if I lost the road the first German who read my pass was ordered by it to shoot me.  So I decided to give myself up to the occupants of the next German car going toward Brussels and ask them to carry me there under arrest.  I waited until an automobile approached, and then stood in front of it and held up my pass and pointed to the red seal.  The car stopped, and the soldiers in front and the officer in the rear seat gazed at me in indignant amazement.  The officer was a general, old and kindly looking, and, by the grace of Heaven, as slow-witted as he was kind.  He spoke no English, and his French was as bad as mine, and in consequence he had no idea of what I was saying except that I had orders from the General Staff to proceed at once to Brussels.  I made a mystery of the pass, saying it was very confidential, but the red seal satisfied him.  He bade me courteously to take the seat at his side, and with intense satisfaction I heard him command his orderly to get down and fetch my knapsack.  The general was going, he said, only so far as Hal, but that far he would carry me.  Hal was the last town named in my pass, and from Brussels only eleven miles distant.  According to the schedule I had laid out for myself, I had not hoped to reach it by walking until the next day, but at the rate the car had approached I saw I would be there within two hours.  My feelings when I sank back upon the cushions of that car and stretched out my weary legs and the wind whistled around us are too sacred for cold print.  It was a situation I would not have used in fiction.  I was a condemned spy, with the hand of every German properly against me, and yet under the protection of a German general, and in luxurious ease, I was escaping from them at forty miles an hour.  I had but one regret.  I wanted Rupert of Hentzau to see me.  At Hal my luck still held.  The steps of the Hotel de Ville were crowded with generals.  I thought never in the world could there be so many generals, so many flowing cloaks and spiked helmets.  I was afraid of them.  I was afraid that when my general abandoned me the others might not prove so slow-witted or so kind.  My general also seemed to regard them with disfavor.  He exclaimed impatiently.  Apparently, to force his way through them, to cool his heels in an anteroom, did not appeal.  It was long past his luncheon hour and the restaurant of the Palace Hotel called him.  He gave a sharp order to the chauffeur.

“I go on to Brussels,” he said.  “Desire you to accompany me?” I did not know how to ask him in French not to make me laugh.  I saw the great Palace of Justice that towers above the city with the same emotions that one beholds the Statue of Liberty, but not until we had reached the inner boulevards did I feel safe.  There I bade my friend a grateful but hasty adieu, and in a taxicab, unwashed and unbrushed, I drove straight to the American legation.  To Mr. Whitlock I told this story, and with one hand that gentleman reached for his hat and with the other