In a big department-store we bought the articles mentioned. The sleeping-bags were thin, by no means waterproof and almost useless, but better than nothing. Clothed as we were, in ordinary town clothes only, I was much concerned to get what extra protection from the cold we could.
While I was completing this purchase, a shop-walker addressed me and followed up his introductory remarks with a reference to the latest air raid on London and a pious wish as to the fate of the d——d English. I heartily endorsed his sentiments, while Wallace, with dancing eyes, grinned facetiously at me. Just at closing time we left the store and took the hand-bag to the station cloak-room.
Walking about the streets to wile away the time until ten o’clock, we met S. and G. carrying their luggage. “Hullo, what the ——! It’s all right, boys; be at the place at ten.”
We were there at half-past nine. We were still there at eleven. Nobody came. Several times I made the round of the café, even though we sat close to the only entrance and could not miss them if they came. At half-past eleven we left, but returned in twenty minutes. Then we gave up hope.
CHAPTER XVI
FROM BERLIN TO HALTERN
The night was bitterly cold. The extraordinarily mild weather of the last weeks had changed at the most inopportune moment. A few hard flakes of snow were now and again driven into our faces by a searching wind. We were without shelter, without food for the walking part of our enterprise, without adequate clothes. In Wallace’s case a year and a half, in mine seven months, of prison life had not improved the condition of our health. We were decidedly too soft to stand a number of days of cold weather without at least some fatty nourishment.
I pictured us sleeping in ordinary townish winter clothes on a freezing day, perhaps with snow on the ground, in thin sleeping-bags consisting of an outer cover of canvas and a light lining of shoddy. We should be wet through in half an hour. The moisture would freeze on our garments as the generation of body heat, already at a low ebb for want of food, decreased. Then, we would go to sleep.