We had no rights.  Our only right was to the convictions within our minds, provided we kept them there.  I believe that were it not for the surmises of the English lieutenant who took them to the Ambassador I would be in prison yet.  On second thought, I wouldn’t, either.  I couldn’t have endured the strain much longer.  If I had been caged in there a few hours more than I was, in my nervous tension I probably would have vented my sense of outraged justice by assaulting one of the officers myself.  I wouldn’t have had a long time then to speculate upon the immortality of the soul.  I would have possessed first-hand information.  One can understand why, for their own protection, the Germans imposed their iron laws upon the Belgians with their terrible penalties.  What is hard to understand is the long-suffering patience and self-restraint of the Belgians.  Occasionally some high-spirited or high-strung fellow was no longer able to keep the lid on the volcano of hatred and rage seething within him.  This blowup brought down, not only upon his own head, but upon the whole community, the most hideous reprisals.

By the time my writing was completed the men were pretty well settled down for the night.  On the outside the roaring of the Austrian guns, which for days had been bombarding their way into Antwerp, now became less constant; less and less frequently the hoarse commands of the officers, mingled with the rumbling of the automobiles, came up from the courtyard below.  At midnight the only sounds were the groans and moans of the twisting sleepers and the measured tread of the sentry as he paced up and down the hall, his silhouette darkening at regular intervals the glass door at the end of our little room.

I was placed in a. sort of adjoining closet with six others.  A motley mixture indeed; a Russian, an American, four Belgians, and a German—­all prisoners awaiting our sentences.  As a last move, the German soldier guards sandwiched themselves into the open spaces on the floor, their long bayonets glistening in the electric light that blazed down upon us.  The peasants had characteristically closed the windows to keep out the baneful night air.  In the main room a drop-light with shade flung its radiance on a table and lit up the anxious faces of the few men gathered round it.  It showed one poor fellow bolt upright, unspeaking, unmoving, his fixed white eyeballs staring into space, as though he would go stark mad.  Those eyes have forever burned themselves into my brain, a pitiful protest against a mad, wild world at war.

Sleep was entirely out of the question with me.  It wasn’t the bad air or the hard floor or the snores of my comrades, but just plain cold fear.  Now I possess an average amount of courage.  Quite alone I walked in and out of Liege when the Germans were painting the skies red with the burning towns.  My ribs were massaged all the way by ends of revolvers, whose owners demanded me to give forthwith my reasons for being there, they being sole arbiters of whether my reasons were good or bad.  I got so used to a bayonet pointing into the pit of my stomach that it hardly looks natural in a vertical position.