Being a Guest of the Kaiser


You know how four of us blundered into the German lines in a taxicab;
and how, getting out of German hands after three days and back to
Brussels, we undertook, in less than twenty-four hours thereafter, to
trail the main forces then shoving steadily southward with no other goal
before them but Paris.

First by hired hack, as we used to say when writing accounts of funerals
down in Paducah, then afoot through the dust, and finally, with an
equipment consisting of that butcher's superannuated dogcart, that
elderly mare emeritus and those two bicycles, we made our zigzagging way
downward through Belgium.

We knew that our credentials were, for German purposes, of most dubious
and uncertain value. We knew that the Germans were permitting no
correspondents--not even German correspondents--to accompany them. We
knew that any alien caught in the German front was liable to death on
the spot, without investigation of his motives. We knew all these
things; and the knowledge of them gave a fellow tingling sensations in
the tips of his toes when he permitted himself to think about his
situation. But, after the first few hours, we took heart unto
ourselves; for everywhere we met only kindness and courtesy at the hands
of the Kaiser's soldiers, men and officers alike.

There was, it is true, the single small instance of the excited noncom.
who poked a large, unwholesome-looking automatic pistol into my
shrinking diaphragm when he wanted me to get off the running board of a
military automobile into which I had climbed, half a minute before, by