Kings, Queens, and Pawns | Page 5

if all went well, meant the
privilege of going fifty miles northeast to the actual front. True, it gave
no chance for deviation. A mile, a hundred feet off the straight and
tree-lined road north to La Panne, and I should be arrested. But the time
to think about that would come later on.
As a matter of fact, I have never been arrested. Except in the hospitals,
I was always practically where I had no business to be. I had a room in
the Hôtel des Arcades, in Dunkirk, for weeks, where, just round the
corner, the police had closed a house for a month as a punishment
because a room had been rented to a correspondent. The correspondent
had been sentenced to five years' imprisonment, but had been released
after five weeks. I was frankly a writer. I was almost aggressively a
writer. I wrote down carefully and openly everything I saw. I made, but
of course under proper auspices and with the necessary permits,
excursions to the trenches from Nieuport to the La Bassée region and
Béthune, along Belgian, French and English lines, always openly,
always with a notebook. And nothing happened!

As my notebook became filled with data I grew more and more anxious,
while the authorities grew more calm. Suppose I fell into the hands of
the Germans! It was a large notebook, filled with much information. I
could never swallow the thing, as officers are supposed to swallow the
password slips in case of capture. After a time the general spy alarm
got into my blood. I regarded the boy who brought my morning coffee
with suspicion, and slept with my notes under my pillow. And nothing
happened!
I had secured my passport visé at the French and Belgian Consulates,
and at the latter legation was able also to secure a letter asking the civil
and military authorities to facilitate my journey. The letter had been
requested for me by Colonel Depage.
It was almost miraculously easy to get out of England. It was almost
suspiciously easy. My passport frankly gave the object of my trip as
"literary work." Perhaps the keen eyes of the inspectors who passed me
onto the little channel boat twinkled a bit as they examined it.
The general opinion as to the hopelessness of my trying to get nearer
than thirty miles to the front had so communicated itself to me that had
I been turned back there on the quay at Folkstone, I would have been
angry, but hardly surprised.
Not until the boat was out in the channel did I feel sure that I was to
achieve even this first leg of the journey.
Even then, all was not well. With Folkstone and the war office well
behind, my mind turned to submarines as a sunflower to the sun.
Afterward I found that the thing to do is not to think about submarines.
To think of politics, or shampoos, or of people one does not like, but
not of submarines. They are like ghosts in that respect. They are
perfectly safe and entirely innocuous as long as one thinks of
something else.
And something went wrong almost immediately.
It was imperative that I get to Calais. And the boat, which had intended

making Calais, had had a report of submarines and headed for
Boulogne. This in itself was upsetting. To have, as one may say, one's
teeth set for Calais, and find one is biting on Boulogne, is not agreeable.
I did not want Boulogne. My pass was from Calais. I had visions of
waiting in Boulogne, of growing old and grey waiting, or of trying to
walk to Calais and being turned back, of being locked in a cow stable
and bedded down on straw. For fear of rousing hopes that must
inevitably be disappointed, again nothing happened.
There were no other women on board: only British officers and the
turbaned and imposing Indians. The day was bright, exceedingly cold.
The boat went at top speed, her lifeboats slung over the sides and ready
for lowering. There were lookouts posted everywhere. I did not think
they attended to their business. Every now and then one lifted his head
and looked at the sky or at the passengers. I felt that I should report him.
What business had he to look away from the sea? I went out to the bow
and watched for periscopes. There were black things floating about. I
decided that they were not periscopes, but mines. We went very close
to them. They proved to be buoys marking the Channel.
I hated to take my eyes off the sea, even for a moment. If you have ever
been driven at sixty miles an hour over a bad road, and felt that if you
looked away