"Keep your ear to the ground and you will!" said Ted.
"They'll shoot you the next time," he said earnestly. "If I were you, I wouldn't try it."
Then the guard came, and we could say no more.
Again we were taken to the station and put on the train. Our hands were not tied this time; we were just ordinary prisoners now—we had done ours. Besides, I suppose they knew we shouldn't run far—that had been taken out of us by the "cells."
But our good spirits came back when the train started. We went east towards Rotenburg, through the same sort of low, marshy country we had travelled before, with scrubby trees and plenty of heather moor.
We passed through Bremen again, where we got a glimpse of white sails, and then on to Rotenburg, where we changed cars and had to wait for two hours.
Of course we were hungry—the Oldenburg prison had not sent us out well fed to meet the world, and the one slice of bread had gone. But we had prison-stamps, and our guard took us to the lunch-counter at Rotenburg, where we got a cup of real coffee, some bread, and an orange. The guard paid for what we got with his own money, accepting our stamps in payment. Our stamps were good only at Vehnemoor Camp, having the name "Vehnemoor" stamped on them.
I suppose we were two tough-looking characters. The people seemed to think so, for they looked at us with startled faces, and a little girl who was crossing the platform ran back in alarm to her mother when she saw us coming.
We arrived at Dienstedt after nightfall, and walked out a mile along a rough road to the camp, which was one of the Cellelager group—Cellelager I.
We saw that it consisted of two huts, and when we entered the hut to which we were taken, we saw nothing but Russians, pale-faced, dark-eyed, bearded Russians. They were sitting around, hardly speaking to each other, some mending their clothes, some reading, some staring idly ahead of them. We were beginning to be afraid they had sent us to a camp where there was no one but Russians, until we saw some British, at the other end.