At this period of my adventure if a day or a night passed without its thrill I began to feel almost disappointed, but such disappointments were rather rare. One evening as I was about to swim a canal about two hundred feet wide I suddenly noticed, about one hundred yards away, a canal-boat moored to the side. It was a sort of out-of-the-way place, and I wondered what the canal-boat had stopped for. I crawled up to see. As I neared the boat five men were leaving it, and I noticed them cross over into the fields. At a safe distance I followed them, and they had not gone very far before I saw what they were after. They were committing the common but heinous crime of stealing potatoes! Without the means to cook them, potatoes didn't interest me a bit, and I thought that the boat itself would probably yield me more than the potato-patch. Knowing that the canal hands would probably take their time in the fields, I climbed up the stern of the boat leisurely and without any particular pains to conceal myself. Just as my head appeared above the stern of the boat I saw, silhouetted against the sky, the dreaded outline of a German soldier--spiked helmet and all! A chill ran down my spine as I dropped to the bank of the canal and slunk away. Evidently the sentry had not seen me or, if he had, he had probably figured that I was one of the foraging party, but I realized that it wouldn't pay in future to take anything for granted. X EXPERIENCES IN BELGIUM I think that one of the worst things I had to contend with in my journey through Belgium was the number of small ditches. They intercepted me at every half-mile or so, sometimes more frequently. The canals and the big rivers I could swim. Of course, I got soaked to the skin every time I did it, but I was becoming hardened to that. These little ditches, however, were too narrow to swim and too wide to jump. They had perhaps two feet of water in them and three feet of mud, and it was almost invariably a case of wading through. Some of them, no doubt, I could have jumped if I had been in decent shape, but with a bad ankle and in the weakened condition in which I was, it was almost out of the question. One night I came to a ditch about eight or nine feet wide. I thought I was strong enough to jump it, and it was worth trying, as the discomfort I suffered after wading these ditches was considerable. Taking a long run, I jumped as hard as I could, but I missed it by four or five inches and landed in about two feet of water and three feet more of mud. Getting out of that mess was quite a job. The water was too dirty and too scanty to enable me to wash off the mud with which I was covered and it was too wet to scrape off. I just had to wait until it dried and scrape it off then.