It is, perhaps, the most efficient organization of modern times; and its purpose only is death.  Those who cast it loose upon Europe are military-mad.  And they are only a very small part of the German people.  But to preserve their class they have in their own image created this terrible engine of destruction.  For the present it is their servant.  But, “though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.”  And, like Frankenstein’s monster, this monster, to which they gave life, may turn and rend them.

Chapter II “To Be Treated As A Spy”

This story is a personal experience, but is told in spite of that fact and because it illustrates a side of war that is unfamiliar.  It is unfamiliar for the reason that it is seamy and uninviting.  With bayonet charges, bugle-calls, and aviators it has nothing in common.

Espionage is that kind of warfare of which, even when it succeeds, no country boasts.  It is military service an officer may not refuse, but which few seek.  Its reward is prompt promotion, and its punishment, in war time, is swift and without honor.  This story is intended to show how an army in the field must be on its guard against even a supposed spy and how it treats him.

The war offices of France and Russia would not permit an American correspondent to accompany their armies; the English granted that privilege to but one correspondent, and that gentleman already had been chosen.  So I was without credentials.  To oblige Mr. Brand Whitlock, our minister to Belgium, the government there was willing to give me credentials, but on the day I was to receive them the government moved to Antwerp.  Then the Germans entered Brussels, and, as no one could foresee that Belgium would heroically continue fighting, on the chance the Germans would besiege Paris, I planned to go to that city.  To be bombarded you do not need credentials.

For three days a steel-gray column of Germans had been sweeping through Brussels, and to meet them, from the direction of Vincennes and Lille, the English and French had crossed the border.  It was falsely reported that already the English had reached Hal, a town only eleven miles from Brussels, that the night before there had been a fight at Hal, and that close behind the English were the French.

With Gerald Morgan, of the London Daily Telegraph, with whom I had been in other wars, I planned to drive to Hal and from there on foot continue, if possible, into the arms of the French or English.  We both were without credentials, but, once with the Allies, we believed we would not need them.  It was the Germans we doubted.  To satisfy them we had only a passport and a laissez-passer issued by General von Jarotsky, the new German military governor of Brussels, and his chief of staff, Lieutenant Geyer.  Mine stated that I represented the Wheeler Syndicate of American newspapers, the London Daily Chronicle, and Scribner’s Magazine, and that I could pass German military lines in Brussels and her environs.  Morgan had a pass of the same sort.  The question to be determined was:  What were “environs” and how far do they extend?  How far in safety would the word carry us forward?