CHAPTER XIII[ToC]
ACROSS THE FRONTIER
During our rapid march we passed a few houses, and shortly afterwards began to cross an open moor which spread flat and wide in front of us. Our map showed a canal bordering the frontier itself, and it was along this canal that we anticipated having to avoid the line of actual frontier watchers.
We were desperately anxious to make the frontier line within the next half-hour, in order to avoid having to lie waiting for the next night within a mile or so of it, as so many unfortunate escaped prisoners have been caught while hiding near the frontier itself. This anxiety on our part was now the cause of our making an appalling error, which nearly ended disastrously for us both. When within a mile of a line of trees, which we decided must be along the canal bank and must practically define the frontier line, we suddenly saw two German soldiers advancing some thousand yards in front of us. Had they seen us? We dived to the ground and lay still, in the hope that we had not been seen. Soon there was no doubt whatever that we had been observed, as the two Boches came straight towards us at a steady walk.
We decided that by separating one or both of us might succeed in getting away from them, and so I crawled towards the north while Fox went off southwards towards a peat observation hut.
Fox was dressed in his dark blue suit still, and I had now got my khaki coat as my outside garment. The value of the khaki coat now came out.
They evidently saw Fox crawling and not me, as they very soon changed their direction slightly in order to go after him. Fox and I had crawled two hundred yards apart when he must have had no doubt that they were definitely after him, and I suddenly saw him get up and run off, away from the frontier direction.