person in that hole.

The night before, by chance, we had heard that Gerbeaux and Stevens were
under detention, but until this moment of meeting we did not know their
exact whereabouts. They--the Frenchman, the American and the Belgian--
had started out from Brussels in an auto driven by the African, on
Monday, just a day behind us. Because their car carried a Red Cross
flag without authority to do so, and because they had a camera with
them, they very soon found themselves under arrest, and, what was worse,
under suspicion. Except that for two days they had been marched afoot
an average of twenty-five miles a day, they had fared pretty well,
barring Stevens. He, being separated from the others, had fallen into
the hands of an officer who treated him with such severity that the
account of his experiences makes a tale worth recounting separately and
at length.

We stayed in that place half an hour--one of the longest half hours I
remember. There was a soldier with a fixed bayonet at the door, and
another soldier with a saw-edged bayonet at the window, which was
broken. Parties of soldiers kept coming to this window to peer at the
exhibits within; and, as they invariably took the civilians for
Englishmen who had been caught as spies, we attracted almost as much
attention as the Turcos in their funny ballet skirts; in fact I may say
we fairly divided the center of the stage with the Turcos.

At the end of half an hour the lieutenant bustled in, all apologies, to
say there had been a mistake and that we should never have been put in
with the prisoners at all. The rain being over, he invited us to come
outside and get a change of air. When we got outside we found that our
two bicycles, which we had left leaning against the curb, were gone. To