most exclusive clubs, offered me opportunities to
view the fighting on the Russian front, and treated me like one of
themselves. Of expressions of appreciation and gratitude there was no
limit, and they greatly over-emphasized my services. Not only were the
nobles thus demonstratively grateful, but in nearly every village and
town to which I went I found inhabitants who had returned from
internment in France to relate how helpful Monsieur Wood at the
American Embassy had been to them. Often I remembered neither the
individuals nor the incidents they so gratefully dwelt upon, but the
general atmosphere of friendliness thus created was like springtime
after frost.

In Germany, even after establishing my identity, I have by citizens or
German Secret Service men been the object of grossly insulting
remarks. In Hungary no one even asked what was my personal bias on the
present war, but everyone remembered only the services which the
Embassy of neutral America had in France rendered to any Hungarian
subject who needed assistance. If the other nations of the Dual
Alliance possessed the generosity and courtesy of the Hungarians,
people outside the war would find it easier to be neutral in sentiment
as well as in deed.

CHAPTER XII

A GERMAN PRISON-CAMP

_Vienna, Tuesday, January 12th._ Last night and today twenty-three
long trains of German regular troops have passed through the Ivanka
station on their way east. They were apparently going to the Roumanian
frontier. A train will hold two battalions of infantry, two thousand
men, or a battery of artillery with full equipment. These trains
would, therefore, represent something like thirty thousand men, and
more were all the time coming. My car, in which I was _en route_ from
Budapest to Vienna, stopped at one station just opposite one of these
military trains, which I thus had time to study. It contained a
battery of German artillery and was a very long one, consisting of
flat cars, freight cars, and one or more passenger coaches for the
officers. The guns of the battery, with all the limbers and caissons,
were placed on flat-cars, while some of the freight cars were used for
equipment and ammunition and others for the soldiers. The doors of
these latter were open and were boarded up to a height of eighteen
inches to keep floor draughts off the men lying within. The cars were
filled with clean straw, sprigs of which trailed out of the doorways.
The soldiers, like all G