Part 10

I was far from despairing, however; in fact, I never felt more equal to a situation in my life. The whole thing hinged on my getting my first train. After that I felt I could manage. I had studied German passenger cars as closely as possible in watching them pass at a distance, and was certain they offered fairly good “tourist” accommodation on the “bumpers” or brake beams; but I did not feel that I yet knew enough of their under-slung “architecture” to board them when on the move. This meant that I was going to have to start on my “maiden” trip from a station or siding, where I could find a train at rest. A siding would, of course, have been vastly preferable, but as I had none definitely located, and knew that I might easily waste the rest of the night looking for one, the X---- _bahnhof_ was the only alternative. Because this was so plainly the _only_ way, I was nerved to the job far better than if I had had to decide between two or three lines of action.

Nor was I in any doubt as to how the thing would have to be done. At the ticket windows, or at the gates to the train shed, I was positive I would be challenged at once--even if no word had yet gone to the police of my escape--and held for investigation. Besides, I had not money enough to take me a quarter the distance I felt that I should have to go to be reasonably safe. The only way was to follow the tracks in through the yards and make the best of any opportunity that offered. The ten or twelve-pound magneto would be a good deal of a nuisance, but, as the possible sale of it at some distant point offered an easy way to the money I was sure to need I decided not to let it go till I had to.

I already knew the general lay of the X---- station, and decided that it would be best to go to the tracks by crossing a field just outside of the town. My road crossed the line a half-mile further away, but I felt sure a bridge over a canal which would have to be passed if I took to the ties at this point would be guarded by soldiers. A stumble through a weed-choked ditch, a trudge across a couple of hundred yards of rye stubble, a climb over the wire fencing of the right-of-way, and I was once more crushing stone ballasting under my brogans, as I had done so often before. Ten minutes later I passed unchallenged under the lights of a switching-tower and was inside the X---- yards. Almost at the same moment a bright headlight flashed out down the line ahead, and before I reached the station a long passenger train had pulled in and stopped. “Just in time,” I muttered to myself; “that’s _my_ train, wherever it’s going.”

Entering the train-shed, I avoided the platforms and hurried along between the passenger train and a string of freight cars standing on the next track. Two or three yard hands brushed by me without a glance, for there was practically no difference between my greasy machinist’s rig-out and their own. But as I stopped and began to peer under one of the _erstige_ coaches I saw, with the tail of my eye, a brakeman of the freight train pause in his clamber up the end of one of the cars and crane his head suspiciously in my direction. Scores of times before (though never with so much at stake) I had faced the same kind of emergency, and, without an instant’s hesitation and as though it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing, I started tapping one of the wheels with my big steel wrench. Heaven only knows if they test for cracked car wheels that way in Germany! I certainly have never seen them do it, at any rate. Anyhow, it served my purpose of making the brakeman think I was there on business, for he climbed on up on to his train and passed out of sight. Two seconds later I was snuggled up on the “bumpers” with my wrench and magneto in my lap.

The brake-beams of a German _schlafwagen_ are not quite as roomy as those of an American Pullman, but they might be much worse. The train was a fairly fast one, making few stops, and I believe would have taken me right in to Berlin if I had remained aboard long enough. I was getting rather cramped and stiff after four or five hours, however, and not caring to run the risk of being seen riding by daylight, I dropped off as the train slowed down at a junction on the outskirts of what appeared, and turned out, to be a large manufacturing city. The magneto slipped out of my two-fingered hand as I jumped off, and brought up in the frog of a switch with a jolt that must have played hob with its delicate insides, but I wasn’t doing any worrying on that score. Here I was, safe and sound, a good hundred miles beyond any place they would ever think of looking for me. Moreover, I had money in my pocket, as well as the possible means of getting more. I couldn’t have wished for a better start.

There are a number of reasons why it would not be best for me to go into detail at this time regarding the various ways in which I steered clear of trouble in getting beyond the German frontiers, not the least of them being that it might make it harder in the future for some other poor devil trying to do the same thing. I do not think, however, there would be one chance in a thousand for a British prisoner less “heeled for the game”--a man unable to speak the language and to steal rides on the “brake-beams” of the trains, I mean--than I was to win through from any great distance from the frontier. But however that may be, I am not going to make it harder for any one who may get the chance by telling just how I did it.

