major was not reassuring. He kept telling me that he thought they
would set me free, but even as he spoke tears would come to his
eyes and roll slowly down his cheeks. It was most disconcerting. After
a while it grew dark and he brought me a candle and left me, taking
with him, much to my relief, the sentry and his automatic. This gave
me since my arrest my first moment alone, and, to find anything that
might further incriminate or help me, I used it in going rapidly through
my knapsack and pockets. My note-book was entirely favorable. In it
there was no word that any German could censor. My only other
paper was a letter, of which all day I had been conscious. It was one
of introduction from Colonel Theodore Roosevelt to President
Poincare, and whether the Germans would consider it a clean bill of
health or a death-warrant I could not make up my mind. Half a dozen
times I had been on the point of saying: "Here is a letter from the man
your Kaiser delighted to honor, the only civilian who ever reviewed
the German army, a former President of the United States."

But I could hear Rupert of Hentzau replying: "Yes, and it is
recommending you to our enemy, the President of France!"

I knew that Colonel Roosevelt would have written a letter to the
German Emperor as impartially as to M. Poincare, but I knew also
that Rupert of Hentzau would not believe that. So I decided to keep
the letter back until the last moment. If it was going to help me, it still
would be effective; if it went against me, I would be just as dead. I
began to think out other plans. Plans of escape were foolish. I could
have crawled out of the window to the rain gutter, but before I had
reached the rooftree I would have been shot. And bribing the sentry,
even were he willing to be insulted, would not have taken me farther
than the stairs, where there were other sentries. I was more safe
inside the house than out. They still had my passport and laissez-
passer, and without a pass one could not walk a hundred yards. As
the staff had but one plan, and no time in which to think of a better
one, the obligation to invent a substitute plan lay upon me. The plan I
thought out and which later I outlined to Major Wurth was this: Instead
of putting me away at midnight, they would give me a pass back to
Brussels. The pass would state that I was a suspected spy and that if
before midnight of the 26th of August I were found off the direct road
to Brussels, or if by that