This made matters easier for me, and I was able to crawl forward in full confidence. A dyke, at the bottom of which was a little water, had to be crossed, and then some rough fields.
Shortly after this I heard a patrol which I easily avoided in the corn. Several more dykes, the deepest water in any of them only reaching to my knees, had to be crossed, and I was once more on arable land. I must now have been two miles inside Holland, but now again I heard a patrol. This time a cyclist dashed along the road on hearing me, I suppose, and once again the same curlew noises began to spread themselves around me.
However, this time I knew about them and pushed on extremely rapidly, cutting across country and keeping to the cornfields where I knew I should never be followed and be very difficult to catch.
I soon left this danger behind, and then struck a pavé road and a railway line. The sleepers were wooden, whereas in Germany they are iron.
I felt now that I was across, but continued steadily on my way. Seeing a great number of powerful lights in front of me I made for them, and eventually reached them, to find that they belonged to a factory working at top pressure. Around this factory straggled a large village.
Tuesday, 3rd July. Here I found no guards and sat down to wait for daylight to show me the language of that village as indicated on the advertisements in the shop-windows. I had got in here at 3.30 a.m. and at 4.30 knew that the words in the shop-windows were Dutch and not Boche. What a great feeling of relief and rest it was!
The first man I saw was a soldier on a bicycle, to whom I made myself known. He was very quick to find me breakfast at the cottage of a fellow soldier of his. The latter refused all payment, and was an excellent fellow. Later I reported myself to the local policeman, and while talking to him heard Fox's voice. He had arrived two hours after me, after crossing the frontier a mile to the north of where I had passed the line. We were delighted to see each other, but at the time were not so tremendously struck by the fact that we had come together again. Of course it was an extraordinary thing to happen really, but we only realised that later.
At the moment we only thought of the fact that we were both safely across and would be home in due course, and that we had had the most marvellous luck that could well have come our way.
Fox had covered this distance, roughly a hundred and seventy miles as we did it, in twelve and a half days, and I had taken thirteen days and a few hours.