Indeed, to close this important matter now, Archer got considerably more
than the three tacks from the leather seat. He got a lock-nut from that
“inferrnal combustion engine,” (I suppose he meant _internal_), a
splinter of fabulous value from the casing of a Hun altimétre, and
something which looked like an American collar button, but which he
assured me had had an adventurous career above the clouds. He found it
in the car of the machine and if it was a collar button, why, it might
possibly have been worn by the Kaiser, so it was of priceless value in
any case.
“What arre you doing herre?” Archer says he finally managed to ask, “in
a Hun——”
“I’m standing here,” said Slade in a dry way which Archer says was
characteristic of him. “Help me lift out this bag of sand, will you?
There isn’t any time to talk. I escaped in this thing from the prison
camp at Azoudange. They sent away pretty near the whole guard. They’re
goin’ to attack. They didn’t know I knew anything about aviation.
Hurry—you’ll have to sit there.”
“What became of the fellerr that went up afterr you back therre?” Archer
asked.
“He had to go down,” said Slady dryly; “on account of the weather. Hurry
up. I’ve been hanging over you waiting for you to show me a place to
light, but you never would and that’s just like you. It wasn’t till you
got stuck, just as I knew you would, and moved your light all around
that I got a good squint. Chuck it out—quick.”
Archer climbed the step and looked into the cosy little car of a German
Albatross, two-seater fighting plane. Throwing his light about, he saw
in a quick glance the luxurious seat of the pilot and the plainer one
for the accompanying flier—a heavy bag of sand lashed upon it. He saw
the compass, the altimétre, the revolution counter, and something which
he said looked like a shade roller all wound round with oilskin.
“Don’t touch that,” Slade warned as Archer’s souvenir-loving fingers
lingered about it; “its the rolling-map—it shows a lot of things behind
the German lines.”
Archer climbed into the car, the floor of which was covered with water
like a leaky boat, and threw the bag from the seat he was to occupy.
“You might have had sense enough to know you could never get anywheres
in the flat country tonight,” Slade told him. “Why didn’t you follow the
Marne ridge?”
“’Cause I didn’t know about it,” Archer confessed frankly.
“Where are you going—to Paris?”
“Yes, or the nearest point of communication.”
“Good I picked you up,” said Slade.
Archer said he was so “flabberrgasted” at this almost miraculous meeting
with Slade that it was some minutes before he realized the significance
of all that had occurred. “You couldn’t make Slady talk,” he told me.
“He’d only say what was necessary and even then he was kind of clumsy
telling things. That was why he never botherred much with girrls, I
guess. Maybe that’s why they neverr botherred with him.”
“Maybe one did bother with him and you didn’t know anything about it,” I
suggested.
“Nix,” said Archer, with great decision.
Then he went on to tell me at some length much that he himself did not
learn until afterward, and even then extracted from his hero much as a
dentist draws teeth. “I had to give him gas to get anything out of him,”
he said.
It was a very remarkable story, and I will tell it now.
One night about a month before this Slade, on his motorcycle, had been
carrying a message from headquarters at Louzanne to a point some twenty
miles distant when his machine ran into a shell hole near the village of
La Pavin. This village was held by the French under constant menace from
the enemy.
The hole was very deep and Slade’s head striking a part of his machine
as he fell, he was stunned and lay unconscious in the ragged excavation
for what he afterwards judged must have been several hours.
When he regained consciousness he found himself in a predicament which
must have struck horror even to such a stolid nature as his. There he
lay upon the wreck of his machine in a stifling atmosphere of gasolene.
Where he was he could not imagine at first but he was thoughtful enough
not to strike a match to light his acetylene searchlight which,
moreover, as he later found, was broken.
Presently as he was able to gather his wits, he remembered what had
happened, but why the sickening fumes of gasolene should permeate the
place he could not guess until, feeling about above him, he discovered
the appalling cause of this condition. The shell hole was completely
closed by a hard, irregular surface which felt warm to the touch.
I leave you to imagine his feelings. He told Archer that he knew his
consciousness was but temporary. “I knew I’d faint any minute,” he said.
