If Slade had any suspicion that “Monsieur le Capitaine” was directly
interested in the great gun which was concealed thereabout, he did not
say so to old Grigou and his daughter. They, at least, knew nothing of
any such gun in their neighborhood, but they told him of frightful
explosions which made their cottage “shiver.” They seemed to think that
such things were common along the entire front and they knew of houses
which had been shaken down by distant explosions. Slade asked them if
they had heard any of these explosions lately and they told him they had
not—not for several days. “Only he shake his head—vere wise—so,” Jeanne
volunteered.
He said afterward that he had counted on the noise of the monster to
guide him to it but that he supposed his visit was in an interval of
disuse caused by the ever-increasing scarcity of ammunition.
Early in the morning he set forth with a little snack which Jeanne had
prepared for him and following the woods path was soon lost in the hilly
forest. I have myself seen this forest at its edge and how any human
being could hope to locate a particular object in it is beyond my
comprehension. The woods path which ends near Grigou’s cottage follows a
meandering course over the densely wooded summit and winding down the
western slope develops into the single street of Talois village. I
should say it might be five miles over the hill as the crow flies and
more than ten by the path.
It was long after dark when Slade returned, very weary and apparently
discouraged. He had seen nothing but dead men in the woods, he said. Not
a sign was there of any open way along which artillery might be
hauled—not so much as a wagon track. He was in a very ill mood and
Jeanne tried to console him by saying that as long as he tried it was
not disgrace if he failed.
“Sure it’s a disgrace if you fail,” he answered in a surly tone.
“I tell him ziss is no—what you call—deesgrace.”
Then he made one of those puzzling observations of his—the kind which
Archer was always quoting.
“You can’t disgrace yourself either without disgracing a lot of other
people. If you could it wouldn’t be so bad. That’s why I wouldn’t want
the place where I live disgraced—or the whole air service, either.”
Jeanne apparently did not appreciate this line of reasoning and probably
thought Slade rather a queer fellow.
The next morning at daylight he set forth again and returned long after
dark, dog tired. He had wandered over the west slope of the hill down as
far as the village where he had talked with Germans, making his
inquiries as plain as he dared. The sum total of the information he had
gained was just nothing at all and he returned with the gloomy
realization of the needle-in-the-haystack character of his quest. I
suspect that Slade was not a good loser—perhaps because he was not
accustomed to losing.
“I got one more day,” he said doggedly.
The next day he carried his explorations whither his fancy took him and
hoped for luck. This hill, so called, is in reality a sort of jumble of
hill. Deep gullies intervened to balk the traveller and the undergrowth
and secondary slopes, if I may so call them, make an orderly exploration
quite impossible. I do not see how it could have been otherwise. That he
should stumble upon a piece of artillery in all that litter of
wilderness would have been sheer luck. What he sought was a road of
communication between this unknown monster and the village. But there
was no road. He returned a little after dark in great dejection.
“He will not spik to me,” said the girl. “I tell him _so_—they are
crazee—how you say—to send him. He will not even spik to me—or drink ze
wine.”
Slade was always punctilious in obeying orders; he had the dogged,
mechanical submission of a German in that regard. He went out in the
field, hauled the plane about, tied a strip of surgical bandage, which
he always carried, to the end of a stick, and held it up to note the
direction of the wind.
It was at that moment that the cheerful, sympathetic French girl, seeing
his dejection, uttered the simple words which were to have such
momentous consequences.
“See—wait—I will gif you ze souvenir—so you remember.”
I do not know whether Slade’s mood permitted him a smile in memory of
Archibald Archer at the mention of that familiar word. But I do know
that he answered (rather rudely, I am afraid) that he didn’t want any
souvenir.
I like to think how great things are sometimes brought about by the turn
of a hair—how Columbus, for instance, all but turned back in the fateful
moment when land was sighted. And I pay my tribute here to that frail,
brave, cheerful little maid in devastated France, who all unknowingly
muzzled that big gun forever. And here’s to the Boy Scouts of America
too and all their precious lore of woodcraft.
In another five seconds Tom Slade would have been flying southward,
defeated, chagrined, ashamed. But Jeanne came running out in her pretty,
cheery way and handed him a charred splinter of wood.
“You know how I tell you ze house it shake when ziss beeg noise—here—you
see? Ziss come zen out of ze sky where you fly up. You take ziss to
Americ’ for souvenir—you see? Vive l’Amerique!”
Tom Slade held this splintered fragment down by the tiny bulb which
illumined his compass.
“It flew here, you mean?”
“Out of ze sky—so.”
There was a moment’s pause, she told me—a fateful moment.
“I never knew that grew here; it’s swamp larch.” He smelled of it and
scratched it with his fingers. “Hmmm.” It was charred and left his
fingers black and sticky. “Hmmm,” he said again, “it’s swamp larch all
right—resin just like cedar—hmmm.” He held it close under the little
light and examined it more carefully. He turned it this way and that. He
scraped off some of the charred, pungent resin, and sniffed it. He bit a
splinter off and chewed it a little. “Hmm.”
She was pleased at his interest and said something which I think was
very pretty. “Now you will forgive me about ze picture?”
Tom Slade, of the Flying Corps, turned off the tiny light, shut off his
gas, and climbed down from his seat. It was the airman who climbed into
that machine. It was the scout who got out of it.
“I know where the gun is now,” he said simply. “A minute ago you said,
‘Vive l’Amerique!’ Now _I_ say, ‘Vive la France! Vive Jeanne!’”
I am glad that at least he had the gallantry to say that.