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 punishment work camp near Windau in