It was noticeable that though the barges had been commandeered by their army and they never lost sight of the fact that their owners were “the enemy,” the English officers were meticulously courteous in requesting permission to enter the family cabins. Your Britisher never forgets that a man’s home is his castle. One could not but wonder just what the attitude of a German officer would have been under reversed conditions, for the same motto is far less deeply ingrained in the Teuton character. The barge nearest the steamer was occupied by a family with five children, the oldest aged fourteen, all born on board, at as many points of the vessel’s constant going and coming between Rotterdam and Mannheim. Two of them were at school in the town in which the family was registered as residents, where the parental marriage was on record, where the father reported when the order of mobilization called him to arms. The oldest had already been entered as “crew,” and was preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps—if the expression be allowed under the circumstances.
When they had arranged themselves for the night, the “Tommies” returned on board the steamer for a two-hour entertainment of such caliber as could be aroused from their own midst. There were several professional barn-storming vaudeville performers among them, rather out of practice from their long trench vigils, but willing enough to offer such talents as they still possessed. Nor were the amateurs selfish in preserving their incognito. It was simple fare, typified by such uproarious jokes as:
“’Ungry, are you? Well, ’ene, ’ere’s a piece of chalk. Go draw yourself a plate of ’am an’ eggs.”
But it all served to pass the endless last hours that separated the war-weary veterans from the final ardently awaited return to “the old woman an’ the kids.”
The tramp of hundreds of hobnailed shoes on the deck over our heads awoke us at dawn, and by the time we had reached the open air Germany had been left behind. It needed only the glimpse of a cart, drawn by a dog, occupied by a man, and with a horse hitched behind—a genuine case of the cart before the horse—trotting along an elevated highway, sharp-cut against the floor-flat horizon, to tell us we were in Holland. Besides, there were stodgy windmills slowly laboring on every hand, to say nothing of the rather unprepossessing young Dutch lieutenant, in his sickly gray-green uniform, who had boarded us at the frontier, to confirm the change of nationality of Father Rhine. The lieutenant’s duties consisted of graciously accepting an occasional sip of the genuine old Scotch that graced the sideboard of the youthful commanding officer, and of seeing to it that the rifles of the Tommies remained under lock and key until they reached their sea-going vessel at the mouth of the river—a task that somehow suggested a Lilliputian sent to escort a regiment of giants through his diminutive kingdom.