Yet he displayed enough of his characteristic calmness to reflect that
this complete closing of the hole could not have been of long duration
or he would be dead already. Whatever happened must have happened within
a very few minutes, he thought.
“That was just like Slady,” Archer said, as he told me about it. “He
neverr got excited. He always just sat down and thought what was the
best thing to do next.”
Yet I think he must have been somewhat unnerved then. In any case, he
felt of his gasolene tank and found that the feed pipe had been wrenched
away; not so much as a drop of gasolene was there left in it. The
slightest spark in that horrible, dark prison would have resulted in a
death more terrible than any which the ingenious Huns could have
devised.
Again Slade felt of the warm, hard surface above him and ran his fingers
in the interstices which seemed straight and regular. The surface was of
a warmth much greater than the stifling warmth of his prison, like a
warm radiator.
His head began to pound and he suffered from a straining feeling about
his eyes, which was ominous, as an army surgeon has since told me. Yet
with the few remaining minutes of life which apparently remained to him,
Tom Slade crouched upon the wreck of his machine and _thought_.
I am telling you this not after his own fashion of telling it, as Archer
repeated it to me, for evidently Slade had no idea at all of the story
possibilities of his own experiences.
The result of his thinking was that with a piece of broken glass from
his headlight he hurriedly dug a deep hole in the earth in which he
deposited his papers, filling the hole again and smoothing it over. By
the sheer power of his will he kept his wits while he was doing it and
having finished he had barely the strength to bang with a rock against
the hard surface above him.
“What did you think it was?” Archer says he asked him.
“I thought it was a tank,” Slade answered, “and I wasn’t going to take
any chances with my messages till I knew for certain everything was all
right.” The result proved that this precaution had been a wise one.
I suspect that those few seconds of frantic banging, while he fought a
losing battle against his ebbing consciousness, were perhaps the most
terrific in all his adventurous career. He told Archer that his head
swam and that finally he fell exhausted, struggling like a maniac for
each breath he drew, his eyes throbbing madly.
He did not know whether the hard roof actually moved, for everything
seemed to be moving now, and he was wavering on the edge of
unconsciousness. The last rational thought that he remembered having was
that the tank must have been deserted. His leg slipped between the
spokes of his wheel, he heard a strange noise, saw a little round light,
and thought it was a spark which would ignite the fumes and....
What he really saw as he passed out of that borderland of consciousness
was a star in the bright, clear heaven.
They lifted him, limp and all but lifeless, out of that poisoned dungeon
and laid him on the cool earth and searched him for his papers. They had
taken the little village of La Pavin in a night attack. The huge metal
monster which had shut him in stood hard by and when he came to his
senses he saw it there, brutal in its power and its ugliness—heartless,
irresistible, horrible. For I will tell you on my own account that of
all the engines of combat or of locomotion which man has made there is
nothing so loathesome in its suggestiveness of soulless cruelty as one
of these same monster tanks.
But Herr Von Something-or-other did not find the papers of the
messenger, and the messenger only smiled when they asked him about them.
They raised the broken motorcycle and looked about beneath it with
flashlights. But there were no papers. And so they took the messenger
into the village and put him in the little dressing station there and
gave him oxygen and used a pulmotor and brought him round. He said
afterwards (I mean long afterwards) that the Germans had treated him
well, been kind to him, and that he did not believe all the tales of
German atrocities which he had heard. He said these Germans seemed like
friends. I mention this because he was subsequently accused of
professing sympathy for them and came very near to being
court-martialled for it. Archer says it was just his blunt sense of
common fairness, a notable characteristic of his, and that what he said
has reference only to the treatment he received on that particular
occasion. In any event, nothing came of it.
Slade was taken, along with some of the defenders of La Pavin, to the
big prison camp at Azoudange, on the Marne Canal a few miles east of
Nancy. You will remember that as the place from which the balloon
observer thought that troops were being sent forward toward the lines.
It is in Lorraine, not far from Saarburg.
There Slade remained, and there he was on the stormy night of his great
adventure, which was to prove his brevet flight[2], and bring him face
to face with his former comrade, Archer.
