“We got up into a wood that night, and Martin draws out his compass and he says: ‘We’ve got a hundred and seven miles to do in night shifts, cully. And if we make a slip we’re shot as safe as knife.’ It sounded the maddest scheme in the world, but I somehow felt that Martin would get through it. The only thing that saved me was that—that I didn’t have to think. I simply left everything to him. If I’d started thinking I could have gone mad. I had it fixed in my mind, ‘either he does it or he doesn’t do it. I can’t help it.’ I reely don’t remember much about that journey. It was all a dream like. We did all our travelin’ at night by compass, and hid by day. Neither of us had a word of German. But Gawd’s truth! that man Martin was a marvel! He turned our trousers inside out, and made ’em look like ordinary laborers’ trousers. He disappeared the first night and came back with some other old clothes. We lived mostly on raw potatoes we dug out of the ground with our hands, but not always. One night he came back with a fowl which he cooked in a hole in the earth, making a fire with a flint and some dry stuff he pinched from a farm. I believed Martin could have stole an egg from under a hen without her noticing it. He was the coolest card there ever was. Of course there was a lot of trouble one way and another. It wasn’t always easy to find wooded country or protection of any sort. We often ran into people and they stared at us, and we shifted our course. But I think we were only addressed three or four times by men, and then Martin’s methods were the simplest in the world. He just looked sort of blank for a moment, and then knocked them clean out, and bolted. Of course they were after us all the time, and it was this constant tacking and shifting ground that took so long. Fancy! he never had a map, you know, nothing but the compass. We didn’t know what sort of country we were coming to, nothing. We just crept through the night like cats. I believe Martin could see in the dark.... He killed a dog one night with his hands.... It was necessary.” VII It was impossible to discover from Ernie how long this amazing journey lasted—the best part of two months I believe. He was himself a little uncertain with regard to many incidents, whether they were true or whether they were hallucinations. He suffered greatly from his wound and had periods of feverishness. But one morning, he said, Martin began “prancing.” He seemed to develop some curious sense that they were near the Dutch frontier. And then, according to Ernie, “a cat wasn’t in it with Martin.” He was very mysterious about the actual crossing. I gathered that there had been some “clumsy” work with sentries. It was at that time that Ernie got a bullet through his arm. When he got to Holland he was very ill. It was not that the wound was a very serious one, but, as he explained: “Me blood was in a bad state. I was nearly down and out.”