Eventually the countess managed to escape from Damascus to Bayreuth, where she had hoped to find a friend in the Vali, or Governor, there, who had treated her with great consideration at the time of her arrival in Syria. Upon instructions from Damascus, however, he kept her a virtual prisoner, and when later her trunks were examined and the photographs and notes she had made while on her expedition discovered she was in imminent danger of being shot as a Russian secret agent. The Russian consul, who was himself in danger and had made one fruitless effort to escape, was unable to assist her. She found her best friends, then, in the officers of the American men-of-war _North Carolina_ and _Tennessee_, which were lying off the town. They gave her good counsel and helped to keep her spirits up. After some weeks of agonizing uncertainty it was decided that the countess should merely be expelled from the country, and she was given an hour to get aboard of a vessel which was sailing for Egypt. GERMAN STUDENTS TELL WHAT SHERMAN MEANT _Three Confessions from German Soldiers_ _Told by Walther Harich, Wilhelm Spengler and Willie Treller_ What the educated German soldier thinks about the war, how he is affected by the strain and the brutalities and the heroisms of life consequent of it, is described with a fresh, powerful vividness in a book of war letters from German students issued under the editorship of Professor Philipp Witkop, of Freiburg ("Kriegsbriefe Deutscher Studenten"). Translations of some of the impressions on the German youth are here presented. I--"DRIVEN TO DEATH BY ME" Of the worst of all I have not written.... It is not the slaying, not the mounds of dead, which we are always passing, and not the wounded (they have the morphine needle and they lie quiet and peaceful in the straw of the requisitioned peasant carts). To me the worst is the distress and suffering to which man and beast are constantly subjected by the terrible strain. We have just buried my first mount, a glorious animal, virtually driven to his death. Driven to death by me! Can you imagine that a person as peaceable as I could find it possible to drive a horse to death with whip and spurs? There is no help for it. The word is forward--always forward! Oh, this everlasting driving on! One stands beside a team that can go no further and compels the drivers, with kindness or threats, to force the impossible out of the horses. The poor animals are all in, but one grabs the whip himself and mercilessly beats away at the miserable beasts till they move again. That is the shocking thing--that one is constantly compelled to make demands upon the poor animals to which they are not equal. Everything here is beyond one's strength. The impossible is made possible. It must go--till something or other breaks.