pressing--more depressing than London. I don't know how to put it,
but the whole big concern seemed to have no soul in it, to be like a
big factory instead of a city. You won't make a factory look like a
house, though you decorate its front and plant rose-bushes all round
it. The place depressed and yet cheered me. It somehow made the German
people seem smaller.

At three o'clock the lieutenant took us to a plain white building in a
side street with sentries at the door. A young staff officer met us
and made us wait for five minutes in an ante-room. Then we were
ushered into a big room with a polished floor on which Peter nearly sat
down. There was a log fire burning, and seated at a table was a little
man in spectacles with his hair brushed back from his brow like a
popular violinist. He was the boss, for the lieutenant saluted him and
announced our names. Then he disappeared, and the man at the table
motioned us to sit down in two chairs before him.

'Herr Brandt and Herr Pienaar?' he asked, looking over his glasses.

But it was the other man that caught my eye. He stood with his back to
the fire leaning his elbows on the mantelpiece. He was a perfect
mountain of a fellow, six and a half feet if he was an inch, with
shoulders on him like a shorthorn bull. He was in uniform and the
black-and-white ribbon of the Iron Cross showed at a buttonhole. His
tunic was all wrinkled and strained as if it could scarcely contain his
huge chest, and mighty hands were clasped over his stomach. That man
must have had the length of reach of a gorilla. He had a great, lazy,
smiling face, with a square cleft chin which stuck out beyond the rest.
His brow retreated and the stubby back of his head ran forward to meet
it, while his neck below bulged out over his collar. His head was
exactly the shape of a pear with the sharp end topmost.

He stared at me with his small bright eyes and I stared back. I had
struck something I had been looking for for a long time, and till that
moment I wasn't sure that it existed. Here was the German of
caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against. He was as
hideous as a hippopotamus, but effective. Every bristle on his odd
head was effective.

The man at the table was speaking. I took him to be a civilian
official of sorts, pretty high up from his surroundings, perhaps an
Under-Secretary. His Dutch was slow and careful, but good--too good
for Peter. He had a paper bef