My hitherto cool, smiling manner must have been an irritation to him.  A German official, especially a petty one, takes everything with such deadly seriousness that he can’t understand us taking things so debonairly, especially when it is his own magisterial self.

So I think he thoroughly enjoyed my first signs of perturbation, and said:  “Your case will be settled in a little while—­perhaps directly.”  He turned to a soldier, bade him watch me, and disappeared.

About five minutes later I heard outside the command “Halt!” to a squad of soldiers.  The doors opened and Javert reappeared, this time in the full uniform of an officer.  For the moment I thought he had come with a firing squad and they were going to make short shrift of me.  The grim humor of disposing of my case thus “directly” came home to me.  But merely flicking the ashes from his cigarette, he glanced round the room without offering the slightest recognition, and then disappeared.  How he made his change from civilian clothes so quickly I can’t understand.  It seemed like a vainglorious display of his uniform in order to let us take full cognizance of his eminence.

I began now a survey of my surroundings.  Our room was in fact a hallway crammed with soldiers and prisoners.  The soldiers, with fixed bayonets in their rifles, stood guard at the door.  The prisoners, some thirty-five in number, were ranged on benches, overturned boxes, and on the floor.  We were of every description, from well-groomed men of the city to artisans and peasants from the fields.  The most interesting of the peasants was a young fellow charged with carrying dispatches through the lines to Antwerp.  The most interesting of the well-dressed urban group was a theater manager charged with making his playhouse the center of distribution for the forbidden newspapers smuggled into Brussels.  There was a Belgian soldier in uniform, woefully battered and beaten; and for the first time I saw a German soldier without his rifle.  He, too, was a prisoner waiting trial, having been sent up to the headquarters accused of muttering against an under officer.

All these facts I learned later.  Then I sat paralyzed in an atmosphere charged with smoke and silence.  The smoke came not from the prisoners, for to them it was forbidden, but from the soldiers, who rolled it up in great clouds.  The silence came from the suspicion that one’s next neighbor might be a spy planted there to catch him in some unwary statement.  Each man would have sought relief from the strain by unbosoming his hopes and fears to his neighbor, but he dared not.  That is one fearful curse of any cause that is buttressed by a system of espionage.  It scatters everywhere the seeds of suspicion.  All society is shot through with cynical distrust.  It poisons the springs at the very source—­one’s faith in his fellows.  Ordinarily one regards the next man as a neighbor until he proves himself a spy.  In Europe he is a scoundrel and a spy until he proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is a neighbor.