CHAPTER XI
BEHIND WALLS AND BARBED WIRE
THE English officer reassured me. “Be assured,” he said, “that you will be able to interview your Swiss Consul at Gibraltar to-day. You will be free the moment he confirms that your passport is in order.”
I was only too soon to learn how matters stood in regard to this. The steam-launch churned its way through the water, and soon we disembarked in the inner part of the war harbour.
Ten soldiers with fixed bayonets stood ready at the landing-stage. A few curt orders and, with our few belongings on our backs, we had to fall in in two files. The ten soldiers took us into their midst, and at the word “Quick march” the sad procession set out on its way. Everything around me seemed part of a dream. I was so horribly downcast that I was hardly able to think. A prisoner! Was it true? Was it possible?
It was horrible, incomprehensible! We were being led along like malefactors, and the population seemed to regard us as such. The soldiers told us to hurry up. I was so weak that I could hardly move, as the fever still held me in its grip and I had taken nothing except quinine for the last three days. The sun beat down on our backs, and I had never felt more desolate or more hopeless.
We climbed higher and higher, through narrow, hot streets. Soon the houses gave place to bare rocks on either side. After an hour we had reached the highest summit of Gibraltar. Orders rang out, barbed-wire fences and iron doors opened and clanged to, chains and bolts rattled.
A prisoner!
We were first brought to the police-station, and there subjected to an examination. I protested with energy and demanded to be taken at once to my Consul, as I had definitely been promised this by the English officer. But they laughed regretfully. We were not the first, alas, that had been brought before them and had made this same request! How many had probably stood in the same place and been obliged to bury their hopes in the same way!
After that examination we had to submit to being searched.