to go back to Berlin and apply at the _Auswartiges Amt_ (Foreign
Office). I did not wish to wait in Berlin until this campaign was
over; I wished to follow on the heels of the army through the
ruined land and catch up to the fighting if possible. American
correspondents had done this in Belgium. I myself had done it with
the Austrians against the Serbs, and I succeeded in East Prussia,
but not through Berlin.

I was well aware that Germany was making a tremendous bid for
neutral favour. I had furthermore heard so much of Russian
atrocities that I was convinced that the stories were true;
consequently I decided to play the role of an investigator of
Muscovite crime. I won Herr Meyer of the Wolff Telegraph Bureau,
who sent me along with his card to Commandant von Rauch, who at
first refused to let me proceed, but after I had hovered outside
his door for three days, finally gave me a pass to go to Tapiau,
the high-water mark of the Russian invasion.

That night, "by chance," in the _Deutscher Hof_, I met the
black-bearded official who had arrested me on the boat, and I told
him that I had permission to go to Tapiau next morning. When he
became convinced, that I was a professional atrocity hunter who
believed that the Russians had been brutal, his hospitality became
boundless, and over copious steins of Munich beer he described the
invaders in a manner which made Gladstone's expose of the Turks in
Bulgaria, the stories of Captain Kidd, and the tales of the Spanish
Inquisition seem like essays on brotherly love. He was
particularly incensed at the Russians because they had destroyed
Allenburg, for Allenburg was his home. One of the stories on which
he laid great stress was that a band of Cossacks had pillaged the