were foodless and
aimless. We agreed that our fighting value was extremely small, and that
our first duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructions
again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was
manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could take
a line westward and get back to England across the North Sea. He
calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would be possible to
reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty hours. But this idea
I overruled because of the shortness of our provisions, and more
particularly because of our urgent need of water.

'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands did
much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we went away to the
south we should reach hilly country, or at least country that was not
submerged, and then we should be able to land, find some stream, drink,
and get supplies and news. Many of the barges adrift in the haze about
us were filled with British soldiers and had floated up from the Nord
See Canal, but none of them were any better informed than ourselves of
the course of events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.

'"Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the form
of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing a truce, and
giving the welcome information that food and water were being hurried
down the Rhine and were to be found on the barge flotilla lying over the
old Rhine above Leiden.' . . .

We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his strange
overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by Zaandam and
between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a voyage in a red-lit
mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full of strange voices and
perplexity, and with every other sensation dominated by a feverish
thirst. 'We sat,' he says, 'in a little huddled group, saying very
little, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance. Our
only continuing sound was the persistent mewing of a cat one of the men
had rescued from a floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward
course by a watch-chain compass Mylius had produced....

'I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had
we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our
mental setting had far more of the effect of a huge natural catastrophe.
The atomic bombs had dwarfed the international issues to complete
i