard school of the Emperor Wilhelm I—the sort of fellow who makes militarism his god.
“‘In other words,’ he growled at me, ‘you confess that you are not the person whose passport you use, and that you have for some time past been penetrating our lines under false colors. You now say that you are an American newspaper man, yet you know that war correspondents have been officially ordered out of the war zone. How do I know but that you are lying to me as you already have to all of my officers between here and Malines? You are a spy!’
“I tried to bring him into a reasonable frame of mind, but that is a hard thing to do with a man whose army is being daily beaten further back. He would not listen to me.
“Then they took me to a foul prison where I stayed for three weeks with about fifty other wretched men—some of them Frenchmen who had been captured in battle; a couple of them peasants who had been caught looting dead bodies on the battle field; and three or four common malefactors. We were treated well enough there, but sanitary conditions were unspeakable, and, really, the news of yesterday that my case was at last to come up for final decision, struck me as an actual relief.
“Long before this I had given up all hopes of ever escaping and I expected to be condemned. My trial was a mere form. All the way down that road to the place of execution this morning I kept thinking about you boys, wondering what you were doing and if you would have tried to rescue me had you heard of my plight.
“All of the adventures and happy times we ever had together in the past recurred to me vividly. Good old pals! How I wanted to see you just once more before I died!
“When they backed me up against that wall, I closed my eyes, expecting to hear the death volley ring out at any moment. Then I suddenly felt something tugging and slashing at my wrists, the hard ropes fell away, and I turned, half-dazed, to find Buck shoving two big revolvers into my hands, with word that you other boys were near with the Flyer.