oad station--where the trains bringing wounded men
continually shuttled past--and the house where the commandant of the
garrison had his headquarters. In the latter place, as guests of Major
von Abercron, we met at dinner that night and again after dinner a
strangely mixed company. We met many officers and the pretty American
wife of an officer, Frau Elsie von, Heinrich, late of Jersey City, who
had made an adventurous trip in a motor ambulance from Germany to see
her husband before he went to the front, and who sent regards by us to
scores of people in her old home whose names I have forgotten. We met
also a civilian guest of the commandant, who introduced himself as
August Blankhertz and who turned out to be a distinguished big-game
hunter and gentleman aeronaut. With Major von Abercron for a mate he
sailed from St. Louis in the great balloon race for the James Gordon
Bennett Cup. They came down in the Canadian woods and nearly died of
hunger and exposure before they found a lumber camp. Their balloon was
called the Germania. There was another civilian, a member of the German
secret-service staff, wearing the Norfolk jacket and the green Alpine
hat and on a cord about his neck the big gold token of authority which
invariably mark a representative of this branch of the German espionage
bureau; and he was wearing likewise that transparent air of mystery
which seemed always to go with the followers of his ingenious
profession.

During the evening the mayor of Maubeuge came, a bearded, melancholy
gentleman, to confer with the commandant regarding a clash between a
German under-officer and a household of his constituents. Orderlies and
attendants bustled in and out, and somebody played Viennese waltz songs
on a piano, and altogether there was quite a gay little party in the
parlor of this handsome house which the Germans had commandeered for the
use of their garrison staff.

At early bedtime, when we stepped out of the door of the lit-up mansion
into the street, it was as though we had stepped into a far-off country.
Except for the tramp of a sentry's hobbed boots over the sidewalks and
the challenging call of another sentry round the corner the town was as
silent as a town of tombs. All the people who remained in this place
had closed their forlorn shops where barren shelves and emptied
showcases testified to the state of trade; and they had shut themselves
up in their houses away from sight of the invaders. We