But I could hear Rupert of Hentzau replying:  “Yes, and it is recommending you to our enemy, the President of France!”

I knew that Colonel Roosevelt would have written a letter to the German Emperor as impartially as to M. Poincare, but I knew also that Rupert of Hentzau would not believe that.  So I decided to keep the letter back until the last moment.  If it was going to help me, it still would be effective; if it went against me, I would be just as dead.  I began to think out other plans.  Plans of escape were foolish.  I could have crawled out of the window to the rain gutter, but before I had reached the rooftree I would have been shot.  And bribing the sentry, even were he willing to be insulted, would not have taken me farther than the stairs, where there were other sentries.  I was more safe inside the house than out.  They still had my passport and laissez-passer, and without a pass one could not walk a hundred yards.  As the staff had but one plan, and no time in which to think of a better one, the obligation to invent a substitute plan lay upon me.  The plan I thought out and which later I outlined to Major Wurth was this:  Instead of putting me away at midnight, they would give me a pass back to Brussels.  The pass would state that I was a suspected spy and that if before midnight of the 26th of August I were found off the direct road to Brussels, or if by that hour I had not reported to the military governor of Brussels, any one could shoot me on sight.  As I have stated, without showing a pass no one could move a hundred yards, and every time I showed my pass to a German it would tell him I was a suspected spy, and if I were not making my way in the right direction he had his orders.  With such a pass I was as much a prisoner as in the room at Ligne, and if I tried to evade its conditions I was as good as dead.  The advantages of my plan, as I urged them upon Major Wurth, were that it prevented the General Staff from shooting an innocent man, which would have greatly distressed them, and were he not innocent would still enable them, after a reprieve of two days, to shoot him.  The distance to Brussels was about fifty miles, which, as it was impossible for a civilian to hire a bicycle, motor-car, or cart, I must cover on foot, making twenty-five miles a day.  Major Wurth heartily approved of my substitute plan, and added that he thought if any motor-trucks or ambulances were returning empty to Brussels, I should be permitted to ride in one of them.  He left me, and I never saw him again.  It was then about eight o’clock, and as the time passed and he did not return and midnight grew nearer, I began to feel very lonely.  Except for the Roosevelt letter, I had played my last card.