I knew it sounded like fiction; but it was quite true.
Rupert of Hentzau smiled delightedly.
"Do you expect us to believe that ?" he protested.
"Listen," I said.

"If you could invent an explanation for that uniform as quickly as I told you that one, standing in a road with eight officers trying to shoot you, you would be the greatest general in Germany." That made the others laugh; and Rupert retorted: "Very well, then, we will concede that the entire British army has changed its uniform to suit your photograph.

But if you are not an officer, why, in the photograph, are you wearing war ribbons ?" I said the war ribbons were in my favor, and I pointed out that no officer of any one country could have been in the different campaigns for which the ribbons were issued.
"They prove," I argued, "that I am a correspondent, for only a correspondent could have been in wars in which his own country was not engaged." I thought I had scored; but Rupert instantly turned my own witness against me.
"Or a military attache," he said.

At that they all smiled and nodded knowingly.
He followed this up by saying, accusingly, that the hat and clothes I was then wearing were English.

The clothes were English, but I knew he did not know that, and was only guessing; and there were no marks on them.