Toward midnight, as I was falling asleep, a score of erratically spaced shots and the brief rat-a-tat of a machine-gun sounded somewhere not far away. Their direction was too uncertain, however, to make it worth while to accept the permission granted by the red slip. In the morning the city was thronged with the business-bent quite as if disorders had never dodged in and out of its wide streets. The main hotels, however, had been partly taken over by the staffs of the newly arrived troops, and pulsated with field gray. At the doors very young men in iron hats leaned their fixed bayonets in the crook of an elbow while they examined the _Ausweis_ with which each civilian was supposed to prove his identity. I entered several of them in the vain hope that the flash of my American passport would “start something.” The youths in uniform handed it back each time without so much as a flicker of curiosity on their rather dull faces. Inside, another boy volunteer ran his hands hastily over me in quest of concealed weapons; but not even the most obviously harmless Bavarian escaped that attention. The staff evidently had no secrets from the world at large. At any rate, I wandered into a dozen hotel rooms that had been turned into offices and idled about undisturbed while majors gave captains their orders for the day and lieutenants explained to sergeants the latest commands from higher up. What had become of that stern discipline and the far-famed secrecy of the German army? The soldiers of democratic America were automatons in the presence of their officers compared with these free-and-easy youths in gray; over in Posen the Poles were manyfold more exacting. Had I been a spy, there were several opportunities to have pocketed papers strewn about tables and improvised desks. When at last an officer looked up at me inquiringly I explained my presence by asking for written permission to take photographs within the beleaguered city, and it was granted at once without question.