An hour later Irving was on a troop train, speeding away to the northeast, away from the still thundering battle front and toward the objective city of his secret-service aims, hopes, plans and patriotic ambition.
CHAPTER XXIV
IN BERLIN
Berlin!
The name was well worth the exclamation. If Irving did not utter it aloud, he thought it in the "tone of voice" in which it appears here.
He had ridden more than half of the preceding day, all night and well into another day with a companion in whom he was able to find little of sympathetic interest. The fellow, an infantry lieutenant, about 30 years old, was a cold-eyed, emotionless individual and about as cruelly boastful Prussian as one would care to meet. There was no fate too frightful for an English soldier in his opinion, and all other Allies fighting on the side of the British ought to be reduced to vassalage and forced to pay tribute to the House of Hohenzollern.
Irving tried for a while to engage in intelligent conversation with him, but at last found this impossible and decided to encourage him along the line of least resistance with the view of obtaining as much information from him as his prejudiced mind was capable of giving. By discounting every thing uttered with a burst of passion or with sneer of contempt or tone of bravado and by watching for inadvertent admissions, Irving gleaned enough to convince him that the central allies were not nearly as confident of winning the war as they wished the outside world to believe.
Lieutenant Ellis was a good enough spy not to confine his observations to the one supreme purpose of obtaining a list of enemy agents in Canada and the United States. He saw at once, after landing with his parachute in the boche lines, that he could be of great service to the cause for which the Allies were fighting by gathering a fund of information regarding the man power, supplies, ammunition and the general attitude of the people in the kaiser's country. By the time he reached Berlin, he felt considerably compensated for the uncongeniality of his traveling companion during the trip.
They took a horse-cab--there were no automobile taxis in evidence--and were driven at a very sleepy gait to a high-class hotel in Friederichstrasse. The horse behind which they rode looked as if he might have had a full meal of oats and corn some time before the war. There was little in the scenes through which they passed that impressed Irving as bearing any indications of the ravages of war, except perhaps the scarcity of automobiles and the lack of that spick-and-span condition for which the streets of Berlin had long been famous. The boy spy was unable to discover any quality of excellence at all superior to that of Buffalo, N.Y., in general appearance.
The hotel he found well furnished, decorated and supplied with rugs. The rooms taken by Irving and his companion were all that a "particular," if not fastidious, guest would demand. True, a girl operated the elevator, but the young spy had learned, through letters from his cousin, that Canadian girls went much farther than this in their patriotic efforts, sharing not a little in the heavy labors of munition shops and the general industries.