didn't sing nor even speak. The passers-by buttoned their coats
more tightly against the chill wind and hurried on their several
ways, with never a thought or a look for the men in field-grey,
moving, many of them for the last time, through the streets of the
capital. The old man who angered the war-mad throng before the
_Schloss_ on August 1st, 1914, with his discordant croak of "War is
a serious business, young man," lives in the spirit of to-day. And
he did not have to go to the mountain!

CHAPTER XXVII

ACROSS THE NORTH SEA

After my last exit from Germany into Holland I was confronted by a
new problem. I had found going to England very simple on my
previous war-time crossings. Now, however, there were two
obstacles in my path--first, to secure permission to Board a vessel
bound for England; secondly, to make the actual passage safely.

The passport difficulty was the first to overcome. The passport
with which I had come to Europe before the war, and which had been
covered with frontier _visees_, secret service permissions and
military permissions, from the Alps to the White Sea and from the
Thames to the Black Sea, had been cancelled in Washington at my
request during my brief visit home in the autumn of 1915. On my
last passport I had limited the countries which I intended to visit
to Germany and Austria-Hungary. I purposed adding to this list as
I had done on my old passport, but subsequent American regulations,
aimed at restricting travellers to one set of belligerents,
prevented that.

I was not only anxious to return to London to continue my work with
Lord Northcliffe on _The Times_ and the _Daily Mail_, but I was
encouraged by two American officials in Germany and Austria-Hungary
to write the truth about Germany--a feat quite impossible, as one
of them said to me, for a correspondent remaining in the zone of
the Central Powers. The official in Austria-Hungary had become
righteously indignant at the sneering German remarks about how they
could "play with Washington in the U-boat question." He asked me
to learn all possible news of submarines. The official in Germany
had been impressed by my investigations among the men behind
Tirpitz, men who never for a moment ceased in their efforts to turn
on frightfulness in full force. When I mentioned the new American
passport regulations which would delay me getting to England, he
said: "In Holland fix it with the British. I hope you will do so