We certainly found plenty of unsettled country to travel through in the first days of our journey, for we seemed to go through one marsh after another, covered with coarse, long hay, which would have been cut, no doubt, but for the soft bottoms which make it impossible to use a mower.  To drain this land would furnish more work for the Russian prisoners!  In one place we suddenly stepped down a couple of feet into a bog filled with water, but with grass on the top.  We discovered that it was a place from which the peat had been removed, and it was the only sign of human activity that we saw all night.

On the evening of August 23d, when we started out after a fairly good day in a spruce thicket, we could see the lights of Bremen reflected in the sky.  The lights of a city, with its homes, its stores, its eating-places, its baths, should be a welcome sight to wayfaring men who have been living on oats and turnips, but not for us, to whom a city meant only capture.  So when we noticed the rosy glow in the southern sky we steered our course farther west, but still taking care to avoid the city, which we intended to pass on the south and east side.

Our troubles were many that night.  A good-sized river got in our way and had to be crossed.  There was no bridge in sight, and we had determined to waste no time looking for one.  So we undressed on the marshy bank and made bundles of our clothes, pinning our tunics about everything with the safety-pins which we carried.  We also used the cord around the bundles.  Ted was doubtful about swimming and carrying his clothes, so I said I would try it first, with mine.  I went down through the coarse grass, which was harsh and prickly to my feet, and full of nettles or something which stung me at every step, and was glad to reach the open water.  The moon was in the last quarter, and clouded over, so the night was of the blackest.  I made the shore without much trouble, and threw my bundle on a grassy bank.

I called over to Ted that the going was fine, and that I would come back for his clothes.  At that, he started in to meet me, swimming on his back and holding his clothes with both hands, using only his feet, but when he got into the current, it turned him downstream.  I swam toward him as fast as I could, but by the time I reached him he had lost the grip of his clothes, and when I got them they were wet through.  As we were nearer to the bank from which he had started, we went back to it, for we were both pretty well blown.  However, in a few minutes we were able to strike out again, and reached the other bank in safety.  Poor Ted was very cold and miserable, but put on his soaking garments, without a word, and our journey continued.

This was another ditch country—­ditches both wide and deep, and many of them treacherous things, for their sides were steep and hard to climb.  The darkness made it doubly hard, and sometimes we were pretty well frightened as we let ourselves down a greasy clay bank into the muddy water.  Later on we found some corduroy bridges that the hay-makers had put over the ditches.