tored through their food parcels from home they were off, but in
an entirely different direction.

I asked one of them, a little Welshman, where be got the waterproof
rubber bag on the floor at his feet, in which were all his earthly
belongings. "That used to be the old German farmer's tablecloth,"
he said.

To-day in Europe there are millions of civilians dressed in
military uniform, which fails to hide the fact that their main work
of life is not that of the soldier. But the three British soldiers
sitting under the smoky brass lamp were of a different sort.
Twelve years of service had so indelibly stamped them as soldiers
of the King that the make-shift clothing given them in Holland,
could not conceal their calling. Their faces were an unnatural
white from the terrible experiences which they had undergone, but,
like the rest of the Old Army, they were always soldiers, every
inch of them.

The two men whom, I had heard talking French on the deck were
Belgians. The one had been a soldier at Liege, and had managed to
scramble across a ditch after his three days' tramp to Holland,
although the sentry's bullet whistled uncomfortably close. He said
that his strongest wish was to rejoin the Belgian army so that he
might do his part to avenge the death of seven civilian hostages
who had been shot before his eyes.

The other Belgian was just over military age, but he wanted to
reach England to volunteer. His nerve and resource are certainly
all right. He knew of the electrified wire along the Belgian-Dutch
frontier, so he brought two pieces of glass with him, and thus held
the current of death away from his body while he wriggled through
to freedom.

We talked until after midnight. The French captain, formerly an
instructor of artillery at Saint Cyr--the West Point and the
Sandhurst of France--taken prisoner in the first autumn of the war,
was the last to tell his story.

At Torgau, Saxony, in the heart of Germany, be plunged into the
Elbe in the darkness of night, stemmed the swift waters, and on
landing, half-drowned, rose speedily and walked fast to avoid a
fatal chill.

For twenty-nine days he struggled on towards liberty. Nothing but
the tremendous impulse of the desire for freedom could have carried
him on his own two feet across Germany, without money, through
countless closely-policed villages and great cities, in a country
where everyone carries an identity book (with which, of course, he
was unp