The English officer said, “Very singular, we are ten minutes behind that fellow everywhere.  He is the cleverest of all the German spies, and we are not able to catch him!”

If that spy had been caught in his English uniform inspecting English defenses, would not everything have been kept quiet in the endeavor to pick up the lines of his foreign communications?

In writing home from England, even to my family, toward the close of 1914, I thought it just as well to be brief and not too definite with any information.  I had seen some of the censorship regulations and envelopes resealed with a paper bearing heavy black letters, “Opened by censor,” with the number of the censor, showing that there are more than one hundred people engaged in this work; and also directions from the censorship that “responses to this inquiry must be submitted,” etc., etc.

Nobody could believe until this war broke out and there descended upon peaceful Belgium not only armies and demands for their shelter, maintenance and food, and drink, but also huge demands for financial indemnification—­war tax levies upon cities, towns, and provinces, with individuals held as hostages for their payment—­that German war plans meant the looting, not only of nations and states, but of individual fortunes and properties.

It now seems that the march to Paris through Belgium and the imposition of a huge redemption tax upon Paris and France were but the preliminaries to larger demands upon London and England.

Indeed, judged by the demands upon Belgium, the German plans contemplated the transfer of the wealth of France and the British Empire to Germany; and such enslavement of these peoples as would make Germany rich, powerful and triumphant for many generations, if not forever, over the whole habitable globe.  The German minister at Washington sounded a true German note when he asked who should question the right of Germany to take Canada and the British possessions in North America.  Were they not at war, and if Germany were able, should she not possess them?

It had been understood before this war that countries were invaded under ideas of national defense.  But possession of countries for the absorption of their wealth and the enslavement of their people, to work thereafter for the victors, was believed a barbarism from which this world had long ago emerged in the struggle for the freedom of the individual.

CHAPTER XI

ENGLISH WAR FORCES

The Men at the Front—­The Recruiting—­English Losses—­Horses and Ships—­War Supplies—­Barring the Germans.

I really admire the English censorship and the manner in which it can withhold information from the English people, and I see the usefulness of much of the withholdings.  You are some days in England before you realize that there are now no weather reports—­not even for Channel crossings.  Nobody really cared for them in London.  Everybody there knew what the weather was, and nobody could tell what it was to be.  If reports were printed, they would fool only the German Zeppelins; but cable reports might be quite another thing.  So you can’t cable your family:  “Weather fine, come over.”