I suppose you know that Slade had always taken a great interest in
aviation. He had a Boy Scout badge for proficiency in this business, so
Archer says, and was pretty thoroughly posted on airplane construction
and mechanics. How far into the science these Scout studies took him you
may be better able to tell than I, but that they aroused a very
intelligent interest in these things there is no doubt. In the early
period of his service in the Motorcycle Corps he was attached to the
airdrome at Calleaux where he was very popular with the “fledglings.” He
tried, indeed, to get into that branch of the service, but without
success. Archer says that Slade’s practical knowledge of gas engines was
very thorough, he was something of an expert on cycle motors, and seemed
perfectly familiar with the type used in aircraft.
I suspect he must have learned a good deal in the hours of leave which
he spent among the fliers who were learning in the airdrome at Calleaux.
Certain it is that he hobnobbed with them in their barracks, for Archer
says that Slade told him of fixing their Victrola and varying the
monotony of the single record which they had by boring a hole in it a
little off centre, producing a “wierrd kind of music,” as Archer said.
For this ingenious novelty Slade was taken up with one of the
instructors and permitted to “handle the broomstick” all by himself.
Whatever other experiences he had among that fraternal company he did
not communicate to Archer, nor to any one else apparently.
[Illustration: ROUGH SKETCH OF THE ROAD TO PEVY.]
And so we find him in the big barbed wire enclosure at Azoudange, stolid
and silent, with an uncertain quantity of more or less superficial
knowledge of aeronautics in his towhead, and all the reckless courage of
a heaven-born adventurer.
It was characteristic of Slade that he did not let the guards nor even
his fellow prisoners know that he understood German and could speak it
fairly well. “What’s the use of telling anything you don’t have to
tell?” he said to Archer. “And that was Slady all overr,” Archer
remarked. So vivid were these little things he told me of his friend
that sometimes I almost felt as if I had known him and I certainly
wished that I could have seen him.
Well, a week or so before this stormy night Slade heard a German major
who was known among the prisoners by the martial name of Bottle-nose
talking to another officer about the quiet sector across the lines where
the Americans were playing baseball and having concerts. He listened
with ears which would have done credit to a startled hare.
Within two days he knew that preparations were on foot for a surprise
attack upon a very large scale; that the Germans were planning to take
advantage of the embarrassed condition of communications behind the
American lines and the supposed difficulties of observation. Thus bad
weather may sometimes be turned to good account. From the confines of
his spacious prison he could see the dimmed lights upon the canal near
by and hear the voices which told him that barges were passing along
toward La Garde, bound for the front in French Lorraine.
On the day before this culminating storm, the wire which enclosed the
prison camp and which had been dead for some time (owing, it was said,
to the scarcity of fuel and impairment of generating machinery), was
electrified, and that very night the entire guard was marched away, save
for a few old men and cripples who did “stretch” duty[3]. Archer has it
from Slade that one of these, an old German with snow white hair, limped
back and forth on crutches outside the wires, covering his alloted
distance of a couple of hundred yards or more in a steady downpour, and
was shot in the morning because he had collapsed in his tracks.
I leave you to imagine the effect that all these portentous movements
and preparations must have produced in the mind of a prisoner who must
needs watch them and be impotent to do anything. The fact that the big
prison camp was so near the border and the battle line, where these
hurried preparations were intensive, was enough to distress the soul of
a patriot. “Slady was all nutty about it,” Archer said.
Late in the afternoon of that memorable day, Slade watched several
German officers, intent upon their observations through a powerful field
glass. They were evidently watching the observation balloon to which I
have already referred. Slade was required to hold an umbrella over the
head of “Herr General” while he studied the tiny object which bobbed in
the distance.
They were troubled about this little speck for it had an eye—an eye in a
long tube, just like their own, which could see a very long way. And the
final number of their program of preparation was yet to come. If they
were going to get the troops from Pfalzburg through before morning they
would have to begin these movements before dark.
“Ich wuensche sein verdammter cable wuerdc zerbrechen,” said Herr
General; which meant that he wished the cable of the balloon would
break.
If they had waited a little longer they would have had the satisfaction
of seeing this aerial eavesdropper hauled down in fear of that very
catastrophe. But instead they discussed the possibility of spearing[4]
the thing by airplane.
Herr General said that no airplane could go out in such weather.
