surprising information that
the greatest good that a correspondent could do in the world be to
use his influence to bring the United States and Germany to a
better understanding. I made neither comment nor promise. I was
well aware that the same Wilhelmstrasse, while laying the wires for
an attempt to have my country play Germany's game, was sedulously
continuing its propaganda of _Gott strafe Amerika_ among the German
people. As in the hatred sown against Great Britain hate against
America was sown so that the Government would have a united Germany
behind them in case of war.

I was at last out of Germany, but the lights of the Hook of Holland
reminded me that a field of German activity lay ahead--floating
mines, torpedoes, submarines, and swift destroyers operating from
Ostend and Zeebrugge. They are challenging British supremacy in
the southern part of the North Sea, through the waters of which we
must now feel our way.

We were off the Hook running straight to the open sea. The nervous
feeling of planning and delay of the last few days gave way now to
the exhilaration which comes of activity in danger. If the Germans
should get us, the least that would happen to me would be
internment until the end of the war. I was risking everything on
the skill and pluck of the man who paced the bridge above my head,
and on the efficiency of the British patrol of the seas.

The little steamer suddenly began to plunge and roll with the waves
washing her decks when I groped my way, hanging to the rail, to the
snug cabin where six men sat about the table. The pallor of their
faces made them appear wax-like in the yellow light of the smoking
oil lamp which swung suspended overhead. Three of them were
British, two were Belgian, and one was French, but there was a
common bond which drew them together in a comradeship which
transcends all harriers of nationality, for they had escaped from a
common enemy.

They welcomed me to the table. It is surprising what a degree of
intimacy can spring up between seven men, all with histories
behind, and all with the same hope of getting to England. They
were only beginning to find themselves, they were indeed still
groping to pick up the threads of reality of a world from which
they had been snatched two years before.

The Englishman at my right, a corporal, had been taken prisoner
with a bullet in his foot at the retreat from Mons. In the summer
of 1916 he had been sent to a pu