ing on this basis. By way of
discouraging this traffic it is said that the Germans have shot several
men caught smuggling papers. Those caught selling them in Brussels are
arrested and given stiff terms of imprisonment. All taxis disappeared
many days ago and altogether the normal life of the town has ceased. It
will be a rollicking place from now on.

* * * * *

_Brussels, September 17, 1914._--This morning I spent digging my way out
from under a landslide of detail work which has been piling up on my
desk, until I could hardly see over it. I now have it out of the way,
and can breathe again freely for the moment.

This afternoon Baron de Menten de Horne, a Lieutenant in the Second
Regiment of Lancers, was brought in to the Legation, a prisoner, still
wearing his Belgian uniform. He was captured last Friday near H---- while
I was there. Nyssens, the Major who was in the convent with us, told me
that one of his officers had gone off on a reconnaissance and had not
reappeared; he was greatly worried about him, but could not send any one
out to look for him. This was the man. He was surrounded, in company
with several of his men, and took to cover in a field of beets. Night
was coming on, and they thought that when the fight was over and the
German troops who were all about them had retired, they would be able to
work their way out and rejoin their own forces, but twenty-five Germans
surrounded them, and after killing all the others, took this man
prisoner.

His only idea is to be exchanged and rejoin his regiment; and, as is the
case with pretty much everybody else nowadays, he turned to the American
Legation. He made such a good plea that the German authorities brought
him here yesterday, and left him an hour, on his giving his word of
honour not to divulge anything as to the military movements he had seen
while a prisoner.

Of course, we could not arrange to make the exchange, but he stayed on
for an hour and told us of his adventures. He was a pathetic figure in
his dirty uniform, sitting on a little chair in my office and telling in
a simple way of all he had been through--laying more stress on the
sufferings and death of his soldiers than on anything that had happened
to him. His own brother had been killed in the fighting around Liege,
and he had heard that his brother-in-law, of whom he was very fond, had
also been mortally wounded. While at Louvain, he had v