After I returned to Berlin I met an American correspondent who was
in East Prussia when I was. His sympathies were pro-German, but he
was an, open and fair-minded man, who, like me, had left Berlin
with a deep feeling against the Russians, thanks to the excellent
German propaganda. "I went especially to get some good stories of
Russian atrocities," he said. "I thought that every mile would be
blood-marked with evidence, but I came back defeated. Some petty
larceny and robbery, a Red Cross flag torn to shreds by a Russian
shell, two old men murdered and robbed by Cossacks, and a woman in
the hospital at Soldau, who had been outraged by five Cossacks, was
all that I could find, even though I was aided by the German
Government."

My own first-hand investigations convinced me that it would be
difficult for any army in the world to conduct a cleaner campaign
than Russia conducted in her first invasion of East Prussia. I
remind the reader that I am speaking of the _first_ invasion, for I
have no personal knowledge of the second. Subsequently in Germany
when. I spoke of the matter I was always told that it was the
_second_ invasion which was so bad. Perhaps! But I had been
fooled when Berlin cried wolf the first time.

By a stroke of fortune while in East Prussia I became "assistant"
for two days to a Government moving picture photographer who had a
pass for himself and assistant in those happy days of inexactitude.
We formed the kind of close comradeship which men form who are
suffocated but unhurt by a shell which kills and maims others all
about them. That had been our experience. He had, moreover, been
over much of the ground covered by me behind the front.