Try to think of a slender, slightly stooped military man, perhaps a trifle foppish, with his sleek, brilliantined hair, sitting in a delicate gold and tapestried chair, and directing the affairs of a captured nation. His face is sallow, and his sunken eyes always seemed to smolder, and his mouth is so thin and straight, as almost to be cruel, but you feel that he is absolutely fair, and it is hard to think of him as breaking his word. I cannot imagine Governor General von Bissing doing that. I think he is ruthlessly honest, ruthlessly just, hard, a rigid disciplinarian, and scrupulously fair, and if reprisals are necessary no sentimentality will stay his hand. "They are only needle pricks," he says of seditious Belgians,--"they know why." The ideal man for a military government, his is an Iron Fist; but if the fist were of softer stuff, all Belgium would be in chaos. IX PRISONERS OF WAR Promptly at two o'clock the gray army automobile emblazoned with Prussian eagles in black, left Wilhelmstrasse. Half an hour's run--and the drivers of those army motor cars know not a speed law--and we were at garrison headquarters on Doeberitz Road. One saw a fence of white palings, a lawn surprisingly green for winter, symmetrically laid out among gray gravel walks that lead up to a square business-like house of brown stucco, over the door of which was printed "_Kaiser Wilhelm Soldatenheim, 1914_." Off to the right loomed a long weather-beaten line of huge tents, one of which was open, showing the tail of a Taube monoplane. Across the road behind us, unpainted barrack sheds and soldiers showed through a grove of pine trees, and then while Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office, my escort, went to find Major General von Loebell, commanding the entire Doeberitz camp and garrison, I heard something that reminded me of the riveting machines on the skyscrapers in New York. Imagine your state of mind with twenty riveting machines, all making their infernal clatter at the same time, only each capable of double the usual noise. That is the sound that suddenly broke in upon us at Doeberitz Road, and off in the fields we saw battery after battery of machine gun men, learning their deadly trade. While we waited Dr. Roediger's return, more guns broke loose, and by the time the General came, he could scarcely make himself heard. He began by explaining from his military point of view the Doeberitz camp.