the letter back until the last moment. If it was going to help me, it still
would be effective; if it went against me, I would be just as dead. I
began to think out other plans. Plans of escape were foolish. I could
have crawled out of the window to the rain gutter, but before I had
reached the rooftree I would have been shot. And bribing the sentry,
even were he willing to be insulted, would not have taken me farther
than the stairs, where there were other sentries. I was more safe
inside the house than out. They still had my passport and laissez-
passer, and without a pass one could not walk a hundred yards. As
the staff had but one plan, and no time in which to think of a better
one, the obligation to invent a substitute plan lay upon me. The plan I
thought out and which later I outlined to Major Wurth was this: Instead
of putting me away at midnight, they would give me a pass back to
Brussels. The pass would state that I was a suspected spy and that if
before midnight of the 26th of August I were found off the direct road
to Brussels, or if by that hour I had not reported to the military
governor of Brussels, any one could shoot me on sight. As I have
stated, without showing a pass no one could move a hundred yards,
and every time I showed my pass to a German it would tell him I was
a suspected spy, and if I were not making my way in the right
direction he had his orders. With such a pass I was as much a
prisoner as in the room at Ligne, and if I tried to evade its conditions I
was as good as dead. The advantages of my plan, as I urged them
upon Major Wurth, were that it prevented the General Staff from
shooting an innocent man, which would have greatly distressed them,
and were he not innocent would still enable them, after a reprieve of
two days, to shoot him. The distance to Brussels was about fifty
miles, which, as it was impossible for a civilian to hire a bicycle,
motor-car, or cart, I must cover on foot, making twenty-five miles a
day. Major Wurth heartily approved of my substitute plan, and added