“I came to the conclusion that my brain would not stand the captivity.  I knew some of the difficulties before me, but I doubt whether I would have started if I had known them all.  I lived on unthreshed wheat and rye, apples, blackberries, bilberries, carrots, turnips and even raw potatoes.  I did not taste one morsel of cooked food or anything stronger than water till I arrived in Holland.  I did not speak one word to any human being.  On two occasions I marched more than thirty miles in the twenty-four hours.  I slept always away from the roadside, and very often by day, and as far as possible from any inhabited house.  I am, as you see, weak and thin, practically only muscle and bone, and during the last three days, while waiting in Holland for the boat, I have had to eat carefully to avoid the illness that would almost certainly follow repletion.”

After I had lain down for a few hours’ sleep, I thought, as I had often thought during the past thirty months, that although this is a war of machinery there is plenty of the human element in it, too.  People who tell only of the grim-drab aspect of the great struggle sometimes forget that romances just as fine as were ever spun by Victor Hugo happen around, them every day.

At dawn I hung to the rail of the wildly tossing ship, looking at the horizon from which the mists were clearing.  Two specks began to grow into the long low black lines of destroyers.  Our most anxious moment of the voyage had come.  We waited for the shot that would show them to be German.

“They’re all right.  They’re the escort!” came a voice on the winds that swept over the bridge.

They grew rapidly large, lashed the sea white as they tore along one on each side of us, diving through the waves when they could not ride them.  When abreast of us they seemed almost to stop in their own length, wheel and disappear in the distance.  Somehow the way they wheeled reminded me of the way the Cossacks used to pull their horses sharply at right angles when I saw them covering the rearguard in the retreat through the Bukovina.

The rough soldier at my side looked after them, with a mist in his eyes that did not come from the sea.  “I’ll be able to see my wife again,” he said, more to the waves than to me.  “I didn’t write, because I didn’t want to raise any false hopes.  But this settles it, we’re certain to get home safe now.  I suppose I’ll walk in and find her packing my food parcel for Germany—­the parcel that kept me alive, while some of them poor Russian chaps with nobody to send them parcels are going under every day.”

We ran close to two masts sticking up out of the water near the mouth of the Humber, the mast of our sister ship, which had gone down with all on board when she struck a mine.

That is the sort of sight which makes some critics say, “What is the matter with the British Navy?” Those critics forget to praise the mine-sweepers that we saw all about, whose bravery, endurance and noble spirit of self-sacrifice lead them to persevere in their perilous work and enable a thousand ships to reach port to one that goes down.