disobey any
German. So, lest I should oversleep, until three o'clock I paced the
cell, and then, with all the terrors of a burglar, tiptoed down the stairs.
There was no light, and the house was wrapped in silence.

Earlier there had been everywhere sentries, and, not daring to
breathe, I waited for one of them to challenge, but, except for the
creaking of the stairs and of my ankle-bones, which seemed to
explode like firecrackers, there was not a sound. I was afraid, and
wished myself safely back in my cell, but I was more afraid of Rupert,
and I kept on feeling my way until I had reached the garden. There
some one spoke to me in French, and I found my host.

"The animals have gone," he said; "all of them. I will give you a bed
now, and when it is light you shall have breakfast." I told him my
orders were to leave his house at three.

"But it is murder!" he said. With these cheering words in my ears, I
thanked him, and he bid me bonne chance.

In my left hand I placed the pass, folded so that the red seal of the
General Staff would show, and a match-box. In the other hand I held
ready a couple of matches. Each time a sentry challenged I struck
the matches on the box and held them in front of the red seal. The
instant the matches flashed it was a hundred to one that the man
would shoot, but I could not speak German, and there was no other
way to make him understand. They were either too surprised or too
sleepy to fire, for each of them let me pass. But after I had made a
mark of myself three times I lost my nerve and sought cover behind a
haystack. I lay there until there was light enough to distinguish trees
and telegraph-poles, and then walked on to Ath. After that, when they
stopped me, if they could not read, the red seal satisfied them; if they
were officers and could read, they cursed me with strange, unclean
oaths, and ordered me, in the German equivalent, to beat it. It was a
delightful walk. I had had no sleep the night before and had eaten
nothing, and, though I had cut away most of my shoe, I could hardly
touch my foot to the road. Whenever in the villages I tried to bribe any
one to carry my knapsack or to give me food, the peasants ran from
me. They thought I was a German and talked Flemish, not French. I
was more afraid of them and their shotguns than of the Germans,
and I never entered a village unless German soldiers were entering
or leaving it. And the Germans gave me no reason to feel free from
c