destination that I had in mind was Ghent, but passing through the
lines thereto was forbidden. Instead of going directly the thirty
miles in three hours, I must go around almost a complete circle,
about three hundred miles in three days. But nothing could take
the edge off my joy. A strange exhilaration and a wild desire to
celebrate possessed me. With such a mood I had not hitherto
been sympathetic; on the contrary, I had been much grieved by
the sundry manifestations of what I deemed a base spirit in certain
Belgians. One of them had said, "Just wait until the Allies' army
comes marching into Brussels! Oh, then I am going out on one
glorious drunk!" In the light of the splendid sacrifices of his fellow-
Belgians, this struck me as a shocking degradation of the human
spirit.

I could not then understand such a view-point. But I could now. In
the removal of the long abnormal tension one's pent-up spirits
seek out an equally abnormal channel for expression. I, too, felt
like an uncaged spirit suddenly let loose. I didn't get drunk, but I
very nearly got arrested again. In my headlong ecstasy I was deaf
to the warnings of a German guard saying, "Passage into this
street is forbidden." I checked myself just in time, and in chastened
spirit made my way back to the Metropole.

Three times I was offered the prohibited Antwerp papers that had
been smuggled into the city and once the London Times for
twenty-five cents. The war price for this is said often to have run up
to as many dollars.

An English, woman, or at any rate a woman with a beautiful
English accent, opened a conversation with the remark that she
was going directly through to Ghent on the following day and that
she knew how to go right through the German lines. That was
precisely the way that the Germans had just forbidden me to go.
But this accomplice (if such she was) got no rise out of me. To all
intents I was stone-deaf. Compared to me, she would have found
the Sphinx garrulous indeed. She may have been as harmless as
a dove but, after my escapade, I wouldn't have talked to my own
mother without a written permit from the military governor. The
Kaiser himself would have found it hard work breaking through my
cast-iron spy-proof armor of formality. I had good reason, too, not
to let down the bars, for I was trailed by the spy-hunters. Not until
ten days later when I passed over the Holland border did I feel
release from their vigilant eyes. My key at the