was unprovided), without a friend or accomplice at any point of the
journey, with only a map torn from a railway time-table, and no
other guides than the sun, moon, and stars and direction posts. I
will give the rest of the man's story in his own words.

"I came to the conclusion that my brain would not stand the
captivity. I knew some of the difficulties before me, but I doubt
whether I would have started if I had known them all. I lived on
unthreshed wheat and rye, apples, blackberries, bilberries,
carrots, turnips and even raw potatoes. I did not taste one morsel
of cooked food or anything stronger than water till I arrived in
Holland. I did not speak one word to any human being. On two
occasions I marched more than thirty miles in the twenty-four
hours. I slept always away from the roadside, and very often by
day, and as far as possible from any inhabited house. I am, as you
see, weak and thin, practically only muscle and bone, and during
the last three days, while waiting in Holland for the boat, I have
had to eat carefully to avoid the illness that would almost
certainly follow repletion."

After I had lain down for a few hours' sleep, I thought, as I had
often thought during the past thirty months, that although this is
a war of machinery there is plenty of the human element in it, too.
People who tell only of the grim-drab aspect of the great struggle
sometimes forget that romances just as fine as were ever spun by
Victor Hugo happen around, them every day.

At dawn I hung to the rail of the wildly tossing ship, looking at
the horizon from which the mists were clearing. Two specks began
to grow into the long low black lines of destroyers. Our most