A STRANGE MEETING As he walked west Fred noticed, even in the night, a change in the country.

It was not that he passed once in a while a solitary soldier guarding a culvert, as he neared a railway, or a patrol, with its twinkling fire, watching this spot or that that needed special guarding.
That was part of war, the part of war that he had been able to foresee.
It wasn't anything due to the war that made an impression on his mind so much as a sort of thickening of the country.

Though he had traveled so short a distance from the Russian border, there seemed to be more people about.
Great houses, rising on high ground, with small, contented looking villages nestling, as it were, under their protection, were frequent.

He was, as a matter of fact, in a country of great aristocratic landholders, the great nobles of Prussia, the men who are the real rulers of the country, under the Prussian King, who is also the German Kaiser.

And in many of these great houses lights were burning, even after midnight, when all signs of life in the villages had ceased.