But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting efforts of Polish
friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna. Once
there, the wing of the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy heads.
We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador (who, all
along, interested himself in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf,
his invaluable assistance and the real friendliness of his reception in
Vienna. Owing to Mr. Penfield's action we obtained the permission to
leave Austria. And it was a near thing, for his Excellency has informed
my American publishers since that a week later orders were issued to have
us detained till the end of the war. However, we effected our hair's-
breadth escape into Italy; and, reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch
mail steamer, homeward-bound from Java with London as a port of call.

On that sea-route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the
past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. We saw the signs
of it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the
misty glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of
transports, in the presence of British submarines in the Channel.
Innumerable drifters flying the Naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and
two Naval officers coming on board off the South Foreland, piloted the
ship through the Downs.

The Downs! There they were, thick with the memories of my sea-life. But
what were to me now the futilities of an individual past? As our ship's
head swung into the estuary of the Thames, a deep, yet faint, concussion
passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which missing my ear
found its way straight into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at
my boys, I happened to meet my wife's eyes. She also had felt
profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea,
the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of Flanders--shaping