To help along our train two more little engines were added, but even with four of them to draw and to shove their load was now so heavy that we were jerked along with sensations as though we were having a jaw tooth pulled every few seconds. After such a fashion we progressed very slowly. Already we knew that we were not going to Brussels, as we had been promised in Beaumont that we should go. We only hoped we were not bound for a German military fortress in some interior city.
It fell to my lot that second night to sleep in the aisle. In spite of being walked on at intervals I slept pretty well. When I waked it was three o'clock in the morning, just, and we were standing in the train shed at Liège, and hospital corps men were coming aboard with hot coffee and more raw sausages for the wounded. Among the Germans, sausages are used medicinally. I think they must keep supplies of sausages in their homes, for use in cases of accident and sickness.
I got up and looked from the window. The station was full of soldiers moving about an various errands. Overhead big arc lights sputtered spitefully, so that the place was almost as bright as day. Almost directly below me was a big table, which stood on the platform and was covered over with papers and maps. At the table sat two officers—high officers, I judged—writing busily. Their stiff white cuff-ends showed below their coat-sleeves; their slim black boots were highly polished, and altogether they had the look of having just escaped from the hands of a valet. Between them and the frowsy privates was a gulf a thousand miles wide and a thousand miles deep.
When I woke again it was broad daylight and we had crossed the border and were in Germany. At small way stations women and girls wearing long white aprons and hospital badges came under the car windows with hot drinks and bacon sandwiches for the wounded. They gave us some, too, and, I think, bestowed what was left upon the prisoners at the rear. We ran now through a land untouched by war, where prim farmhouses stood in prim gardens. It was Sunday morning and the people were going to church dressed in their Sunday best. Considering that Germany was supposed to have been drained of its able-bodied male adults for war-making purposes we saw, among the groups, an astonishingly large number of men of military age. By contrast with the harried country from which we had just emerged this seemed a small Paradise of peace. Over there in Belgium all the conditions of life had been disorganized and undone, where they had not been wrecked outright. Over here in Germany the calm was entirely unruffled.
It shamed us to come as we were into such surroundings. For our car was littered with sausage skins and bread crusts, and filth less pleasant to look at and stenches of many sorts abounded. Indeed I shall go further and say that it stank most fearsomely. As for us, we felt ourselves to be infamous offenses against the bright, clean day. We had not slept in a bed for five nights or had our clothes off for that time. For three days none of us had eaten a real meal at a regular table. For two days we had not washed our faces and hands.
The prisoners of war went on to Cologne to be put in a laager, but we were bidden to detrain at Aix-la-Chapelle. We climbed off, a dirty, wrinkled, unshaven troop of vagabonds, to find ourselves free to go where we pleased. That is, we thought so at first. But by evening the Frenchman and the Belgians had been taken away to be held in prison until the end of the war, and for two days the highly efficient local secret-service staff kept the rest of us under its watchful care. After that, though, the American consul, Robert J. Thompson, succeeded in convincing the military authorities that we were not dangerous.
I still think that taking copious baths and getting ourselves shaved helped to clear us of suspicion.