I went through into Belgium on the brake-beams of a fast freight which, from the way it seemed to have the right-of-way over passengers, I concluded was carrying munitions urgently needed at the front. It was slowed down in some kind of a traffic jam at a junction when I boarded it, but when I left it—when I thought I was as far into Belgium as I wanted to go—it was hitting up a lively thirty miles an hour or more, and all my practice at the game could not save me from a nasty roll. Luckily, I dropped clear of the ties; and as the fill was of soft earth, with a ditch full of water at the bottom, I was not much the worse for a fall that would have brained me a dozen times over on most American lines.
Of how I got out of Belgium into Holland, and finally on to England, it would not do for me to write anything at all at this time, beyond saying that it was entirely due to aid that I had from the Belgians themselves. One of the most interesting chapters of the war will be the one—not to be published till all is over—telling how Belgian patriots in Belgium not only kept touch with each other during the German occupation, but also contrived to send news—and even go and come themselves—to the outer world. Even the “electric fence” along the Holland boundary has no terrors for them, and I am giving away no secret when I say that there are more ways of getting safely under or over that fence than there are wires in it. It will probably do no harm for me to say that I crossed this barrier on a very cleverly made little folding stairway which when not in use, was kept hidden under a square of sod but a few feet away from the fence itself. The genial old German sentry who spread it for me—he had, of course, been liberally bribed, and probably had some regular “working arrangement” with my Belgian friends—confided to me at parting that, when he had accumulated enough money to keep him comfortably the rest of his life in Holland, he intended to climb over that little stairway himself and never go back. I have often wondered how many other Germans feel the same about leaving “the sinking ship.”
THE SINGING SOLDIER
I
There was something just a bit ominous in the brooding warmth of the soft air that was stirring at the base of the towering cliffs of the Marmolada, where I took the teleferica; and the tossing aigrettes of wind-driven snow at the lip of the pass where the cable-line ended in the lee of a rock just under the Italian first-line trenches signalled the reason why. The vanguard of one of those irresponsible mavericks of mountain storms that so delight to bustle about and take advantage of the fine weather to make surprise attacks on the Alpine sky-line outposts was sneaking over from the Austrian side; and somewhere up there where the tenuous wire of the teleferica fined down and merged into the amorphous mass of the cliff behind, my little car was going to run into it.
“A good ten minutes to snug down in, anyhow,” I said to myself. And after the fashion of the South Sea skipper who shortens sail and battens down the hatches with his weather eye on the squall roaring down from windward, I tucked in the loose ends of the rugs about my feet, rolled up the high fur collar of my Alpinio coat, and buttoned the tab across my nose.
But things were developing faster than I had calculated. As the little wire basket glided out of the cut in the forty-foot drift that had encroached on its aerial right-of-way where the supporting cables cleared a jutting crag, I saw that it was not only an open-and-above-board frontal attack that I had to reckon with, but also a craftily-planned flank movement quite in keeping with the fact that the whole affair, lock, stock, and barrel, was a “Made in Austria” product. Swift-driven little shafts of blown snow, that tried hard to keep their plumes from tossing above the sheltering rock-pinnacles, were wriggling over between the little peaks on both sides of the pass and slipping down to launch themselves in flank attack along the narrowing valley traversed by the teleferica and the zigzagging trail up to the Italian positions. Even as I watched, one of them came into position to strike, and straight out over the ice-cap covering the brow of a cliff shot a clean-lined wedge of palpable, solid whiteness.
One instant my face was laved in the moist air-current drawing up from the wooded lower valley, where the warm fingers of the thaw were pressing close on the hair-poised triggers of the ready-cocked avalanches; the next I was gasping in a blast of Arctic frigidity as the points of the blown ice-needles tingled in my protesting lungs with the sting of hastily-gulped champagne. Through frost-rimmed eyelashes I had just time to see a score of similar shafts leap out and go charging down into the bottom of the valley, before the main front of the storm came roaring along, and heights and hollows were masked by swishing veils of translucent white. In the space of a few seconds an amphitheatre of soaring mountain peaks roofed with a vault of deep purple sky had resolved itself into a gusty gulf of spinning snow blasts.