The little vessel was headed into the stream now, the three Tommies had gone inside, followed a little later by the two men who were on the deck when I arrived, men who talked French.  When the steward left I was alone on the deck.

I watched the receding lights of Rotterdam till they flickered out in the distance.  The night was misty and too dark to make out anything on shore.  My thoughts went back to the last time, nearly a year before, when I had been on that river.  I saw it then, in flood of moonlight as I stepped on the boat deck of the giant liner Rotterdam.  The soft strains of a waltz floated up from the music room, adding enchantment to the windmills and low Dutch farmhouses strung out below the level of the water.

At that time my thoughts were full of my coming attempt to get into Germany, a Germany which was smashing through Serbia, and already planning the colossal onslaught against Verdun, the onslaught which she hoped would put France out of the war.  I had got into Germany, but for a long time I had almost despaired of getting out; twice I had been turned back courteously but firmly from the frontiers, once when I tried to cross to Switzerland and again when I started for Denmark.  A reliable friend had told me that the Wilhelmstrasse had suspected me but could prove nothing against me.  The day before I felt Germany I was called to the Wilhelmstrasse, where I received the interesting and somewhat surprising information that the greatest good that a correspondent could do in the world be to use his influence to bring the United States and Germany to a better understanding.  I made neither comment nor promise.  I was well aware that the same Wilhelmstrasse, while laying the wires for an attempt to have my country play Germany’s game, was sedulously continuing its propaganda of Gott strafe Amerika among the German people.  As in the hatred sown against Great Britain hate against America was sown so that the Government would have a united Germany behind them in case of war.

I was at last out of Germany, but the lights of the Hook of Holland reminded me that a field of German activity lay ahead—­floating mines, torpedoes, submarines, and swift destroyers operating from Ostend and Zeebrugge.  They are challenging British supremacy in the southern part of the North Sea, through the waters of which we must now feel our way.

We were off the Hook running straight to the open sea.  The nervous feeling of planning and delay of the last few days gave way now to the exhilaration which comes of activity in danger.  If the Germans should get us, the least that would happen to me would be internment until the end of the war.  I was risking everything on the skill and pluck of the man who paced the bridge above my head, and on the efficiency of the British patrol of the seas.