brought sober realization of the fact that I had actually left
my home and family for the first time. I had gone from a bunga-
low down a tree-shaded street in suburban St. Louis, gone from
Ruth and Pat, my wife and year-and-a-half-old daughter, who
just a few days previously had waved a bewildered good-bye at
the airport in St. Louis. In Lisbon, as I looked on scenes I
should have liked to share with them, they had suddenly be-
come far away. I was on my way to help cover a war.

Ala Littoria, the Italian airline, took me from Lisbon to
Madrid. I took off from a field that I was to find typical of
Europe, a grass-covered expanse on which the only concrete
runways were short strips near the airport station. The plane
itself was in no way like those in the United States. There were
no freshly clean white linen towels for head rests on the back of
the seats, no hostesses bringing chewing gum to help you adjust
inner and outer air pressure in ascending and descending, no
admonitions to fasten your safety belt when you went up or
came down--mine was worn and useless anyway--and the crew
did not bother to close the door to the cabin, where I watched
the radio operator occasionally don his ear phones and listen
for messages. We were over the clouds most of the way, only
now and then getting glimpses of the waste brown terrain,
more rolling than most of that in the United States and less
dark, with green relieving the sun-baked expanses only as
crowns upon the higher hills.

At Madrid the Spanish authorities argued about my leaving
the plane, since I had only a transit visa, but I finally con-
vinced them that I could not go on from there out of the coun-
try since I did not have the visa for my destination; I had been
instructed by the German Embassy in New York to pick up my
German visa in Madrid. The rush of my departure had made
that necessary.

I expected to be in Madrid only long enough to call at the
German Consulate and obtain my entrance visa to the Reich.
I therefore asked the central police of the Spanish capital to

-4-