“I read somewhere in the papers that a large shipment of heavy cannon had left America for Russia,” he said with dry humor, “in transit for us—­for if they’re consigned to the Russians, we’ll have them sooner or later, I hope;” adding, with his habitual tense earnestness, “the Americans are something more than shrewd, hard-headed business men.  Have they ever vividly pictured to themselves a German soldier smashed by an American shell, or bored through the heart by an American bullet?  The grim realism of the battlefield—­that should make also the business man thoughtful.”

“Shall you go west when you have cleaned up here in the east?” I suggested.

“I can’t betray military secrets which I don’t know myself, even to interest the newspaper readers,” he said.  He gave me the impression, however, that, east or west, he would be found fighting for the Fatherland so long as the Fatherland needed him.

“Now it means work again.  You must excuse me,” he concluded, courteously.  “You want to go to the front.  Where should you like to go?”

“To Warsaw,” I suggested, modestly.

“I, too,” he laughed, “but today—­ausgeschlossen, (’nothing doing,’ in Americanese.) Still—­that may be yet.”

“May I come along, your Excellency?”

“Certainly, then you can see for yourself what sort of ‘barbarians’ we Germans are.”

“Dropping in on Hindenburg” yields some unimportant but interesting by-products.  The railroad Napoleon, as all the world knows, lives and works in a palace, but this palace doesn’t overawe one who has beaten professionally at the closed portals of Fifth Avenue.  It would be considered a modest country residence in Westchester County or on Long Island.  Light in color and four stories high, including garret, it looks very much like those memorials which soap kings and sundry millionaires put up to themselves in their lifetime—­the American college dormitory, the modern kind that is built around three sides of a small court.  The palace is as simple as the man.

The main entrance, a big iron gateway, is flanked by two guardhouses painted with white and black stripes, the Prussian “colors,” and two unbluffable Landsturm men mount guard, who will tell you to go around to the back door.

The orderly who opens the front door is a Sergeant in field gray uniform.  You mount a flight of marble steps, and saunter down a marble hall, half a block long.  It is the reception hall.  It is furnished with magnificent hand-carved, high-backed chairs without upholstery, lounging not being apparently encouraged here.  They are Gothic structures backed up against the walls.  There is no Brussels or Axminster carpet on the cold marble floor—­not even Turkish rugs.  Through this palace hall, up by the ceiling, runs a thick cable containing the all-important telephone wires.  The offices open off the hall, the doors labeled with neatly printed signs telling who and what is within.  If you should come walking down the street outside at 3 A.M. you would probably see the lights in Hindenburg’s office still burning, as I did.  At 3:30 they went out, indicating that a Field Marshal’s job is not a sinecure.