Mrs. Omohundro made a journey of several hundred miles to get out of Russia from Petrograd to Stockholm, part of which was a trip in sleighs of twenty-seven miles from Tornio, in Finland, to Korning, Sweden. This trip took about four hours and the ride was through the rather weird twilight of midday in the northern latitudes.
An amusing story was told of the stop at Tornio, on the border, where the members of the party were searched. Even the women did not escape inspection by the Russian soldiers and all postcards and suspicious looking papers were confiscated. In the party was an English Jew who was returning to London after selling out his business in Moscow. It was noticed by some of the travellers that the returning merchant, whose name was Cohen, frequently bought many boxes of matches.
When the search took place at Tornio the many boxes of matches in Cohen's baggage did not seem to excite any suspicion among the Russian troopers. After the party had passed over the border Cohen opened up box after box and from the bottom of each took a compact roll of money. He had concealed about $12,000 in this way.
"You see," he explained, "I could not afford to take any chances."
A French officer who came under heavy fire while carrying several cases of champagne across an exposed place in his lines to a hospital nearby wrote thus to a friend: "For the first time during the war I was afraid--terribly so. No one could have been more terrified. I wasn't afraid of being killed, but if I had been hit while carrying the champagne from a vacant house everyone would have said, 'Served the looter right.' Who would have believed that I was taking it to a hospital?"
A German living in St. Louis has twenty-three nephews in the Kaiser's army, three of whom have been decorated with the Iron Cross for bravery. Two have been wounded in action. A French Senator has given his three sons for France. One was killed in Alsace, another storming breastworks on the Aisne, and another in Africa.
A correspondent of the London _Daily Chronicle_ in Flanders telegraphs the following:
"The Germans had been attacked and driven back during a certain engagement to their trenches 400 yards from ours. Between the lines a German officer fell, wounded by a bayonet. He was nearer the British trenches than the German, but whenever our men began to go out to carry in the wounded man the German snipers got busy. They would neither succor their tortured comrade nor let the British do it.