I had proceeded perhaps a mile along the main street when I noticed ahead of me three German soldiers standing at the curb.
Again my heart started to beat fast, I must confess, but I was not nearly so scared as I had been an hour or so before. I walked ahead, determined to follow my previous procedure in every particular.
I had got to about fifteen feet away from the soldiers when one of them stepped onto the sidewalk and shouted:
"Halt!"
My heart stopped beating fast—for a moment, I believe, it stopped beating altogether! I can't attempt to describe my feelings. The thought that the jig was up, that all I had gone through and all I had escaped would now avail me nothing, mingled with a feeling of disgust with myself because of the foolish risk I had taken in going through the village, combined to take all the starch out of me, and I could feel myself wilting as the soldier advanced to the spot where I stood rooted in my tracks.
I had a bottle of water in one pocket and a piece of bread in the other, and as the Hun advanced to search me I held the bottle up in one hand and the piece of bread in the other so that he could see that was all I had.
It occurred to me that he would "frisk" me—that is, feel me over for arms or other weapons, then place me under arrest and march me off to the guard-house. I had not the slightest idea but that I was captured, and there didn't seem to be much use in resisting, unarmed as I was and with two other German soldiers within a few feet of us.
Like a flash it suddenly dawned on me, however, that for all this soldier could have known I was only a Belgian peasant and that his object in searching me, which he proceeded to do, was to ascertain whether I had committed the common "crime" of smuggling potatoes!
The Belgians are allowed only a certain amount of potatoes, and it is against the laws laid down by the Huns to deal in vegetables of any kind except under the rigid supervision of the authorities. Nevertheless, it was one of the principal vocations of the average poor Belgian to buy potatoes out in the country from the peasants and then smuggle them into the large cities and sell them clandestinely at a high price.