The Governor General received me in a dainty, Louis Quinze room, done in rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and heavy brocaded curtains, a background which you felt precisely suited His Excellency. In the English newspapers, which by the way, the Germans do not childishly bar from the Berlin cafés, I had read of His Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather expected to see a heavy, domineering man. Instead, a slender, stealthy man in the uniform of a general, rose from behind a tapestry-topped table, revealing as he did, a slight stoop in his back, and held out a long-fingered hand. As I looked at Governor General von Bissing I saw that he wore the second class of the Iron Cross and no other decorations; at the same time I imagined he had been awarded about ten orders which he could have strung across his narrow chest. His black, glistening, almost artificial-looking hair, was brushed back tight over his head, and when I noticed his eyes, I saw that they were of bluish gray, heavy and unrelenting, pouched and lined, glowing in a way that either made you want to turn away, or else stare, fascinated by their powers. He struck me as being rather longer headed than most Germans, and his straggly grayish mustache only half hid the thin, straight, ruthless lines of his mouth; but when you tried to study his face, you could discern only two things, features thin, but intensely strong, pierced with two points of fire, sunken, glowering eyes. And I knew then what they meant by the Iron Fist. General von Bissing spoke no English. Somehow I imagined him to be one of those old patriots who would never learn the language simply because it was English. Through Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann I asked the Governor General what Germany was doing towards the reconstruction of Belgium. I asked Herrmann to explain to him--for I dreaded attempting my ungrammatical German--that America, when I had left it, was under the impression that Belgium was a land utterly laid waste by the German armies; in America the common belief was that the German military Government meant tyranny; what was Germany doing for Belgium?