"If he spots us," advised my companion, "we've got to hand him the cold shoulder. Mark my words, he'll try to trail along to the same hotel and stick like a leech." Again he was right. At the baggage room the Englishman overtook us, suggesting that we make a party of it--he knew a gay café--first going to the hotel. He suggested the _Atlantic_. Bluntly he was informed we were visiting friends, but nothing would do then but we must agree to meet him in, say, an hour. Not until he found it an impossibility did he give us up and finally, with marvelous good nature, he said good night. The last I saw of him was his broad back disappearing through a door into a street. The courier nudged me. "Quick," he whispered, "look,--the man going out the next door." Before I could turn I knew whom he meant. I saw only the man's profile before he, too, disappeared into the street; but it was a face difficult to forget, for it had been close to me at Warnemunde; it was the face of the police spy. "I told you they purposely let him get through," continued my friend. "That police fellow must have come down on the train from Warnemunde. I tell you it's best not to pick up with any one these days. Suppose we had fallen for that Englishman and gone to a café with him to-night--a nice mess!" It was in a restaurant a few hours later that I saw my first Iron Cross, black against a gray-green coat and dangling from a button. In _Bieber's_, a typical better class café of the new German type, luxurious with its marble walls and floors, and with little soft rugs underfoot and colored wicker tables and chairs, one felt the new spirit of this miracle of nations. On the broad landing of a wide marble staircase an orchestra played soldier songs and above the musicians, looking down on his people, loomed a bust of Wilhelm II, _Von Gottes Gnaden, Kaiser von Deutschland_. About him, between the flags of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, blazed the black, white, and red, and there where all might read, hung the proclamation of August to the German people. We had read it through to the last line: "_Forward with God who will be with us as he was with our Fathers!_"--when we heard an excited inflection in the murmurings from the many tables--"_Das Eiserne Kreuz!_" And we saw the officer from whose coat dangled the black maltese cross, outlined in silver. His cheeks flushed, proud of a limping, shot-riddled leg, proud of his Emperor's decoration, but prouder still that he was a German; he must have forgotten all of battle and suffering during that brief walk between the tables. Cheers rang out, then a song, and when finally the place quieted everybody stared at that little cross of black as though held by some hypnotic power.