I went up towards the church, which stands on the top of a steep hill. There are some gardens sloping down the hill. I found an old sort of summer-house in one of these and went to sleep. It was about 1 a.m., and none too warm.
I was up at dawn and started again on my weary pilgrimage of the streets of Flensburg. How I hated that place! I half thought of altering my plan and doing the rest of the journey on foot. It was about 70 kilometres to the frontier.
I passed three military policemen in half an hour and wondered resentfully what they were doing in such large quantities on a Sunday morning.
At about eight I got to the station, and ate my last sandwich. Assuming that the porter had been right the previous night, I had got to put in three hours more dreary waiting. There were no overhead notices, but I noticed a useful-looking collection of time-tables stuck up on big boards in a little alcove just out of the booking hall. If I could get behind the rearmost of these I could put in much of my time unobserved. People might come and people might go, but they would never dream that I had been there all the time.
I examined the time-tables. I could make nothing of the Sunday trains, but I found the name Ober-Jersthal. That had been the station given by our informant at Stralsund as the last station outside the Grenz-Gebiet. In the maps we had seen in the camp we had never been able to verify this place. Ober-Jersthal must be on the main line running up the east Schleswig coast. So far so good, but at what time would this train go? It could not be the same train as the Tondern train, for Tondern is west Schleswig.
I wandered on to the platform. The bookstall was open and I bought a paper and also a Pocket Railway Guide. The Guide had a good map. I saw from this that the Tondern and Ober-Jersthal lines branched off at Tingleff—possibly the two trains went in one as far as Tingleff. I had not long to wait for corroboration. At the cloak-room I heard a man ask the attendant what time the train went for a station which I knew to be north of Ober-Jersthal on the same line. The answer was 11.3. There could be no doubt of it now. I booked for Ober-Jersthal.
SKETCH MAP
OF
N.W. GERMANY AND FRONTIERS
Shaded area = Neutral country
X = Point where the author crossed the frontier
I had still an hour to wait. It passed somehow. I went into the waiting room and got my first drink for 29 hours, a glass of beer; it was washy stuff but went down wonderfully well. There were a lot of Matrosen (sailors) in the waiting room. Some of them stared at me and I began to have the Hamburg platform haunted sensation over again. I pretended to read my paper fiercely for half an hour and then went on to the platform. I began to regret that I had not had a shave that morning.
The train came in punctually. There was no incident till Tingleff, about 20 kilos northward. There I saw the passport officials waiting on the platform. I had almost forgotten about this part of the business....