(S) BRAND WHITLOCK. A Son Excellence Monsieur le Baron von
der Lancken, Bruxelles.


Before my final liberation I was escorted into the biggest and
busiest office of all.

Here I was given an Erlaubnis to travel by military train through
Liege into Germany, and from there on out by way of Holland. The
destination that I had in mind was Ghent, but passing through the
lines thereto was forbidden. Instead of going directly the thirty
miles in three hours, I must go around almost a complete circle,
about three hundred miles in three days. But nothing could take
the edge off my joy. A strange exhilaration and a wild desire to
celebrate possessed me. With such a mood I had not hitherto
been sympathetic; on the contrary, I had been much grieved by
the sundry manifestations of what I deemed a base spirit in certain
Belgians. One of them had said, "Just wait until the Allies' army
comes marching into Brussels! Oh, then I am going out on one
glorious drunk!" In the light of the splendid sacrifices of his fellow-
Belgians, this struck me as a shocking degradation of the human
spirit.

I could not then understand such a view-point. But I could now. In
the removal of the long abnormal tension one's pent-up spirits
seek out an equally abnormal channel for expression. I, too, felt
like an uncaged spirit suddenly let loose. I didn't get drunk, but I
very nearly got arrested again. In my headlong ecstasy I was deaf
to the warnings of a German guard saying, "Passage into this