After that the old man took us across the back yard to a large modern barn which was heavily padlocked. Once inside he unshuttered a row of windows along one side of the main, ground-floor room. It was jammed to the ceiling with every conceivable item of household furnishings: chairs, tables, beds, bedding, kitchen utensils and porcelain. But no pictures. We poked around enough to satisfy ourselves that first appearances were not deceiving. They weren’t, so, having made certain that the old fellow, who claimed to be merely the custodian of these things, understood the regulations forbidding their removal, we picked up Captain Vassalle. He had completed his interrogation of the alleged SS officer and placed him under house arrest. Our next objective was an old Schloss which, according to our map, was still a good hour’s drive to the northeast. As it was nearly noon and we were all hungry, we decided to investigate the possibilities of food in the neighborhood. On our way back through Bad Brückenau we stopped at the office of a small detachment of troops and asked where we could get some lunch. The hospitable second lieutenant on duty in the little stucco building, which had once been part of the Kurhaus establishment, gave us directions to the sprawling country hotel, high up above the town, where his outfit was quartered. He said that he would telephone ahead to warn the mess sergeant of our arrival. For a little way we followed along the Sinn, which flows through the grassy valley in which Bad Brückenau nestles. Then we began to mount sharply and, for the next fifteen minutes, executed a series of hairpin turns and ended abruptly beside a rambling structure which commanded a wonderful view of the valley and the wooded hills on the other side. Our hosts were a group of friendly young fellows who seemed delighted to have the monotony of their rural routine interrupted by our visit. They asked Charlie and me the usual question—what was the Navy doing in the middle of Germany—and got our stock reply: we are planning to dig a canal from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. We had a heavy downpour during lunch, and we waited for the rain to let up before starting out again. Then we took the winding road down into town, crossed the river and drove up into the hills on the other side of the valley. An hour’s drive brought us to upland meadow country and a grove of handsome lindens. At the end of a long double row of these fine trees stood Schloss Rossbach. “Castle” was a rather pompous name for the big seventeenth century country house with whitewashed walls and heavily barred ground-floor windows.