are. Every time they read my pass they were inclined to try me all
over again, and twice searched my knapsack.

After that happened the second time I guessed my letter to the
President of France might prove a menace, and, tearing it into little
pieces, dropped it over a bridge, and with regret watched that
historical document from the ex-President of one republic to the
President of another float down the Sambre toward the sea. By noon
I decided I would not be able to make the distance. For twenty-four
hours I had been without sleep or food, and I had been put through
an unceasing third degree, and I was nearly out. Added to that, the
chance of my losing the road was excellent; and 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 b