road before them as they sped
along.

Fred knew enough of Germany to understand something of what he saw and
heard. It was from these great houses that a great many officers were
contributed to the army. These young men had no real career before them
from their birth, almost, except in the army. So it was easy to guess
why the lights were burning in those mansions, and why there was anxiety
among them, and why the throbbing motor cars were humming over the
roads.

If Germany were beaten back in the beginning, if the task she had
undertaken proved too heavy, this was the province that was sure to feel
the first brunt of invasion. Behind him, to the east, Fred knew were the
great masses of Russia, moving slowly, but with a terrible, always
increasing force. No wonder these people were stirring, were sending out
all their men to drive back the huge power that lay so near them, a
constant menace!

But now, though he did not know it, Fred was approaching real danger for
the first time. Many of the motors he saw and heard were going west.
Though he could not guess it, they were carrying women and children away
from the old houses that were too much exposed, too directly in the path
of a possible invasion for the helpless ones to be left in them when the
men had gone to fight. All Germany had to be defended. It happened to be
the part of East Prussia to bear invasion, if it came to that.

And so the people of the great houses were making their migration. The
men went to their regiments; the women to Berlin, and to the great
fortresses that lay nearer than Berlin--Koenigsberg, Danzig, Thorn. This
was historic country that Fred was traversing, the same country that had
trembled beneath the thundering march of Napoleon's grand army more than
a hundred years before, when the great Emperor had launched the mad
adventure against Russia that had sealed his fate.

But he didn't think of these things, except of Napoleon, as he trudged
along. Once more he traveled through the night. Once more, as the first
signs of morning came, he began to feel tired, and, despite the food he
had carried with him which he had stopped to eat about midnight, he was
hungry. And, as had been the case on the night of his tramp from
Virballen, the first rays of the rising sun showed him a village. It was
in a hollow, and above it the ground rose sharply to a large house,
evidently very old, built of a grey stone that had been weathered by the
winds an