It was a great relief to have somebody with whom to talk, and we set to and discussed details in low whispers.
I then found out that I had not been missed at roll-call the night I had hidden in the tin office.
Fox told me his adventures and I gave him an account of mine in exchange.
Again our luck was well to the fore. On examining our supplies of food, etc., I found that Fox had lost nearly all his biscuits and chocolate in the crossing of the Aller, which they had had to negotiate by swimming a raft across. This had got swamped, as its buoyancy was poor, naturally with disastrous consequences to much of the perishable food they had taken with them.
I had got a good number, and so would be able to supply them and in exchange they gave me other things.
My compass was a good one, theirs poor; whereas my map was exceedingly bad and theirs quite good.
We found that we had both the same ideas of the route to be taken towards the frontier. The Germans had captured three other lots of escapers in the district around Osnabrück.
Forest guards were active in the woods in this district, and this had decided both of us on our line before we met.
Another fact which made us the more sure which route we should follow was the nature of the ground as shown by the maps. The country which we eventually traversed is shown as marshy, and we had both decided that the great drought in Germany this summer would have dried this up to a very large extent, and we hoped that the Germans might not have taken this fact into consideration in allocating guards, so that this district would be more lightly watched than others. As a matter of fact the maps exaggerate the marshes, and I should think that even after really wet weather it would be possible to follow the same line.