"How long are you remaining in Germany?" "Just as long as Your Serene Highness will permit," I responded, half facetiously and half seriously, for foreign correspondents are occasionally expelled from Germany for pernicious professional activity. For the ten days preceding August 1, 1914, while the European cloudburst was gathering momentum, such time as I could spare from the chase for the nimble item was devoted to patching up my journalistic fences in Berlin, with a view to remaining there throughout the war. There was at that time no conclusive indication that England would be involved. Having seen Germany in full and magnificent stride in peace, I was overwhelmingly anxious to watch her in the practise of her real profession. As an American citizen and special correspondent of three great American newspapers--the _New York Times, Philadelphia Public Ledger_ and _Chicago Tribune_--and fully accredited as such in German official quarters, I had every reason to hope that, even if England were drawn into the war (as to which I, myself, was never in doubt), my previous status as Berlin correspondent of Lord Northcliffe’s _Daily Mail_ would not interfere with my remaining in Germany as an American writing exclusively for American papers. It was, of course, obvious that if this permission were granted me, my connection with the British news organization, which for years was Germany’s _bête noire_, would have automatically to cease. In Ambassador Gerard, as ever, I found a ready supporter of my plans. He recognized, as I did, that a "_Daily Mail_ man," particularly one who had specialized, as I did for eight years, in publishing as much as I dared about Germany’s palpable preparations for war, would perhaps be on thin ice in asking favors of the Kaiser’s Government at such an hour. But Judge Gerard also knew that, while persistently doing my duty in reporting the sleepless machinations of the German War Party to attain "a place in the sun," I had written copiously in England and with equal faithfulness of the many attractive and favorable aspects of German life and institutions. In 1913 I produced a little book, _Men Around the Kaiser_, which from cover to cover was a sincere hymn of praise of almost everything Teutonic. This foreigner’s tribute to the real source of modern German greatness--the Fatherland’s captains of science, art, letters, commerce, finance and industry--was considered so fair and flattering to the Germans that _Männer um den Kaiser_, a German translation, went through eight editions to the two of the English original. During the Zabern army upheaval in Alsace-Lorraine in the winter of 1913-14 an article of mine in _The Daily Mail_ entitled "What the Colonel Said" was the only presentation of the German military attitude published in England. Even the War Party newspapers in Berlin honored me with a reproduction of that attempt to interpret the Prussian