The assurance of a safe-conduct from the Ministère des Etrangères was a rather important item as I had been born in Germany, even though only the first nine years of my life had been spent there. My father emigrated to America in 1871, and as I had received my education here, had lived in America ever since, and had married an American, I had never felt myself anything but an American and of the most enthusiastic variety. When the Germans invaded Belgium, when they sank the _Lusitania_, and when they seemed to have broken all laws of international relations, I expressed myself, both personally and in newspaper interviews, so strongly that long before we entered the war several Berlin newspapers violently took me to task and honored me by calling me a renegade and a traitor to the country of my birth. There was an understanding between our country and France that no American civilian of German birth should be permitted to enter France except by special permission of either M. Clemenceau or M. Pichon, then Minister of Foreign Affairs. The French high commissioner cabled to the latter and in most cordial terms recommended that I be permitted to enter France, both because of my office as president of the Society of American Friends of Musicians in France, and because of a life-long admiration for French music, which I had demonstrated for thirty-three years by producing in our country nearly every important symphonic work that French composers had written before and within that time. M. Pichon promptly cabled the necessary visé and with all proper credentials I set sail on June 15, 1918, on the French steamship _La Lorraine_. The ship’s passengers were almost entirely soldiers and war workers. There were two hundred and fifty Belgian soldiers with their officers returning to France after three years spent in Russia, and who, when the revolution broke out, had after incredible hardships reached Vladivostok, sailing from there to California. There were Polish soldiers on their way to join the Foreign Legion of the French army and there were dozens of Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., K. of C., and S. A. workers. There were not more than a dozen civilians, among them my friend, Melville Stone, director of the Associated Press, and M. Sulzer, the Swiss minister then accredited to our country. It was strange to be on a transatlantic steamer without any idle rich, tourists, or commercial travellers; and the large guns mounted fore and aft with a gun crew watching, ready day and night, gave one a grim foretaste of the war raging on the other side.