He was then sent into the fields with two companions—­the two who were in the group about the table—­and with them he seized a favourable opportunity to escape.  His companions had tried on previous occasions, each separately, but had been caught, sent back and put into dark cells and given only one meal a day for a long and weakening period.  That did not daunt them.  The Germans thought that men who had gone through that kind of punishment would not try to escape again.  Yet as soon as their strength was restored through their food parcels from home they were off, but in an entirely different direction.

I asked one of them, a little Welshman, where be got the waterproof rubber bag on the floor at his feet, in which were all his earthly belongings.  “That used to be the old German farmer’s tablecloth,” he said.

To-day in Europe there are millions of civilians dressed in military uniform, which fails to hide the fact that their main work of life is not that of the soldier.  But the three British soldiers sitting under the smoky brass lamp were of a different sort.  Twelve years of service had so indelibly stamped them as soldiers of the King that the make-shift clothing given them in Holland, could not conceal their calling.  Their faces were an unnatural white from the terrible experiences which they had undergone, but, like the rest of the Old Army, they were always soldiers, every inch of them.

The two men whom, I had heard talking French on the deck were Belgians.  The one had been a soldier at Liege, and had managed to scramble across a ditch after his three days’ tramp to Holland, although the sentry’s bullet whistled uncomfortably close.  He said that his strongest wish was to rejoin the Belgian army so that he might do his part to avenge the death of seven civilian hostages who had been shot before his eyes.

The other Belgian was just over military age, but he wanted to reach England to volunteer.  His nerve and resource are certainly all right.  He knew of the electrified wire along the Belgian-Dutch frontier, so he brought two pieces of glass with him, and thus held the current of death away from his body while he wriggled through to freedom.

We talked until after midnight.  The French captain, formerly an instructor of artillery at Saint Cyr—­the West Point and the Sandhurst of France—­taken prisoner in the first autumn of the war, was the last to tell his story.

At Torgau, Saxony, in the heart of Germany, be plunged into the Elbe in the darkness of night, stemmed the swift waters, and on landing, half-drowned, rose speedily and walked fast to avoid a fatal chill.

For twenty-nine days he struggled on towards liberty.  Nothing but the tremendous impulse of the desire for freedom could have carried him on his own two feet across Germany, without money, through countless closely-policed villages and great cities, in a country where everyone carries an identity book (with which, of course, he 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.