My Escape from Germany

by Eric A. Keith

It was an absolute nightmare. Panting and breathless, I got up after one of my many tumbles. It was in an open kind of wood. My soaked clothes were dripping, yet I felt warm with the speed of my flight. Then the sensation of being utterly lost came over me, the danger-signal that the nerves are giving way. Luckily I had sense enough to recognize it as such, and promptly sat down in half an inch of water, pretending that I was in no hurry whatever.

I tried to reason out the situation. If the road were where I sought it, I should have come to it long before. My maps were unreliable in small details. Suppose the road crossed to the south of the railway, some distance outside Vehlen, instead of in the village as marked. In that case I had started from a point north of the road and south of the railway. Better go back to the railway and follow it west until I came to the point of intersection.

I turned due south, feeling better for the rest, and ten minutes later jumped the ditch along the turnpike. The night was very fine, the road hard and smooth. My footsteps rang so loudly that it was difficult to tell whether anybody was coming up behind me or not. For the third time I took off my boots and socks, and walked the rest of the night with bare feet. It was simply glorious to be able to step out. The exercise soon sent the blood tingling and warming through my body, which had become chilled during my rest in the woods. My clothes were drying apace; I hardly knew now that they were wet. My toes seemed to grip the ground and lever me forward. It was good to be alive.

After I had traversed the considerable belt of isolated farms surrounding a village, the country became quite uninhabited for a time, until a solitary inn appeared on my right. Here another road joined from the north, and at the point of meeting stood a big iron sign-post. “Dangerous corner ahead! Motors to slow down,” I managed to decipher, clinging to the pointing arm. Soon after, the brook was crossed on a stone bridge. Not being thirsty, I did not stop, but went forward until I came to a track on my right. Posts were planted across it at measured intervals, as if it had been closed to wheeled traffic some time before, yet there were fresh cart ruts running parallel to it. The country was flat, with plenty of cover, and empty. I kept checking the direction of the path, which meandered about a little, and found it one or two points more westerly than I had expected. This worried me a little. Its angle with the road shown on the map was so small, however, that I could not attach undue importance to it. At the worst, it meant striking the frontier ultimately a mile or two farther south, increasing the distance by that much from the point the soldier had so triumphantly warned me against the night before.

In due course I came across another railroad and a turnpike. A quarter of a mile to the north a church steeple was faintly outlined against the sky, indicating a village. This tallied fairly well with my expectations. When crossing over the line of rails I had entered the danger zone, where sentries and patrols might be expected anywhere. Probably the frontier was no more than three miles ahead, and might be nearer.

Instead of proceeding along the road, I walked at about two hundred yards to one side over plowed fields. It hurt my feet until I thrust them hastily into my boots without troubling about the socks.

The sky was paling faintly in the east. It was high time to disappear into some thicket, like the hunted animal I was.

Behind a windmill and a house on my right the outline of dark woods promised cover. There was no possibility now of picking and choosing; I had to take what I could find. What there was of it was the reverse of satisfactory. Most of the ground was swampy. The trees and bushes, which seemed to offer excellent places for concealment while it was dark, moved apart with the growing light, while I grew more anxious.

At last I found a wood composed of small birches and pines, and some really magnificent trees. Several paths ran through it. Fairly in the center they left a sort of island, a little more densely studded with trees than the rest, and with plenty of long heather between them. This must have been about five o’clock.