I had waited for a long time—so it seemed to me—and becoming alarmed I cautiously started out to find him. Just as I had about given him up, he came creeping on his hands and knees through some underbrush saying, “Hist! The German devils are right thick around here; I have been trying to dodge them for an hour. Get down out of sight, chum!”
All this was uttered in a hoarse whisper, and with an expression of alarm more ominous of danger than his words.
We remained in our hiding place during most of that day, and at night began once more to travel cautiously, with many misgivings, westward, hoping to get through the German lines.
“If it were not for our uniforms, chum,” said my comrade, “we would stand a better chance; but they are ‘a dead give away.’”
We traveled slowly and warily—but at last, in some unexplainable way, we fell into a trap.
We had stopped in a little depression of the ground in the outskirts of a wood near a little brook. Thinking it as good a place for concealment as we would find, we refreshed ourselves by bathing our hands and faces, after which Gordon began dressing my wound. He was rewinding the bandage, after washing it, when he stopped short and, in a whisper said, “What’s that?”
But there was no need of an answer, for there came the sharp call: “Hande hoch!” And to enforce this order of “hands up” several rifle barrels pointed towards us from behind trees. We were caught.
Our German captors were mostly young fellows who looked like students. With one exception, and that was an old grizzled sergeant, not one of them, I should judge, was over seventeen years of age. I learned through Gordon that they had but lately come in to the service, and they were greatly pleased to have captured us. The old sergeant spoke fair English.
“Who are you?” he interrogated. “How came you inside our lines?”
“We are Americans and escaping prisoners,” Gordon answered in German.