Nor was I in any doubt as to how the thing would have to be done. At the ticket windows, or at the gates to the train shed, I was positive I would be challenged at once—even if no word had yet gone to the police of my escape—and held for investigation. Besides, I had not money enough to take me a quarter the distance I felt that I should have to go to be reasonably safe. The only way was to follow the tracks in through the yards and make the best of any opportunity that offered. The ten or twelve-pound magneto would be a good deal of a nuisance, but, as the possible sale of it at some distant point offered an easy way to the money I was sure to need I decided not to let it go till I had to.
I already knew the general lay of the X—— station, and decided that it would be best to go to the tracks by crossing a field just outside of the town. My road crossed the line a half-mile further away, but I felt sure a bridge over a canal which would have to be passed if I took to the ties at this point would be guarded by soldiers. A stumble through a weed-choked ditch, a trudge across a couple of hundred yards of rye stubble, a climb over the wire fencing of the right-of-way, and I was once more crushing stone ballasting under my brogans, as I had done so often before. Ten minutes later I passed unchallenged under the lights of a switching-tower and was inside the X—— yards. Almost at the same moment a bright headlight flashed out down the line ahead, and before I reached the station a long passenger train had pulled in and stopped. “Just in time,” I muttered to myself; “that’s my train, wherever it’s going.”
Entering the train-shed, I avoided the platforms and hurried along between the passenger train and a string of freight cars standing on the next track. Two or three yard hands brushed by me without a glance, for there was practically no difference between my greasy machinist’s rig-out and their own. But as I stopped and began to peer under one of the erstige coaches I saw, with the tail of my eye, a brakeman of the freight train pause in his clamber up the end of one of the cars and crane his head suspiciously in my direction. Scores of times before (though never with so much at stake) I had faced the same kind of emergency, and, without an instant’s hesitation and as though it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing, I started tapping one of the wheels with my big steel wrench. Heaven only knows if they test for cracked car wheels that way in Germany! I certainly have never seen them do it, at any rate. Anyhow, it served my purpose of making the brakeman think I was there on business, for he climbed on up on to his train and passed out of sight. Two seconds later I was snuggled up on the “bumpers” with my wrench and magneto in my lap.
The brake-beams of a German schlafwagen are not quite as roomy as those of an American Pullman, but they might be much worse. The train was a fairly fast one, making few stops, and I believe would have taken me right in to Berlin if I had remained aboard long enough. I was getting rather cramped and stiff after four or five hours, however, and not caring to run the risk of being seen riding by daylight, I dropped off as the train slowed down at a junction on the outskirts of what appeared, and turned out, to be a large manufacturing city. The magneto slipped out of my two-fingered hand as I jumped off, and brought up in the frog of a switch with a jolt that must have played hob with its delicate insides, but I wasn’t doing any worrying on that score. Here I was, safe and sound, a good hundred miles beyond any place they would ever think of looking for me. Moreover, I had money in my pocket, as well as the possible means of getting more. I couldn’t have wished for a better start.
There are a number of reasons why it would not be best for me to go into detail at this time regarding the various ways in which I steered clear of trouble in getting beyond the German frontiers, not the least of them being that it might make it harder in the future for some other poor devil trying to do the same thing. I do not think, however, there would be one chance in a thousand for a British prisoner less “heeled for the game”—a man unable to speak the language and to steal rides on the “brake-beams” of the trains, I mean—than I was to win through from any great distance from the frontier. But however that may be, I am not going to make it harder for any one who may get the chance by telling just how I did it.
Money—to be obtained by selling the magneto of the tractor I had brought along with me—was the first thing for me to see to after getting well clear of the country in which I was likely to be searched for, and it was in going after this that I was nearest to “coming a cropper.” I made the mistake—in my haste to get rid of the burden of the heavy thing—of offering it to the first electrical supply shop I came to. The proprietor wanted the thing very badly, but while he seemed to accept readily enough my story that I was a returned German-American working in munition factories, he said that the law required him to call up the police and ask if anything of the kind had been reported as stolen. I was not in the least afraid that the magneto would be reported at a point so distant from the one I had taken it from, but I did know that I couldn’t “stand up” for two minutes in any kind of interview with the police. So I told old Fritz to go ahead and telephone, and as soon as his back was turned grabbed up the magneto and slipped out to the street as quietly as possible.
