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710 read, 'Your message understood. We are returning. Our movements will be explained as 'manœuvres.' And," added the general, "the English, having driven us back, will be willing to officially accept that explanation. As manœuvres, this night will go down into history. Return to the hotel," he commanded, "and in two months you can rejoin your regiment."

On the morning after the invasion the New York Republic published a map of Great Britain that covered three columns and a wood-cut of Ford that was spread over five. Beneath it was printed: "Lester Ford, our London correspondent, captured by the Germans; he escapes and is the first to warn the English people."

On the same morning, in an editorial in The Times of London, appeared this paragraph.

"The Germans were first seen by the Hon. Arthur Herbert, the eldest son of Lord Cinaris; Mr. Patrick Headford Birrell, both of Balliol College, Oxford, and Mr. Lester Ford, the correspondent of the New York Republic. These gentlemen escaped from the landing party that tried to make them prisoners, and at great risk proceeded in their motor car over roads infested by the Germans to all the coast towns of Norfolk, warning the authorities, Should the war office fail to recognize their services, the people of Great Britain will prove that they are not ungrateful."

A week later three young men sat at dinner on the terrace of the Savoy.

"Shall we, or shall we not," asked Herbert, "tell my uncle that we three, and we three alone, were the invaders?"

"That's hardly correct," said Ford; "as we now know there were two hundred thousand invaders. We were only the three who got ashore."

"I vote we don't tell him," said Birrell. "Let him think with everybody else that the Germans blundered; that an advance party landed too soon and gave the show away. If we talk," he argued, "we'll get credit for a successful hoax. If we keep quiet, everybody will continue to think we saved the country. I'm content to let it go at that."