ion, and took ourselves off to bed; for the next day was
expected to be a full day, which it was indeed and verily. In the
hotels of the town, such as they were, officers were billeted, four to
the room and two to the bed; but the commandant enthroned at the Hotel
de Ville looked after our comfort. He sent a soldier to nail a notice
on the gate of one of the handsomest houses in Laon--a house whence the
tenants had fled at the coming of the Germans--which notice gave warning
to all whom it might concern that Captain Mannesmann, who carried the
Kaiser's own pass, and four American Herren were, until further orders,
domiciled there. And the soldier tarried to clean our boots while we
slept and bring us warm shaving water in the morning.

Being thus provided for we tramped away through the empty winding
streets to Number Five, Rue St. Cyr, which was a big, fine three-story
mansion with its own garden and courtyard. Arriving there we drew lots
for bedrooms. It fell to me to occupy one that evidently belonged to
the master of the house. He must have run away in a hurry. His
bathrobe still hung on a peg; his other pair of suspenders dangled over
the footboard; and his shaving brush, with dried lather on it, was on
the floor. I stepped on it as I got into bed and hurt my foot.

Goodness knows I was tired enough, but I lay awake a while thinking what
changes in our journalistic fortunes thirty days had brought us. Five
weeks before, bearing dangerously dubious credentials, we had trailed
afoot--a suspicious squad--at the tail of the German columns, liable to
be halted and locked up any minute by any fingerling of a sublieutenant
who might be so minded to so serve us. In that stressful time a war
correspondent was almost as popular, with the officialdom of the German
army, as the Asiatic cholera would have been. The privates were our
best friends then. Just one month, to the hour and the night, after we
slept on straw as quasi-prisoners and under an armed guard in a
schoolhouse belonging to the Prince de Caraman-Chimay, at Beaumont, we
dined with the commandant of a German garrison in the castle of another
prince of the same name--the Prince de Chimay--at the town of Chimay,
set among the timbered preserves of the ancient house of Chimay. In
Belgium, at the end of August, we fended and foraged for ourselves
aboard a train of wounded and prisoners.

In northern France, at the end of September, Prince Reuss, German
m