The civil police under direction of the Military Governor were very busy in Paris during the early days of the war. Throughout the twenty- four hours, and especially in the darkness of night, the streets were patrolled by blue-capped men on bicycles, who rode, four by four, as silently as shadows, through every quarter of the city. They had a startling habit of surrounding any lonely man who might be walking in the late hours and interrogating him as to his nationality, age and business. Several times I was arrested in this way and never escaped the little frousse which came to me when these dark figures closed upon me, as they leapt from their bicycles and said with grim suspicion: "Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!" My pockets were bulging with papers, which I thrust hurriedly into the lantern-light for a close-eyed scrutiny. They were very quick to follow the trail of a stranger, and there was no sanctuary in Paris in which he might evade them. Five minutes after calling upon a friend in the fifth floor flat of an old mansion at the end of a courtyard in the Rue de Rivoli, there was a sharp tap at his door, and two men in civil clothes came into the room, with that sleuth-hound look which belongs to stage, and French, detectives. They forgot to remove their bowler hats, which seemed to me to be a lamentable violation of French courtesy. "Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!" Again I produced bundles of papers--permis de séjour in Paris, Amiens, Rouen, Orleans, Le Mans; laisser-passer to Boulogne, Dieppe, Havre, Dunkirk, Aire-sur-Lys, Béthune and Hazebrouck; British passports and papiers visés by French consuls, French police, French generals, French mayors, and French stationmasters. But they were hardly satisfied. One man with an ugly bulge in his side- pocket--you have seen at Drury Lane how quickly the revolver comes out?--suggested that the whole collection was not worth an old railway ticket because I had failed to comply with the latest regulation regarding a photograph on the permis de séjour... We parted, however, with mutual confidence and an expression of satisfaction in the Entente Cordiale. 3