inister to Persia, but serving temporarily in the Red Cross Corps, had
bestirred himself to find lodgings for us. And now, thanks to a newborn
desire on the part of the Berlin War Office to let the press of America
know something of the effects of their operations on the people of the
invaded states, here we were, making free with a strange French
gentleman's chateau and messing with an Over-General's Staff. Lying
there, in another man's bed, I felt like a burglar and I slept like an
oyster--the oyster being, as naturalists know, a most sound sleeper.

In the morning there was breakfast at the great table--the flies of the
night before being still present--with General von Heeringen inquiring
most earnestly as to how we had rested, and then going out to see to the
day's killing. Before doing so, however, he detailed the competent
Captain von Theobald and the efficient Lieutenant Giebel to serve for
the day as our guides while we studied briefly the workings of the
German war machine in the actual theater of war.

It was under their conductorship that about noon we aimed our
automobiles for the spot where, in accordance with provisions worked out
in advance, but until that moment unknown to us, we were to lunch with
another general--Von Zwehl, of the reserves. We left the hill, where the
town was, some four miles behind us, and when we had passed through two
wrecked and silent villages and through three of those strips of park
timber which Continentals call forests, we presently drew up and halted
and dismounted where a thick fringe of undergrowth, following the line
of an old and straggly thorn hedge, met the road at right angles on the
comb of a small ridge commanding a view of the tablelands to the
southward.

As we climbed up the banks we were aware of certain shelters which were
like overgrown rabbit hutches cunningly contrived of wattled faggots and
straw sheaves plaited together. They had tarpaulin interlinings and
dug-out earthen floors covered over thickly with straw. These cozy
small shacks hid themselves behind a screen of haws among the scattered
trees which flanked an ancient fortification, abandoned many years
before, I judged, by the grass-grown looks of it. Out in front, upon
the open crest of the rise, staff officers were grouped about two
telescopes mounted on tripods. An old man--you could tell by the hunch
of his shoulders he was old--sat on a camp chair with his back to us and
his face again