[XVI
I APPROACH THE FRONTIER]
To get out of the city it would be necessary to pass two guards. This I had learned in the course of my walks at night, having frequently traveled to the city limits with the idea of finding out just what conditions I would have to meet when the time came for me to leave.
A German soldier's uniform, however, no longer worried me as it had at first. I had mingled with the Huns so much in the city that I began to feel that I was really a Belgian, and I assumed the indifference that the latter seemed to feel.
I decided, therefore, to walk out of the city in the daytime when the sentries would be less apt to be on the watch. It worked splendidly. I was not held up a moment, the sentries evidently taking me for a Belgian peasant on his way to work.
Traveling faster than I had ever done before since my escape, I was soon out in the open country, and the first Belgian I came to I approached for food. He gave me half his lunch and we sat down on the side of the road to eat it. Of course, he tried to talk to me, but I used the old ruse of pretending I was deaf and dumb and he was quite convinced that it was so. He made various efforts to talk to me in pantomime, but I could not make out what he was getting at, and I think he must have concluded that I was not only half-starved, deaf, and dumb, but "luny" into the bargain.
When night came I looked around for a place to rest. I had decided to travel in the daytime as well as night, because I understood that I was only a few miles from the frontier, and I was naturally anxious to get there at the earliest possible moment, although I realized that there I would encounter the most hazardous part of my whole adventure. To get through that heavily guarded barbed and electrically charged barrier was a problem that I hated to think of, even, although the hours I spent endeavoring to devise some way of outwitting the Huns were many.
It had occurred to me, for instance, that it would not be such a difficult matter to vault over the electric fence, which was only nine feet high. In college, I know, a ten-foot vault is considered a high-school boy's accomplishment, but there were two great difficulties in the way of this solution. In the first place, it would be no easy matter to get a pole of the right length, weight, and strength to serve the purpose. More particularly, however, the pole-vault idea seemed to be out of the question because of the fact that on either side of the electric fence, six feet from it, was a six-foot barbed-wire barrier. To vault safely over a nine-foot electrically charged fence was one thing, but to combine with it a twelve-foot broad vault was a feat which even a college athlete in the pink of condition would be apt to flunk. Indeed, I don't believe it is possible.
Another plan that seemed half-way reasonable was to build a pair of stilts about twelve or fourteen feet high and walk over the barriers one by one. As a youngster I had acquired considerable skill in stilt-walking, and I have no doubt that with the proper equipment it would have been quite feasible to have walked out of Belgium as easily as possible in that way, but whether or not I was going to have a chance to construct the necessary stilts remained to be seen.