At last we were in the cell, which was of course as dark as the nether regions, having taken quite an affectionate farewell of our escort. PART III CHAPTER XIX FOOTING THE BILL The lieutenant at the station, by his orders to us and the soldiers, had given us the cue for our behavior. Obviously, we must try to impress the warder with our standing as “military prisoners,” in order to be as comfortable as circumstances permitted. We proceeded to do this with great ingenuousness. Long arguments and counter-arguments secured us the use of an oil lamp until eight o’clock at night. We went in force to obtain a second blanket, the warder leading the procession. Our cell was very small, and very dirty. What little space there ought to have been was taken up by stacks of old bicycle tires, which had been confiscated six months before by the Government to relieve the rubber famine in the army. During the three days we spent in Haltern prison we had no exercise at all. When the weather changed on the second day, and became mild again, just about the time when we should have been close to the frontier if everything had gone well, we sulked with fate more than ever. The reported arrival of our escort on the evening of the third day excited the warder to such an extent that he wanted us to get up at half-past five the next morning in order to catch a train about eight o’clock. We demurred, of course, and got our way, as usual. Ever since our arrest we had devoted a good deal of time to weighing the probability of being sent to a certain penal prison in Berlin. “Where are you going to take us?” Wallace and I blurted out simultaneously at two shadowy soldiers in the dark passage of the prison the following morning. “To where you came from, the Stadtvogtei in Berlin,” one of them replied. To say we felt relieved is putting it mildly. “We’d better not take it for granted that we are going to stay there, though!” I said, as we tramped through the melting slush to the station. Several hours later, after a change of trains, Wallace and I had been put temporarily into a compartment with other travelers, until it could be cleared for the exclusive use of ourselves and escort. Slipping into the only two empty seats, we found the burning interest of our fellow-travelers centered upon a man in the naval uniform of the Zeppelin service, who was holding forth about his adventures over England. With extraordinary frankness he was recounting the names of a number of air-ship stations, and the number of Zeppelins usually detailed from each for attacks on Great Britain, and predicting another raid seven days later. “You give them h---- every time you fly across, don’t you?” asked a civilian, leaning far forward in his seat. “Can’t say that there is much to boast about of late,” was the unexpected reply. “They’ve plenty of guns, and can shoot quite as well as we. There won’t be many more raids after the one coming off next week.”