head of the Boy Scout movement in Germany
and edited the official organ of the Boy Scouts. He had a squad of his
scouts on messenger duty at his headquarters--smart, alert-looking
youngsters. They seemed to me to be much more competent in their
department than were the important-appearing German Secret Service
agents who infested the building. The Germans may make first-rate
spies--assuredly their system of espionage was well organized before the
war broke out--but I do not think they are conspicuous successes as
detectives: their methods are so delightfully translucent.

Major Bayer had been one of the foremost German officers to set foot on
Belgian soil after the severance of friendly relations between the two
countries. "I believe," he said, "that I heard the first shot fired in
this war. It came from a clump of trees within half an hour after our
advance guard crossed the boundary south of Aachen, and it wounded the
leg of a captain who commanded a company of scouts at the head of the
column. Our skirmishers surrounded the woods and beat the thickets, and
presently they brought forth the man who had fired the shot. He was
sixty years old, and he was a civilian. Under the laws of war we shot
him on the spot. So you see probably the first shot fired in this war
was fired at us by a franc-tireur. By his act he had forfeited his
life, but personally I felt sorry for him; for I believe, like many of
his fellow countrymen who afterward committed such offenses, he was
ignorant of the military indefensibility of his attack on us and did not
realize what the consequences would be.

"I am sure, though, that the severity with which we punished these
offenses at the outset was really merciful, for only by killing the
civilians who fired on us, and by burning their houses, could we bring
home to thousands of others the lesson that if they wished to fight us
they must enlist in their own army and come against us in uniforms, as
soldiers."

Within the same hour we were introduced to Privy Councilor Otto von
Falke, an Austrian by birth, but now, after long service in Cologne and
Berlin, promoted to be Director of Industrial Arts for Prussia. He had
been sent, he explained, by order of his Kaiser, to superintend the
removal of historic works of art from endangered churches and other
buildings, and turn them over to the curator of the Royal Belgian
Gallery, at Brussels, for storage in the vaults of the museum until such
t