Many of my answers to these and similar questions were carefully written down by the man at the desk, while his companions in the inquisition glared, always glared, and the room danced with soldiers passing through it. At length my passport was folded and returned to me, but my credentials and reference books were sealed in an envelope. They would be returned to me later, I was told. I was shunted along into an adjoining small room where nimble fingers dexterously ran through my clothing to find out if I had overlooked declaring anything. Another shunting and I was in a large room. I rubbed elbows with more soldiers along the way, but nobody spoke. Miraculously I came to a halt before a huge desk, much as a bar of glowing iron, after gliding like a living thing along the floor of a rolling mill, halts suddenly at the bidding of a distant hand. Behind the desk stood men in active service uniforms--men who had undoubtedly faced death for the land which I was seeking to enter. They fired further questions at me and took down the data on my passport, after which I wrote my signature for the official files. Attacks came hard and fast from the front and both flanks, while a silent soldier thumbed through a formidable card file, apparently to see if I were a _persona non grata_, or worse, in the records. I became conscious of a silent power to my left, and turning my glance momentarily from the rapid-fire questioners at the desk, I looked into a pair of lynx eyes flashing up and down my person. Another detective, with probably the added role of interpreter, but as I was answering all questions in German he said not a word. Yet he looked volumes. Through more soldiers to the platform, and then a swift and comparatively comfortable journey to Emmerich, accompanied by a soldier who carried my sealed envelope, the contents of which were subsequently returned to me after an examination by the censor. At last I was alone! or rather I thought I was, for my innocent stroll about Emmerich was duly observed by a man who bore the unmistakable air of his profession, and who stepped into my compartment on the Cologne train as I sat mopping my brow waiting for it to start. He flashed his badge of detective authority, asked to see my papers, returned them to me politely, and bowed himself out. My journey was through the heart of industrial Germany, a heart which throbs feverishly night and day, month in and month out, to drive the Teuton power east, west, north, and south. Forests of lofty chimney-stacks in Wesel, Duisburg, Krefeld, Essen, Elberfeld and Dusseldorf belched smoke which hazed the landscape far and wide: smoke which made cities, villages, lone brick farmhouses, trees, and cattle appear blurred and indistinct, and which filtered into one's very clothing and into locked travelling bags.