Goodness knows I was tired enough, but I lay awake a while thinking what changes in our journalistic fortunes thirty days had brought us.  Five weeks before, bearing dangerously dubious credentials, we had trailed afoot—­a suspicious squad—­at the tail of the German columns, liable to be halted and locked up any minute by any fingerling of a sublieutenant who might be so minded to so serve us.  In that stressful time a war correspondent was almost as popular, with the officialdom of the German army, as the Asiatic cholera would have been.  The privates were our best friends then.  Just one month, to the hour and the night, after we slept on straw as quasi-prisoners and under an armed guard in a schoolhouse belonging to the Prince de Caraman-Chimay, at Beaumont, we dined with the commandant of a German garrison in the castle of another prince of the same name—­the Prince de Chimay—­at the town of Chimay, set among the timbered preserves of the ancient house of Chimay.  In Belgium, at the end of August, we fended and foraged for ourselves aboard a train of wounded and prisoners.

In northern France, at the end of September, Prince Reuss, German minister to Persia, but serving temporarily in the Red Cross Corps, had bestirred himself to find lodgings for us.  And now, thanks to a newborn desire on the part of the Berlin War Office to let the press of America know something of the effects of their operations on the people of the invaded states, here we were, making free with a strange French gentleman’s chateau and messing with an Over-General’s Staff.  Lying there, in another man’s bed, I felt like a burglar and I slept like an oyster—­the oyster being, as naturalists know, a most sound sleeper.

In the morning there was breakfast at the great table—­the flies of the night before being still present—­with General von Heeringen inquiring most earnestly as to how we had rested, and then going out to see to the day’s killing.  Before doing so, however, he detailed the competent Captain von Theobald and the efficient Lieutenant Giebel to serve for the day as our guides while we studied briefly the workings of the German war machine in the actual theater of war.

It was under their conductorship that about noon we aimed our automobiles for the spot where, in accordance with provisions worked out in advance, but until that moment unknown to us, we were to lunch with another general—­Von Zwehl, of the reserves.  We left the hill, where the town was, some four miles behind us, and when we had passed through two wrecked and silent villages and through three of those strips of park timber which Continentals call forests, we presently drew up and halted and dismounted where a thick fringe of undergrowth, following the line of an old and straggly thorn hedge, met the road at right angles on the comb of a small ridge commanding a view of the tablelands to the southward.