Three times I was offered the prohibited Antwerp papers that had been smuggled into the city and once the London Times for twenty-five cents.  The war price for this is said often to have run up to as many dollars.

An English, woman, or at any rate a woman with a beautiful English accent, opened a conversation with the remark that she was going directly through to Ghent on the following day and that she knew how to go right through the German lines.  That was precisely the way that the Germans had just forbidden me to go.  But this accomplice (if such she was) got no rise out of me.  To all intents I was stone-deaf.  Compared to me, she would have found the Sphinx garrulous indeed.  She may have been as harmless as a dove but, after my escapade, I wouldn’t have talked to my own mother without a written permit from the military governor.  The Kaiser himself would have found it hard work breaking through my cast-iron spy-proof armor of formality.  I had good reason, too, not to let down the bars, for I was trailed by the spy-hunters.  Not until ten days later when I passed over the Holland border did I feel release from their vigilant eyes.  My key at the Metropole was never returned to me and I know that my room was searched once, if not twice, after my return to the hotel.

It would be interesting to see how all this tallies with the official report of my case in the archives at Berlin.  Perhaps some of these surmises have shot far wide of the mark.  Javert, for instance, may not be a direct descendant of the ancient Inquisitor who had charge of the rack and the thumb screws, as I believed.  In his own home town he may be a sort of mild-mannered schoolmaster and probably is highly astounded as well as gratified to find himself cast as the villain in this piece.  Perhaps I may have been at other times in far greater danger.  I do not know these things.  All I know is that this is a true and faithful transcript of the feelings and sights that came crowding in upon me in that most eventful day and night.

PART II On Foot With The German Army

Chapter V

The Gray Hordes Out Of The North

The outbreak of the Great War found me in Europe as a general tourist, and not in the capacity of war-correspondent.  Hitherto I had essayed a much less romantic role in life, belonging rather to the crowd of uplifters who conduct the drab and dreary battle with the slums.  The futility of most of these schemes for badgering the poor makes one feel at times that these battles are shams and unavailing.  This is depressing.  It is thrilling, then, suddenly to acquire the glamorous title of war-correspondent, and to have before one the prospect of real and actual battles.