e we got things
straight.

In one way it turned out well. That afternoon we passed the frontier
and I never knew it till I saw a man in a strange uniform come aboard,
who copied some figures on a schedule, and brought us a mail. With my
dirty face and general air of absorption in duty, I must have been an
unsuspicious figure. He took down the names of the men in the barges,
and Peter's name was given as it appeared on the ship's roll--Anton
Blum.

'You must feel it strange, Herr Brandt,' said the captain, 'to be
scrutinized by a policeman, you who give orders, I doubt not, to many
policemen.'

I shrugged my shoulders. 'It is my profession. It is my business to
go unrecognized often by my own servants.' I could see that I was
becoming rather a figure in the captain's eyes. He liked the way I
kept the men up to their work, for I hadn't been a nigger-driver for
nothing.

Late on that Sunday night we passed through a great city which the
captain told me was Vienna. It seemed to last for miles and miles, and
to be as brightly lit as a circus. After that, we were in big plains
and the air grew perishing cold. Peter had come aboard once for his
rations, but usually he left it to his partner, for he was lying very
low. But one morning--I think it was the 5th of January, when we had
passed Buda and were moving through great sodden flats just sprinkled
with snow--the captain took it into his head to get me to overhaul the
barge loads. Armed with a mighty type-written list, I made a tour of
the barges, beginning with the hindmost. There was a fine old stock of
deadly weapons--mostly machine-guns and some field-pieces, and enough
shells to blow up the Gallipoli peninsula. All kinds of shell were
there, from the big 14-inch crumps to rifle grenades and
trench-mortars. It made me fairly sick to see all these good things
preparing for our own fellows, and I wondered whether I would not be
doing my best service if I engineered a big explosion. Happily I had
the common sense to remember my job and my duty and to stick to it.

Peter was in the middle of the convoy, and I found him pretty unhappy,
principally through not being allowed to smoke. His companion was an
ox-eyed lad, whom I ordered to the look-out while Peter and I went over
the lists.

'Cornelis, my old friend,' he said, 'there are some pretty toys here.
With a spanner and a couple of clear hours I could make these maxims
about as deadly as bicycles.