bum them for a bit."

Simmons needed no second invitation but set out as eagerly as I in
cautious pursuit; so fearful were we of alarming our quarry. Our eyes
were glued on their packs.

Just then the road opened up into a broad expanse of heather. And
there we lost them. We beat about in the heather for a long time, and
called loudly, but without avail. They were no doubt lying down,
hiding.

We found some potatoes in a field that night, dug them up with our
bare hands and ate them raw. We were very sad when we thought of those
packs.

It was, I remember, on the day following that we saw some of the
lighter side of German life. The woods thereabouts were cut up into
big blocks, as city streets are. We were laying to in one of them,
thankful for the thickness of our shelter when we heard laughing
voices and then a gust of laughter as a flying group of girls and boys
romped past. They played about for half an hour, causing us great
alarm by their youthful fondness for sudden excursions into unlikely
spots, after nothing in particular. The oldest of the group, a sizable
boy of seventeen or thereabouts and a pretty girl of near that age,
hung back long after the younger children had passed on. We had little
to fear from them. They were quite evidently engrossed in one another.
He argued earnestly, while she listened with a half-smile. Once, he
made as if to take her hand but she drew back and stiffened. He
ignored the rebuff. A moment afterward he said something that pleased
her so well that the last we saw of them his arm was about her waist
as they went down the path together.

Parniewinkel lay forty to fifty miles northeast of Bremen, which in
turn was one hundred and fifty miles from the Holland border. We
reckoned on having to walk double that in covering the stretch, and
figured on twenty-one days for the trip.

My diary for that day, August 22, 1916, reads: "Still raining. Soaked
and cold. Breakfast, dinner and supper: turnips and oats." The night
was a repetition of the preceding one, and made worse by the number of
small swamps we had to struggle through. The next day's diary reads:
"Rain stopped and not so cold. Fair cover; still soaked but
confident."

We had our first narrow escape that day. We were lying in the corner
of a hedge. It was so misty as to give almost the effect of night, but
so long past day as to make travelling unduly dangerous. When the mist
lifted we found ourselves within fifty yard