The Revellers

“No. Never heard Mrs. Saumarez so much as mention her.”

“Thanks. We’ve done a good night’s work, I fancy. And – this for yourself only – there may be a scrap to-morrow afternoon.”

“Fine! I want to stretch my legs. Been in this bally hole nine days. Well, here’s your corporal. Good-night, sir.”

“Good-night!”

And Martin trudged through the mud with Sergeant Mason behind von Struben and the escort.

CHAPTER XXI

NEARING THE END

Sixty hours elapsed before Martin was able to unwrap the puttees from off his stiff legs and cut the laces of boots so caked with mud that he was too weary to untie them. In that time, as the official report put it, “enemy trenches extending from Rue du Bois to Houplines, over a front of nearly three miles, were occupied to an average depth of one thousand yards, and our troops are now consolidating the new territory.”

A bald announcement, indeed! Martin was one of the few who knew what it really meant. He had helped to organize the victory; he could sum up its costs. But this record is not a history of the war, nor even of one young soldier’s share in it. Martin himself has developed a literary style noteworthy for its simple directness. Some day, if he survives, he may tell his own story.

When the last of twelve hundred prisoners had been mustered in the Grande Place of Armentières, when the attacking battalions had been relieved and the reserve artillery was shelling Fritz’s hastily formed gun positions, when the last ambulance wagon of the “special” division had sped over the pavé to the base hospital at Bailleul, Martin thought he was free to go to bed.

As a matter of fact, he was not. Utterly spent, he had thrown himself on a cot and had slept the sleep of complete exhaustion for half an hour, when a brigade major discovered that “Captain Grant” was at liberty, and detailed him for an immediate inquiry. The facts were set forth on Army Form 122: “On the night of the 10th inst. a barrel of rum, delivered at Brigade Dump No. 35, was stolen or mislaid. It was last seen in trench 77. For investigation and report to D.A.Q.M.G. 50th Div.” That barrel of rum will never be seen again, though it was destined to roll through reams of variously numbered army forms during many a week.

But it did not disturb Martin’s slumbers. A brigadier general happened to hear his name given to an orderly.

“Who’s that?” he inquired sharply. “Grant, did you say?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the brigade major.

“Don’t be such a Heaven-condemned idiot!” said the general, or, rather, he used words to that effect. “Grant was all through that push. Find some other fellow.”

Brigade majors are necessarily inhuman. It is nothing to them what a man may have done – they think only of the next job. They are steeled alike to pity and reproach. This one was no exception among the tribe. He merely thumbed a list and said to the orderly:

“Give that chit to Mr. Fortescue.”

So a subaltern began the chase. He smelt the rum through a whole company of Gordons, but the barrel lies hid a fathom deep in the mud of Flanders.

That same afternoon Martin woke up, refreshed in mind and body. He secured a hot bath, “dolled up” in clean clothes, and strolled out to buy some socks from “Madame,” the famous Frenchwoman who has kept her shop open in Armentières throughout three years of shell fire.

A Yorkshire battalion was “standing at ease” in the street while their officers and color sergeants engaged in a wrangle about billets. The regiment had taken part in the “push” and bore the outward and visible signs of that inward grace which had carried them beyond the third line German trench. A lance corporal was playing “Tipperary” on a mouth-organ.

Someone shouted: “Give us ‘Home Fires,’ Jim” – and “Jim” ran a preliminary flourish before Martin recognized the musician.

“Why, if it isn’t Jim Bates!” he cried, advancing with outstretched hand.

The lance corporal drew himself up and saluted. His brown skin reddened as he shook hands, for it is not every day that a staff captain greets one of the rank and file in such democratic fashion.

“I’m main glad te see you, sir,” he said. “I read of your promotion in t’ Messenger, an’ we boys of t’ owd spot were real pleased. We were, an’ all.”

“You’re keeping fit, I see,” and Martin’s eye fell to a pickelhaube tied to the sling of Bates’s rifle.

“Pretty well, sir,” grinned Bates. “I nearly had a relapse yesterday when that mine went up. Did ye hear of it?”

“If you mean the one they touched off at L’Epinette Farm, I saw it,” said Martin. “I was at the crossroads at the moment.”

“Well, fancy that, sir! I couldn’t ha’ bin twenty yards from you.”

“Queer things happen in war. Do you remember Mrs. Saumarez’s German chauffeur, a man named Fritz Bauer?”

“Quite well, sir.”

“We caught him in ‘No Man’s Land’ three nights ago. He is a major now.”

Jim was so astonished that his mouth opened, just as it would have done ten years earlier.

“By gum!” he cried. “That takes it! An’ it’s hardly a month since I saw Miss Angèle in Amiens.”

