f whom, strangely enough, had
German names.

The civil police under direction of the Military Governor were very
busy in Paris during the early days of the war. Throughout the twenty-
four hours, and especially in the darkness of night, the streets were
patrolled by blue-capped men on bicycles, who rode, four by four, as
silently as shadows, through every quarter of the city. They had a
startling habit of surrounding any lonely man who might be walking in
the late hours and interrogating him as to his nationality, age and
business.

Several times I was arrested in this way and never escaped the little
frousse which came to me when these dark figures closed upon me,
as they leapt from their bicycles and said with grim suspicion:

"Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!"

My pockets were bulging with papers, which I thrust hurriedly into the
lantern-light for a close-eyed scrutiny.

They were very quick to follow the trail of a stranger, and there was
no sanctuary in Paris in which he might evade them. Five minutes
after calling upon a friend in the fifth floor flat of an old mansion
at the end of a courtyard in the Rue de Rivoli, there was a sharp
tap at his door, and two men in civil clothes came into the room,
with that sleuth-hound look which belongs to stage, and French,
detectives. They forgot to remove their bowler hats, which seemed
to me to be a lamentable violation of French courtesy.

"Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!"

Again I produced bundles of papers--permis de sejour in Paris,
Amiens, Rouen, Orleans, Le Mans; laisser-passer to Boulogne,
Dieppe, Havre, Dunkirk, Aire-sur-Lys, Bethune and Hazebrouck;
British passports and papiers vises by French consuls, French police,
French generals, French mayors, and French stationmasters. But
they were hardly satisfied. One man with an ugly bulge in his side-
pocket--you have seen at Drury Lane how quickly the revolver comes
out?--suggested that the whole collection was not worth an old
railway ticket because I had failed to comply with the latest regulation
regarding a photograph on the permis de sejour... We parted,
however, with mutual confidence and an expression of satisfaction in
the Entente Cordiale.

3

One scene is clear cut in my memory, as it was revealed in a narrow
street of Paris where a corner lantern flung its rays down upon the
white faces of two men and two women. It was midnight, and I was
waiting outside the door of a newspaper office, where my a