Great houses, rising on high ground, with small, contented looking villages nestling, as it were, under their protection, were frequent.  He was, as a matter of fact, in a country of great aristocratic landholders, the great nobles of Prussia, the men who are the real rulers of the country, under the Prussian King, who is also the German Kaiser.  And in many of these great houses lights were burning, even after midnight, when all signs of life in the villages had ceased.  The country was stirring, and there was more of it to stir.  Now from time to time he heard the throbbing hum of an automobile motor.  Only one or two of these passed him, going in either direction, on the road along which he was traveling.  But there were parallel roads, and he could hear the throbbing motors on these, and often see the pointing shafts of light from their lights, searching out the road before them as they sped along.

Fred knew enough of Germany to understand something of what he saw and heard.  It was from these great houses that a great many officers were contributed to the army.  These young men had no real career before them from their birth, almost, except in the army.  So it was easy to guess why the lights were burning in those mansions, and why there was anxiety among them, and why the throbbing motor cars were humming over the roads.

If Germany were beaten back in the beginning, if the task she had undertaken proved too heavy, this was the province that was sure to feel the first brunt of invasion.  Behind him, to the east, Fred knew were the great masses of Russia, moving slowly, but with a terrible, always increasing force.  No wonder these people were stirring, were sending out all their men to drive back the huge power that lay so near them, a constant menace!

But now, though he did not know it, Fred was approaching real danger for the first time.  Many of the motors he saw and heard were going west.  Though he could not guess it, they were carrying women and children away from the old houses that were too much exposed, too directly in the path of a possible invasion for the helpless ones to be left in them when the men had gone to fight.  All Germany had to be defended.  It happened to be the part of East Prussia to bear invasion, if it came to that.

And so the people of the great houses were making their migration.  The men went to their regiments; the women to Berlin, and to the great fortresses that lay nearer than Berlin—­Koenigsberg, Danzig, Thorn.  This was historic country that Fred was traversing, the same country that had trembled beneath the thundering march of Napoleon’s grand army more than a hundred years before, when the great Emperor had launched the mad adventure against Russia that had sealed his fate.