Martin’s pulse quickened. The mouth-organ in Bates’s hand brought him back at a bound to the night when he had forbidden Jim to play for Angèle’s dancing. And with that memory came another thought. Mrs. Saumarez in Paris – her daughter in Amiens – why this devotion to such nerve centers of the war?

“Are you sure?” he said. “You would hardly recognize her. She is ten years older – a woman, not a child.”

Bates laughed. He dropped his voice.

“She was always a bit owd-fashioned, sir. I’m not mistakken. It kem about this way. It was her, right enough. Our colonel’s shover fell sick, so I took on the car for a week. One day I was waitin’ outside the Hotel dew Nord at Amiens when a French Red Cross auto drove up, an’ out stepped Miss Angèle. I twigged her at once. I’d know them eyes of hers anywheres. She hopped into the hotel, walkin’ like a ballet-dancer. Hooiver, I goes up to her shover an’ sez: ‘Pardonnay moy, but ain’t that Mees Angèle Saumarez?’ He talked a lot – these Frenchies always do – but I med out he didn’t understand. So I parlay-vooed some more, and soon I got the hang of things. She’s married now, an’ I have her new name an’ address in my kit-bag. But I remember ’em, all right. I can’t pronounce ’em, but I can spell ’em.”

And Lance Corporal Bates spelled: “La Comtesse Barthélemi de Saint-Ivoy, 2 bis, Impasse Fautet, Rue Blanche, Paris.”

“It looks funny,” went on Jim anxiously, “but it’s just as her shover wrote it.”

Martin affected to treat this information lightly.

“I’m exceedingly glad I came across you,” he said. “How would you like to be a sergeant, Jim?”

Bates grinned widely.

“It’s a lot more work, but it does mean better grub, sir,” he confided.

“Very well. Don’t mention it to anyone, and I’ll see what can be done. It shouldn’t be difficult, since you’ve earned the first stripe already.”

Martin found his brigadier at the mess. A few minutes’ conversation with the great man led him to a greater in the person of the divisional general. Yet a few more minutes of earnest talk, and he was in a car, bound for General Grant’s headquarters, which he reached late that night. It was long after midnight when the two retired, and the son’s face was almost as worn and care-lined as the father’s ere the discussion ended.

Few problems have been so baffling and none more dangerous to the Allied armies in France than the German spy system. It was so perfect before the war, every possible combination of circumstances had been foreseen and provided against so fully, that the most thorough hunting out and ruthless punishment of enemy agents has failed to crush the organization. The snake has been scotched, but not killed. Its venom is still potent. Every officer on the staff and many senior regimental officers have been astounded time and again by the completeness and up-to-date nature of the information possessed by the Germans. Surprise attacks planned with the utmost secrecy have found enemy trenches held by packed reserves and swarming with additional machine-guns. Newly established ammunition dépôts, carefully screened, have been bombed next day by aeroplanes and subjected to high-angle fire. Troop movements by rail over long distances have become known, and their effect discounted. Flanders, in particular, is a plague-spot of espionage which has cost Britain an untold sacrifice of life and an almost immeasurable waste of effort.

Small wonder, then, that Martin’s forehead should be seamed with foreboding. If his suspicions, which his father shared, were justified, the French Intelligence Department would quickly determine the truth, and no power on earth could save Angèle and her mother from a firing party. France knows her peril and stamps it out unflinchingly. Of late, too, the British authorities adopt the same rigorous measures. The spy, man or woman, is shown no mercy.

And now the whirligig of events had placed in Martin’s hands the question of life or death for Mrs. Saumarez and Angèle. It was a loathsome burden. He rebelled against it. During the long run to Paris his very soul writhed at the thought that fate was making him their executioner. He tried to steel his resolution by dwelling on the mischief they might have caused by thinking rather of the gallant comrades laid forever in the soil of France because of their murderous duplicity than of the woman who was once his friend, of the girl whose kisses had once thrilled him to the core. Worst of all, both General Grant and he himself felt some measure of responsibility for their failure to institute a searching inquiry as to Mrs. Saumarez’s whereabouts when war broke out.

But he was distraught and miserable. He had a notion – a well-founded one, as it transpired – that an approving general had recommended him for the Military Cross; but from all appearance he might have expected a letter from the War Office announcing his dismissal from the service.

At last, after a struggle which left him so broken that at a cordon near Paris he was detained several minutes while a sous-officier who did not like his looks communicated with a superior potentate, he made up his mind. Whate’er befell, he would give Angèle and her mother one chance. If they decided to take it, well and good. If not, they must face the cold-eyed inquisition of the Quai d’Orsay.