But this was a thrust from a different quarter.  In the open a man feels a sporting chance, at any rate, even if a bullet can beat him on the run; but cooped up within four walls he is paralyzed by his horrible helplessness.  He feels that a military court reverses ordinary procedure, holding that it is better for nine innocent to suffer than for one guilty one to escape.  He knows that his fate is in the hands of a tribunal from whose arbitrary decision there is no appeal, and that decision he knows may depend upon the whim of the commandant, to whom a poor breakfast or a bad night’s sleep may give the wrong twist.  The terrible uncertainty of it preys upon one’s mind.

I certainly prayed that the commandant was getting a better night than mine, as I lay there staring up at the electric light with a hundred hates and fears pounding through my brain.  “I’m a prisoner,” was one thought.  “Supposing the silence of the guns means that the Germans, beaten, are being pressed back into Brussels by the Allies.  They may let us go.  No, the Germans, maddened by defeat, might order us all to be shot,” was one idea.  “How does it feel to be blindfolded and stood up against a wall by a firing squad?” was another pleasant companion idea that kept vigil with me through the midnight hours.  Then my fancies took a frenzied turn, “Suppose these be brutes of soldiers and they run us through, saying we were trying to escape.”

“Escape!” The word no sooner leaped into my mind than an almost uncontrollable impulse to escape seized me, or at least I thought one had.  I got upon my feet, observing that the two soldiers lying beside me on the floor were fast asleep and the guards at the outer door were nodding.  I stepped over their sleeping forms arid made a reconnoiter of the hallway.  There in the semi-darkness stood seven soldiers of the Kaiser with their seven guns and their seven glistening bayonets.

Cold steel is not supposed to act as a soothing syrup; but one glance at those bayonets and my uncontrollable impulse utterly vanished.  You will observe that the bayonet is continually cropping up in my story.  It does, indeed.  A bayonet looks far different from what it did on dress parade.  Meet one in war, and its true significance first dawns upon you.  It is not simply a decoration at the end of a rifle, but it is made to stick in a man’s stomach and then be turned round; and when you realize that this particular one is made to stick in your particular stomach, it takes on a still different aspect.

I crawled back into my lair, resolved to seek for deliverance by mental means, rather than by physical; and as the first rays of light stole through the window I composed the following document to His Excellency: 

The Officer who has the case of the American, Albert B. Williams, under supervision:  Sir: 

As you seem willing to be fair in hearing my case, may I take the liberty this morning of addressing you upon my charge?  I fear that I made but a feeble defense of myself yesterday; but when I was accused of offering much money for information relative to the movements of German troops, the accusation came so suddenly that I could only deny it.  May I now offer a few observations upon this charge, the nature of which just begins to become clear to me?