The villages were very thick here, and our chief difficulty was to keep out of them. Once we ventured rather close to the road which ran near the railroad, and heard a number of people talking. They were travellers who had alighted from the train which had raced past us in the darkness a few minutes before. The station is often quite a distance from the village, and these were the passengers walking back to their homes--the village which we had been avoiding. We dropped to the ground, and the people went by, one old man singing. I knew he was old, for his voice was cracked and thin, but of great sweetness, and he sang an aria from a musical comedy which was popular then, called "The Joy of Life." I had heard a doctor in the lazaret singing it. When the sound had grown fainter in the distance, we came out of our hiding-place and went on. "It seems hard," said Bromley, "to be fighting with people who can sing like that. I can't work up any ill-will to that good old soul, going home singing--and I don't believe he has any ill-will to us. I couldn't fight the Germans if they were all like this old chap and Sank!" "You wouldn't need to," I said. "There would not have been any fighting." And then we strained our ears to listen to the song, not a word of which we understood, though to us the music was full of good-will and joy. "We've got to keep farther out," I said at last. "We are sure to run into some one and then it will be all up with us!" We found, at last, after much stumbling over rough ground, a road quite grass-grown and apparently abandoned. We followed it for about a mile, making good progress, until we came to a stream over which there was a bridge. We hesitated a minute before going over, but the place was as silent as a cemetery, and seemed perfectly safe. So we cautiously went over, keeping a sharp outlook all the time. When we were over the bridge, we found ourselves in the one street of another village. We stopped for a minute and listened. There was not a sound. We then went forward. Most of the streets of the villages are paved with cobblestones, but these were not, and our boots made no sound on the dirt road. Not even a dog barked, and just as we were at the farther end of it, the village clock rang the hour of three! "That's all right for once," I said, "but it's risky; I don't think we'd better try it again. Some barking dog is sure to awake." Soon after that the east grew red with morning, and we struck straight into the woods to find shelter. We soon found ourselves in high rushes growing out of swampy ground, and as we plunged along, we came to a high woven-wire fence, which we supposed marked the bounds of a game preserve.