“Once, during my first attempt, I got caught on Dutch soil by the Germans,” I remarked in the course of the conversation.
“What? On Dutch territory? Where was that?” The sergeant was very much interested.
“I can show it to you on a map. It was northwest of Bocholt.”
He disappeared and returned with maps and telegraph forms. I told him my story, and he made notes and wrote two telegrams.
“What you say is possible,” he said at last. “Our men stand three hundred meters behind the actual frontier.”
The next two nights we spent in a hutment in Coevorden. We met a number of Russian privates and N.C.O.’s there, who had made good their escape and were, like us, waiting to be sent to a quarantine camp. Among them were three who had crossed the same night as we, but through the woods at the northern end of the swamp. We were indebted to them and their dead comrade on German soil for the warning shots at midnight.
There followed a fortnight in quarantine camp in Enschede. Under the Dutch regulations, any person “crossing the frontier in an irregular manner,” without a passport, viséd by a Dutch consul, is subjected to this quarantine. We tried to shorten our stay there, pleading that we came from a healthy camp. We were unsuccessful.
We did not like Enschede camp. The food was insufficient for us, who could not live almost exclusively on potatoes. We found it strange that we should not be allowed to supplement our rations by purchasing extra food. The only things we could buy, at first, were apples and chocolate, and only a limited amount of either. Our deep gratitude is due, however, to Mr. Tattersall of Enschede, who indefatigably looked after us and the other Englishmen in Enschede camp, much to the disadvantage of his pocket.
After we had received a clean bill of health, being civilians, we were allowed to proceed to Rotterdam without a guard. We arrived there at ten o’clock one night, and I was promptly arrested, being mistaken for an embezzler who had decamped the same day from somewhere, taking fifteen thousand florins of another man’s money with him. My health passport saved the situation.
The next morning we were at the British consulate. The rest of the day we careered through the town in a motor-car—from the consulate to the shipping-office, from the shipping-office to somewhere else, from there to the consulate’s doctor, back to the shipping-office and the photographer, and again to the consulate. That night we were on board at Hook of Holland.