Money--to be obtained by selling the magneto of the tractor I had brought along with me--was the first thing for me to see to after getting well clear of the country in which I was likely to be searched for, and it was in going after this that I was nearest to “coming a cropper.” I made the mistake--in my haste to get rid of the burden of the heavy thing--of offering it to the first electrical supply shop I came to. The proprietor wanted the thing very badly, but while he seemed to accept readily enough my story that I was a returned German-American working in munition factories, he said that the law required him to call up the police and ask if anything of the kind had been reported as stolen. I was not in the least afraid that the magneto would be reported at a point so distant from the one I had taken it from, but I did know that I couldn’t “stand up” for two minutes in any kind of interview with the police. So I told old Fritz to go ahead and telephone, and as soon as his back was turned grabbed up the magneto and slipped out to the street as quietly as possible.

Whether the police made any effort to trace me or not I never knew. There was no evidence of it, anyhow. I headed into the first side street, and from that into another, and then kept going until I came to a dirty little secondhand shop with a Jew name over the door. Luckily the old Sheeny had had some dealing in junk and hardware, and knew at once the value of the goods I had to offer. As a matter of fact, indeed, the magneto was a “Bosch,” made in Germany in the first place, and imported to the U.S. by the makers of the tractor from which I had taken it. I was a good deal winded from quick walking--I hadn’t a lot of strength at that time anyhow--and the shrewd old Hebrew must have felt sure that I had stolen the thing within the hour. He said no word about ’phoning the police, however, but merely looked at me slyly out of the corner of one eye and offered me fifty marks for an instrument that was worth four or five hundred in ordinary times, and probably half again as much more through war demands. I could probably have got more out of him, but I was in no temper for bargaining, and the quick way in which I snapped up his offer must have confirmed any suspicions the old fox may have had concerning the way I came by the “goods.” The joint was probably little more than a “fence”--a thieves’ clearing-house--anyhow, and I was dead lucky to stumble on to it as I did.

I had two hearty meals that day in cheap restaurants--taking care to order no bread or anything else I felt there might be a chance of my needing a “card” for--and that night swung up on to the “rods” of a passenger train that had slowed down to something like ten miles an hour at a crossing, and rode for several hours in a direction which I correctly figured to be that of the Dutch frontier. I spent the following day moving freely about a good-sized manufacturing city, and the next night “beat” through to a town on the border of Holland. As this was not a place where there were any factories, my machinist’s rig-out didn’t “merge into the landscape” in quite the same way it did in the places where there was a lot of manufacturing, and I stayed there only long enough to make sure that the frontier was guarded in a way that would make the chances very much against my getting across without some kind of help. Such help I knew that I could get in Belgium, and therefore, as the whole of the German railway system seemed to be at my disposal for night excursions, I decided to try my luck from that direction. I wanted to take a look at Essen and Krupps’ while I was so near, but finally concluded it would not be best to take a chance in a district where there were sure to be more on the watch than anywhere else. The distant tops of tall chimneys and a cloud of smoke in the sky were all that I saw of the “place where the war was made.”

The Germans boast of a great intelligence system, yet not once--so far as I could see--was I under suspicion during the several days in which I made my leisurely way, by more or less indirect route, into Belgium. As a matter of fact, I did not give them very much to “lay hold of.” I kept closely to my original plan of steering clear of railway stations and hotels, and of asking for nothing in shops or restaurants that might require “tickets.” The weather was good, and most of my sleeping was done in about the same quiet sort of outdoor nooks as the American “hobo” seeks out in making his way across the continent. The only difference was that it was safer, if anything, in Germany, and many times when, in the States, I would have been greeted by a policeman’s club on the soles of my boots, I saw, from the tail of my eye, the “arm of the law” strut by without a second glance at the tired machinist, with his wrench beside him, dozing under a tree in a park or by the roadside. I had half a dozen good meals with kind-hearted peasants, and one night--it was raining, and I was pretty well played out--I accepted the offer of a bed in a farmhouse, the owner of which had a son who had a sheep ranch in Montana, near Miles City, a place where I had run a threshing outfit one season. He said he was very sorry that the boy had not been as clever as I was in evading the “Englanders” and getting home to help the Fatherland. He was a kind old fellow, and I tinkered up his mowing-machine and put a new valve in his leaking pump to square my account. There were a number of little incidents of this kind, and the simple kindliness of the old peasants I met--mostly fathers and mothers and wives with sons or husbands in the war--was responsible for the fact that I did not feel quite as harshly against Huns in general when I left their country as when I entered it. Still, I know very well that their good treatment of me was only because they thought I was one of themselves, and that they would probably have given me up to a mob to tear to pieces if they had suspected for a minute what I really was.

I went through into Belgium on the brake-beams of a fast freight which, from the way it seemed to have the right-of-way over passengers, I concluded was carrying munitions urgently needed at the front. It was slowed down in some kind of a traffic jam at a junction when I boarded it, but when I left it--when I thought I was as far into Belgium as I wanted to go--it was hitting up a lively thirty miles an hour or more, and all my practice at the game could not save me from a nasty roll. Luckily, I dropped clear of the ties; and as the fill was of soft earth, with a ditch full of water at the bottom, I was not much the worse for a fall that would have brained me a dozen times over on most American lines.

