"But I was not bored. Oh, no. Just anxious concerning my situation.
Otherwise I had plenty to look at."
She waited, pencil poised.
"Plenty to look at," he repeated absently. "Plenty of Huns to gaze at. Huns? They were like ants below me, there. They swarmed under the mountain ledge as far as I could see—thousands of busy Boches—busy as ants. There were narrow-gauge railways, too, apparently running right into the mountain; and a deep broad cleft, deep as another valley, and all crawling with Huns.
"A tunnel? Nobody alive ever dreamed of such a gigantic tunnel, if
it was one!… Well, I was up there three days. It was the first of
August—thereabouts—and I'd been afield for weeks. And, of course,
I'd heard nothing of war—never dreamed of it.
"If I had, perhaps what those thousands of Huns were doing along the mountain wall might have been plainer to me.
"As it was, I couldn't guess. There was no blasting—none that I could hear. But trains were running and some gigantic enterprise was being accomplished—some enterprise that apparently demanded speed and privacy—for not one civilian was to be seen, not one dwelling. But there were endless mazes of fortifications; and I saw guns being moved everywhere.
"Well, I was becoming hungry up on that fir-clad battlement. I didn't know how to get down into the valley. It began to look as though I'd have to turn back; and that seemed a rather awful prospect.
"Anyway, what happened, eventually, was this: I started east through the forest along that pathless tableland, and on the afternoon of the next day, tired out and almost starved, I stepped across the Swiss boundary line—a wide, rocky, cleared space crossing a mountain flank like a giant's road.
"No guards were visible anywhere, no sentry-boxes, but, as I stood hesitating in the middle of the frontier—and just why I hesitated I don't know—I saw half a dozen jagers of a German mounted regiment ride up on the German side of the boundary.
"For a second the idea occurred to me that they had ridden parallel to the ledge to intercept me; but the idea seemed absurd, granted even that they had seen me upon the ledge from below, which I never dreamed they had. So when they made me friendly gestures to come across the frontier I returned their cheery 'Gruss Gott!' and plodded thankfully across. … And their leader, leaning from his saddle to take my offered hand, suddenly struck me in the face, and at the same moment a trooper behind me hit me on the head with the butt of a pistol."