Whether the police made any effort to trace me or not I never knew. There was no evidence of it, anyhow. I headed into the first side street, and from that into another, and then kept going until I came to a dirty little secondhand shop with a Jew name over the door. Luckily the old Sheeny had had some dealing in junk and hardware, and knew at once the value of the goods I had to offer. As a matter of fact, indeed, the magneto was a “Bosch,” made in Germany in the first place, and imported to the U.S. by the makers of the tractor from which I had taken it. I was a good deal winded from quick walking—I hadn’t a lot of strength at that time anyhow—and the shrewd old Hebrew must have felt sure that I had stolen the thing within the hour. He said no word about ’phoning the police, however, but merely looked at me slyly out of the corner of one eye and offered me fifty marks for an instrument that was worth four or five hundred in ordinary times, and probably half again as much more through war demands. I could probably have got more out of him, but I was in no temper for bargaining, and the quick way in which I snapped up his offer must have confirmed any suspicions the old fox may have had concerning the way I came by the “goods.” The joint was probably little more than a “fence”—a thieves’ clearing-house—anyhow, and I was dead lucky to stumble on to it as I did.
I had two hearty meals that day in cheap restaurants—taking care to order no bread or anything else I felt there might be a chance of my needing a “card” for—and that night swung up on to the “rods” of a passenger train that had slowed down to something like ten miles an hour at a crossing, and rode for several hours in a direction which I correctly figured to be that of the Dutch frontier. I spent the following day moving freely about a good-sized manufacturing city, and the next night “beat” through to a town on the border of Holland. As this was not a place where there were any factories, my machinist’s rig-out didn’t “merge into the landscape” in quite the same way it did in the places where there was a lot of manufacturing, and I stayed there only long enough to make sure that the frontier was guarded in a way that would make the chances very much against my getting across without some kind of help. Such help I knew that I could get in Belgium, and therefore, as the whole of the German railway system seemed to be at my disposal for night excursions, I decided to try my luck from that direction. I wanted to take a look at Essen and Krupps’ while I was so near, but finally concluded it would not be best to take a chance in a district where there were sure to be more on the watch than anywhere else. The distant tops of tall chimneys and a cloud of smoke in the sky were all that I saw of the “place where the war was made.”
The Germans boast of a great intelligence system, yet not once—so far as I could see—was I under suspicion during the several days in which I made my leisurely way, by more or less indirect route, into Belgium. As a matter of fact, I did not give them very much to “lay hold of.” I kept closely to my original plan of steering clear of railway stations and hotels, and of asking for nothing in shops or restaurants that might require “tickets.” The weather was good, and most of my sleeping was done in about the same quiet sort of outdoor nooks as the American “hobo” seeks out in making his way across the continent. The only difference was that it was safer, if anything, in Germany, and many times when, in the States, I would have been greeted by a policeman’s club on the soles of my boots, I saw, from the tail of my eye, the “arm of the law” strut by without a second glance at the tired machinist, with his wrench beside him, dozing under a tree in a park or by the roadside. I had half a dozen good meals with kind-hearted peasants, and one night—it was raining, and I was pretty well played out—I accepted the offer of a bed in a farmhouse, the owner of which had a son who had a sheep ranch in Montana, near Miles City, a place where I had run a threshing outfit one season. He said he was very sorry that the boy had not been as clever as I was in evading the “Englanders” and getting home to help the Fatherland. He was a kind old fellow, and I tinkered up his mowing-machine and put a new valve in his leaking pump to square my account. There were a number of little incidents of this kind, and the simple kindliness of the old peasants I met—mostly fathers and mothers and wives with sons or husbands in the war—was responsible for the fact that I did not feel quite as harshly against Huns in general when I left their country as when I entered it. Still, I know very well that their good treatment of me was only because they thought I was one of themselves, and that they would probably have given me up to a mob to tear to pieces if they had suspected for a minute what I really was.