exposed every minute to the chances of ambuscade and barbed-wire
mantraps and the like. I judge he earned his bauble.

I tried Von Theobald next--a lynx-faced, square-shouldered young man of
the field guns. To him I put the question: "What have you done, now, to
merit the bestowal of the Cross?"

"Well," he said--and his smile was born of embarrassment, I thought--
"there was shooting once or twice, and I--well, I did not go away. I
remained."

So after that I quit asking. But it was borne in upon me that if these
gold-braceletted, monocled, wasp-waisted exquisites could go jauntily
forth for flirtations with death as afore-time I had seen them going,
then also they could be marvelously modest touching on their own
performances in the event of their surviving those most fatal
blandishments.

Pretty soon we told the Staff good night, according to the ritualistic
Teutonic fashion, and took ourselves off to bed; for the next day was
expected to be a full day, which it was indeed and verily. In the
hotels of the town, such as they were, officers were billeted, four to
the room and two to the bed; but the commandant enthroned at the Hotel
de Ville looked after our comfort. He sent a soldier to nail a notice
on the gate of one of the handsomest houses in Laon--a house whence the
tenants had fled at the coming of the Germans--which notice gave warning
to all whom it might concern that Captain Mannesmann, who carried the
Kaiser's own pass, and four American Herren were, until further orders,
domiciled there. And the soldier tarried to clean our boots while we
slept and bring us warm shaving water in the morning.