So began the process of drawing me out. A fortnight later the matter of my information was broached openly and the suggestion was made that if I delivered it to the Russian Government, high officials would be friendly and a career assured me in Russia, as I grew up. But by that time Germany had changed her attitude. Her agents also reached me in St. Petersburg. From them I received new assurance of the importance of the document. If I would release it—so the German agent who came to my hotel told me—and keep my tongue still, Berlin would pardon my indiscretion and assure me a career at home. Russia or Germany? My decision was quickly made. That very night I was smuggled out of Petersburg and whisked across the frontier at Alexandrovna, into Germany; and the letter passed out of my hands—for the time being. CHAPTER II. _I Impersonate a Russian Prince and steal a treaty. What the treaty contained and how Germany made use of the knowledge._ Gross Lichterfelde! As I write, it all comes back to me clearly, in spite of the full years that have passed—this, my first home in Berlin. A huge pile of buildings set in a suburb of the city, grim and military in appearance; and in fact, as I soon discovered. I was to become a cadet, it seems; and where in Germany could one receive better training than in this same Gross Lichterfelde? At home I had had some small experience with the exactions of the _gymnasium_; but now I found that this was but so much child’s play in comparison to the life at Gross Lichterfelde. We were drilled and dragooned from morning till night: mathematics, history, the languages—they were not taught us, they were literally pounded into us. And the military training! I am not unfamiliar with the curricula of Sandhurst, of St. Cyr, even of West Point, but I honestly believe that the training we had to undergo was fully as arduous and as technical as at any of those schools. And we were only boys. Military strategy and tactics; sanitation; engineering; chemistry; in fact, any and every study that could conceivably be of use to these future officers of the German Army; to all of these must we apply ourselves with the utmost diligence. And woe to the student who shirked! Then there was the endless drilling, that left us with sore muscles and minds so worn with the monotony of it that we turned even to our studies with relief. And the supervision! Our very play was regulated. Can you wonder that we hated it and likened the cadet school to a prison? And can you imagine how galling it was to me, who had come to Berlin seeking romance and found drudgery? But we learned. Oh, yes. The war has shown how well we learned.