“At five minutes before six a bugle sounded.  The eight men on the floor got up, buckled on their cartridge belts, shouldered their rifles and, leaving their knapsacks behind, tramped out.  I followed with my guards upon either side of me.  My one fear now was that I should tremble at the end.  I felt no fear, but I was afraid my knees would shake.  I remember how relieved I was when I took the first step to find my legs did not tremble under me.

“I was resolved, too, that I would not be shot down with my hands tied behind me.  When I faced the squad I meant to shake off the ropes on my wrists and take the volley with my arms at my sides.”

Stevens was marched to the center of the courtyard.  Then, without a word of explanation to him his bonds were removed and he was put in an automobile and carried off to rejoin the other members of the unlucky sightseeing party.  He never did find out whether he had been made the butt of a hideous practical joke by a half-mad brute or whether his tormentor really meant to send him to death and was deterred at the last moment by fear of the consequences.  One thing he did learn—­there had been no court-martial.  Thereafter, during his captivity, Stevens was treated with the utmost kindness by all the officers with whom he came in contact.  His was the only instance that I have knowledge of where a prisoner has been tortured, physically or mentally, by a German.  It was curious that in this one case the victim should have been an American citizen whose intentions were perfectly innocent and whose papers were orthodox and unquestionable.

Glancing back over what I have here written down I find I have failed altogether to mention the food which we ate on that trip of ours with the German wrecking crew.  It was hardly worth mentioning, it was so scanty.

We had to eat, during that day while we lay at Gembloux, a loaf of the sourish soldiers’ black bread, with green mold upon the crust, and a pot of rancid honey which one of the party had bethought him to bring from Beaumont in his pocket.  To wash this mixture down we had a few swigs of miserably bad lukewarm ration-coffee from a private’s canteen, a bottle of confiscated Belgian mineral water, which a private at Charleroi gave us from his store, and a precious quart of the Prince de Caraman-Chimay’s commandeered wine—­also a souvenir of our captivity.  Late in the afternoon a sergeant sold us for a five-mark piece a big skin-casing filled with half-raw pork sausage.  I’ve never tasted anything better.

Even so, we fared better than the prisoners in the box cars behind and the dozen wounded men in the coach with us.  They had only coffee and dry bread and, at the latter end of the long day, a few chunks of the sausage.  Some of the wounded men were pretty badly hurt, too.  There was one whose left forearm had been half shot away.  His stiff fingers protruded beyond his soiled bandages and they