crossed the
Dutch border at Simplefeldt.

For three hours we talked English, consulted maps, took notes, and
asked questions where and when we pleased. The holiday cost us
dear. At the end of that time we were under lock and key in the town
of Maastricht, the Province of Limburg, and the supposedly free and
neutral Kingdom of the Netherlands. We suspected at the time, and
in view of what I learned upon a later trip to Berlin I am quite certain,
that the long arm of the German Secret Service had reached out for
us across the border.

Having started from Antwerp during its investment, but prior to its
siege by the German army, we were now on the third stage of a
round trip which was to land one of us back in the Belgian temporary
capital in time for the bombardment. During the previous two weeks
we had been stopped, questioned, and sometimes examined, no less
than one hundred and thirty times. Thirteen, we calculated, was our
average number of hold-ups on our early "marching days"; that is to
say, during those wanderings which led us by foot, train, ox cart, and
automobile past the double sector of Antwerp's fortifications, through
the Belgian fighting lines to Ghent and Termonde, and thence into the
arms of the German pickets on the outskirts of Brussels.

And now, as the heavy door of the Maastricht police headquarters
slammed in our faces, and the key rattled in the guardroom lock, my
companion in crime threw down his hat and coat in rage. Between us
we treated our fellow-prisoners to a quarter of an hour's tirade on the
American citizen's right to freedom, swore that the Kingdom of the
Netherlands would repent this outrage, and each of us politely
assured the other it was all the other fellow's fault.

All of which, though true, had no effect on the sniffling young woman
across the way, nor the sleeper on the hardwood bench next mine,
nor the bald-headed, big-lipped police sergeant who bent over his
desk in the corner, impervious to these usual outbursts of the newly
arrested, as he laboriously scrawled in the police blotter the report of
the day's round-up.

"Sit down!" he bellowed as I advanced toward the pen door, and tried
to open it.

When he resumed his scratching I did my best to explain in a
German-French-Dutch dialect of my own invention that we wished to
see Mons. le Commissaire at once; that we had only come to inspect
the concentration camp of German and Belgian prisoners, and that
we were l