Later I found one standing in front of
a group of Austrian boys.

"Any one o' you," he was shouting, "I'll box the whole gang o' you!"

This Cockney, his little brother, and their sister were the thorn in
the flesh of the escort.

"Absolute terrors," declared everyone, but I liked them.

Many of the children were middle class, children of doctors, lawyers,
architects, and so on; nice kiddies they were. The bigger girls could
speak English, and I used them as interpreters.

On the Monday morning the English escort took charge. The first task
was medical inspection, and the two English doctors and four or five
Dutch doctors prepared for action. Our job was to marshal the kiddies,
help them to take their shirts off, and then bundle them into the
inspection room. It sounds easy, but it was a weary business. You
looked down the list for No. 258, and you found a name.

"Mitzi Dvoracek!" you called, and wondered whether a boy or a girl
would appear. There was no answer . . . and an hour later you found a
little girl who had lost her identity card, and you concluded that she
was Dvoracek, but she wasn't; her name was Leopoldine Czsthmkyghw, or
something resembling that.

I was greatly troubled by their questions. Following a method I had
used with indifferent effect while conversing with garrulous Dutchmen
in railway carriages, I answered "Ja" and "Nay" alternately. Many of
the children stared at me in wonder and I marvelled . . . until I
discovered that most of them had been asking me the way to the
lavatory. After that I just pointed to a door in the wall when a boy
asked me a question, and when one lad didn't seem to understand, I took
him by the back of the neck and shoved him through the door. Then I
found that he had been asking the time.

I gave up replying to questions after that.

The children had all been examined, and one lad stood alone; he had no
card and no one could place him. Then he confessed that he was a
stowaway who had been too old to join the batch, and had boarded the
train quietly at Vienna. Mrs. Ensor, the secretary of the Famine Area
Committee, proved herself a sport by declaring that she would take him
to England. The good Dutch folk also rose to the occasion, and went
out and bought him a pair of short trousers.

In the afternoon I sat down beside a few boys. And then I did a fatal
thing. A boy dropped his pencil and I picked it up, threw it over the
house . . . and then