At about ten o’clock I was taken to the inn to be examined by the “sergeant-major-lieutenant.” On the way we passed, and I recognized, the shed.
“How far is it from here to the frontier?” I asked my escort.
He did not answer.
“Look here, I can’t get away from you, can I, with no cover within two hundred yards and you having five in the magazine and one in the barrel? Can’t you understand that I want to know?”
He eyed me doubtfully.
“You can spit across the frontier from here,” he made slow answer.
That, I knew, was meant metaphorically, but it sufficed for me.
The examination did not amount to much. I was considered with grave suspicion by the sergeant-major, because at that time I could not tell him the name of the village I had escaped from. Also, the British officer was haunting their minds still. If he and I were not identical, I might have met and helped him, was their beautifully logical argument. “See that he is taken to Bocholt on the two-thirty train and handed over to a man from Company Headquarters. Now take him back to the guard-room.”
When we got back there, they put a sentry in the yard, who sat on a chair with a rifle across his lap, and went to sleep. It must have been a strictly unofficial sentry. Nobody took the slightest notice of him, and he was quite superfluous, because most of the soldiers off duty were in the yard all the time enjoying the warm sunshine. Dinner-hour came and went. I, of course, received nothing officially, but the man who had talked with me in the morning gave me several of his sandwiches.