Of how I got out of Belgium into Holland, and finally on to England, it would not do for me to write anything at all at this time, beyond saying that it was entirely due to aid that I had from the Belgians themselves. One of the most interesting chapters of the war will be the one--not to be published till all is over--telling how Belgian patriots in Belgium not only kept touch with each other during the German occupation, but also contrived to send news--and even go and come themselves--to the outer world. Even the “electric fence” along the Holland boundary has no terrors for them, and I am giving away no secret when I say that there are more ways of getting safely under or over that fence than there are wires in it. It will probably do no harm for me to say that _I_ crossed this barrier on a very cleverly made little folding stairway which when not in use, was kept hidden under a square of sod but a few feet away from the fence itself. The genial old German sentry who spread it for me--he had, of course, been liberally bribed, and probably had some regular “working arrangement” with my Belgian friends--confided to me at parting that, when he had accumulated enough money to keep him comfortably the rest of his life in Holland, he intended to climb over that little stairway himself and never go back. I have often wondered how many other Germans feel the same about leaving “the sinking ship.”

THE SINGING SOLDIER

I

There was something just a bit ominous in the brooding warmth of the soft air that was stirring at the base of the towering cliffs of the Marmolada, where I took the _teleferica_; and the tossing aigrettes of wind-driven snow at the lip of the pass where the cable-line ended in the lee of a rock just under the Italian first-line trenches signalled the reason why. The vanguard of one of those irresponsible mavericks of mountain storms that so delight to bustle about and take advantage of the fine weather to make surprise attacks on the Alpine sky-line outposts was sneaking over from the Austrian side; and somewhere up there where the tenuous wire of the _teleferica_ fined down and merged into the amorphous mass of the cliff behind, my little car was going to run into it.

“A good ten minutes to snug down in, anyhow,” I said to myself. And after the fashion of the South Sea skipper who shortens sail and battens down the hatches with his weather eye on the squall roaring down from windward, I tucked in the loose ends of the rugs about my feet, rolled up the high fur collar of my _Alpinio_ coat, and buttoned the tab across my nose.

But things were developing faster than I had calculated. As the little wire basket glided out of the cut in the forty-foot drift that had encroached on its aerial right-of-way where the supporting cables cleared a jutting crag, I saw that it was not only an open-and-above-board frontal attack that I had to reckon with, but also a craftily-planned flank movement quite in keeping with the fact that the whole affair, lock, stock, and barrel, was a “Made in Austria” product. Swift-driven little shafts of blown snow, that tried hard to keep their plumes from tossing above the sheltering rock-pinnacles, were wriggling over between the little peaks on both sides of the pass and slipping down to launch themselves in flank attack along the narrowing valley traversed by the _teleferica_ and the zigzagging trail up to the Italian positions. Even as I watched, one of them came into position to strike, and straight out over the ice-cap covering the brow of a cliff shot a clean-lined wedge of palpable, solid whiteness.

One instant my face was laved in the moist air-current drawing up from the wooded lower valley, where the warm fingers of the thaw were pressing close on the hair-poised triggers of the ready-cocked avalanches; the next I was gasping in a blast of Arctic frigidity as the points of the blown ice-needles tingled in my protesting lungs with the sting of hastily-gulped champagne. Through frost-rimmed eyelashes I had just time to see a score of similar shafts leap out and go charging down into the bottom of the valley, before the main front of the storm came roaring along, and heights and hollows were masked by swishing veils of translucent white. In the space of a few seconds an amphitheatre of soaring mountain peaks roofed with a vault of deep purple sky had resolved itself into a gusty gulf of spinning snow blasts.

My little wire basket swung giddily to one side as the first gust drove into it, promptly to swing back again, after the manner of a pendulum, when the air-buffer was undermined by a counter-gust and fell away; but the deeply grooved wheel was never near to jumping off the supporting cable, and the even throb of the distant engine coming down the pulling wire felt like a kindly hand-pat of reassurance.

“Good old _teleferica_!” I said half aloud, raising myself on one elbow and looking over the side: “you’re as comfy and safe as a passenger lift and as thrilling as an aeroplane. But”--as the picture of a line of ant-like figures I had noted toiling up the snowy slope a few moments before flashed to my mind--“what happens to a man on his feet--a man not being yanked along out of trouble by an engine on the end of a nice strong cable--when he’s caught in a maelstrom like that? What must be happening to those poor Alpini? Whatever can they be doing?”

