if you try to do so a sentry will shoot you. As soon as certain
movements are completed, you will be at liberty to pass on, on your way
to Koenigsberg. I will add to Lieutenant Ernst's advice. When you reach
Koenigsberg, after you have reported yourself to the police, wait there
until a train can take you to Berlin. It will mean only a few days of
waiting, for at Koenigsberg there are already many refugees, and the
authorities want to get them to Berlin as soon as the movements of troop
trains allow the railway to be reopened for passenger traffic."

Fred agreed to all this. There was nothing else for him to do, for one
thing, and, for another, he was by no means unwilling to see whatever
there might be to be seen here. He could guess by this time that without
any design he had stumbled on a spot that was reckoned rather important
by the Germans, for the time being at least, and he had heard enough
about the wonderful efficiency of the German army to be anxious to see
that mighty machine in the act of getting ready to move.

He did see a good deal, as a matter of fact, that day and the next. It
was on the famous Saturday night of the first of August that he had left
Virballen. Sunday brought news of a clash with France, far away on the
western border, and of the German invasion of Belgium. Monday brought
word of a definite declaration of war between Germany and France, and
of the growing danger that England, too, might be involved.

And all of Sunday and all of Monday supplies of all sorts poured through
the little village in an unceasing stream. Motor cars and trucks were to
be seen in abundance, and Fred caught his first glimpse, which was not
to be his last, of the wonderful German field kitchens, in the mighty
ovens of which huge loaves of bread were being baked even while the
whole clumsy looking apparatus was on the move. But it only looked