Major Von Something-or-other insisted that it could—that the Germans
could do anything.
The upshot of it was that they sent Slade with a message written in
German to the telegraph station in the commandant’s quarters. Slade read
it on the way and saw that it was a despatch to the great German
airdrome near Dossenheim requesting that a skillful flier with rocket
equipment be sent at once to the prison camp. Scarcely had he delivered
it into the hands of the operator when the young major followed him to
make sure that it had been sent. Slade returned to the leaky barracks
where he lived and on the way “bunked plunk into Bottle-nose,” as he
said, “and had to salute him and say I was sorry.”
From which I take it that Slade’s mind was wool-gathering. I have often
wished that I knew his thoughts in reference to his actions. I have
sometimes felt that if I could have seen him I might have pierced his
inpenetrable stolidness and reserve. These things that I am telling you
in a fairly orderly way leaked out of him, as it were, in his subsequent
chats with Archer. The nurses here have told me something of Slade’s own
talk, but it was fragmentary and unsatisfactory. The more I know of him,
the more I wish I could have met him. He was a sort of stormy petrel of
the service, and because he “talked clumsy, sorrt of,” as Archer puts
it, and said very little at that, he seems to have acquired rather more
the reputation of an adventurer than that of a patriot. But if Archer
knew anything to his friend’s discredit, he has not told it to me, and
probably would not do so since his friend is dead. Very likely he knew
of nothing.
But to get back to Slade. What thought he had in mind on that momentous
rainy afternoon, who shall say? He told Archer that he sat down in his
barracks and wrote half a dozen notes, all in the same phraseology.
“Did you ever see any of Slade’s handwriting?” it occurred to me to ask.
“Surre. Why?”
“Have you any of it now?”
“Nope,” said Archer; “he didn’t botherr about letterrs. Why?”
“I just wondered,” I replied; “I think I may have seen his handwriting.”
“Maybe back in Bridgeboro, hey?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Go on with the story.”
“Well,” said Archer, “as near as I can rememberr, this is what he
wrote—half a dozen notes—all the same:
“The Germans are massing from Champrey as far east as the
mountains. They are going to attack tomorrow. This is to let
you know. They are going to advance in close formation.”
Having written these notes, Archer says Slade told him he went out and
picked up as many stones. There was some string which had come around
packages sent to prisoners from the American Red Cross, and with this he
bound each note to a stone. On a junk heap near the barracks he had
often noticed certain stiff, rusty pieces of heavy wire turned into eyes
at one end. They were two feet or so long and he had always supposed
them to be old ramrods from rifles or muskets. He picked out half a
dozen of these, tied the eye ends together with a piece of string and
hung them about his neck so that they depended against his back and
under his jacket and trousers. The stones he distributed in his pockets.
Then he went to a sordid little shack where languished a certain French
soldier, Lauzerne by name, whom he knew and liked. Here is a time when I
should like to know just what he said. But at least I know what Lauzerne
said. Slade asked him if he would be willing to help him in a certain
matter that night “if things came around right.” Lauzerne asked what it
was, for, though presumably of French impulsiveness and generosity, he
was a cautious poilu. Slade told him (“I suppose in that stupid drawl of
his,” Archer observes) that if a certain German airplane should make a
landing on the grounds that night he hoped to go away in it and advise
the allies of their peril.
“Ziss ees—what you say—crazee!” exclaimed Lauzerne.
To which Slade replied that all he wanted Lauzerne to do was to turn the
propeller for him, but that he wasn’t sure of anything yet.
We have it on his own authority that Lauzerne looked at him with dismay
for full half a minute and that Slade said, “What’s the matter with
you?”
Then it was that Lauzerne threw his hands into the air, his fingers
spread wide, and uttered the national exclamation of France, more
eloquent than the Marseillaise:
“Oi, la, la! Oi, la, la!”
-----
Footnote 2:
The supreme and final test for an airman before he enters upon his
regular war duties.
Footnote 3:
A condition in which a number of guards around the enclosure being
removed, those remaining must lengthen their patrols in order to cover
the ground.
Footnote 4:
Approaching a balloon in an airplane and puncturing it with a rocket.