And even before the clinging insistence of the warm breeze from the lower valley had checked the impetuosity of the invader, and diverted him, a cringing captive, to baiting avalanches with what was left of his strength, I had my answer; for it was while the ghostly draperies of the snow-charged wind-gusts still masked the icy slope below that, through one of those weird tricks of acoustics so common among high mountain peaks, the flute-like notes of a man singing in a clear tenor floated up to the ears I was just unmuffling from a furry collar:--

“Fratelli d’Itali, l’Italia, s’è desta; Dell’ elmo di Scipio s’è cinta la testa!”

It was the “Inno di Mameli,” the Song of 1848--the Marseillaise of the Italians. I recognised it instantly, because, an hour previously my hosts at luncheon in the officers’ mess below had been playing it on the gramophone. Clear and silvery, like freshly minted coins made vocal, the stirring words winged up through the pulsing air till the “sound chute” by which they had found their way was broken up by the milling currents of the dying storm. But I knew that the Alpini were still singing,--that they had been singing all the time, indeed,--and when the last of the snow-flurries was finally lapped up by the warm wind, there they were, just as I expected to find them, pressing onwards and upwards under their burdens of soup-cans, wine-bottles, stove-wood, blankets, munitions, and the thousand and one other things that must pass up the life-line of a body of soldiers holding a mountain pass in midwinter.

II

This befell, as it chanced, during one of my early days on the Alpine front, and the incident of men singing in a blizzard almost strong enough to sweep them from their feet made no small impression on me at the moment. It was my first experience of the kind. A week later I should have considered it just as astonishing to have encountered, under any conditions, an Alpino who was _not_ singing; for to him--to all Italian soldiers, indeed--song furnishes the principal channel of outward expression of the spirit within him. And what a spirit it is! He sings as he works, he sings as he plays, he sings as he fights, and--many a tale is told of how this or that comrade has been seen to go down with a song on his lips--he sings as he dies. He soothes himself with song, he beguiles himself with song, he steadies himself with song, he exalts himself with song. It is not song as the German knows it, not the ponderous marching chorus that the Prussian Guard thunders to order in the same way that it thumps through its goose-step; but rather a simple burst of song that is as natural and spontaneous as the soaring lark’s greeting to the rising sun.

Discipline of any kind is more or less irksome to the high-spirited Alpino, but he manages to struggle along under it with tolerable goodwill so long as it is plain to him that the military exigencies really demand it. But the one thing that he really chafes under is the prohibition to sing. This is, of course, quite imperative when he is on scouting or patrol-work, or engaged in one of the incessant surprise attacks which form so important a feature of Alpine warfare. He was wont to sing as he climbed in those distant days when he scaled mountains for the love of it; and, somehow, a sort of reflex action seems to have been established between the legs and the vocal chords that makes it extremely awkward to work the one without the other. If the truth could be told, indeed, probably not a few half-consummated _coups de main_ would be found to have been nearly marred by a joyous burst of “unpremeditated melody” on the part of some spirited Alpino who succumbed to the force of habit.

I was witness of a rather amusing incident illustrative of the difficulty that even the officer of Alpini experiences in denying himself vocal expression, not only when it is strictly against regulations, but even on occasions when, both by instinct and experience, he knows that “breaking into song” is really dangerous. It had to do with passing a certain exposed point in the Cadore at a time when there was every reason to fear the incidence of heavy avalanches. Your real Alpino has tremendous respect for the snow-slide, but no fear. He has--especially since the war--faced death in too many really disagreeable forms to have any dread of what must seem to him the grandest and most inspiring finish of the lot--the one end which he could be depended upon to pick if ever the question of alternatives were in the balance. In the matter of the avalanche, as in most other things, he is quite fatalistic. If a certain _valanga_ is meant for him, what use trying to avoid it? If it is not meant for him, what use taking precautions? All the precautions will be vain against _your_ avalanche; all of them will be superfluous as regards the ones _not_ for you.

It chances, however, that this comforting Oriental philosophy entered not into the reckoning of the Italian General Staff when it laid its plans for minimising unnecessary casualties; and so, among other precautionary admonitions, the order went out that soldiers passing certain exposed sections, designated by boards bearing the warning _Pericoloso di Valanga_, should not raise the voice above a speaking tone, and, especially, that no singing should be indulged in. This is, of course, no more than sensible, for a shout, or a high-pitched note of song, may set going just the vibrations of air needed to start a movement on the upper slopes of a mountain side which will culminate in launching a million tons of snow all the way across the lower valley. The Alpino has observed the rule as best he could,--probably saving not a few of his numbers thereby,--but the effort is one that at times tries his stout spirit almost to the breaking point.