printed. It would be passing the decent bounds of descriptive writing to
put it in black and white. It is sufficient to say that some minutes
later the Hun prised the floor-boards up with his bayonet, and Boudru,
from that moment, without warning, or leaving any trace, disappeared
from the world. He returned in the fullness of time. And this was the
way of it.
For the hundredth time that day, the Hun had gone into the bedroom to
look out of the bulgy bedroom window. Fear began to come over him
without any warning, and he was thinking of little Boudru down there in
the dark. The thing within him that served him for a heart was beating
queer rhythms ... the beating sounded like a regiment of British
Infantry on the march.
"Look," said he to the housewife, "look out on the road. Do you see
soldiers?"
The good woman, distraught between suspense and hope for her little one,
who had been missing for six long hours, blinked away a tear on her
lashes and peered through the diamond panes.
No one was to be seen. But between three and four in the morning the
first faint champing of marching feet could be heard and the Hun came
down from the bedroom looking as pale as death. He opened the door and
stood there listening. The insolent crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy
nail-studded service boots came nearer, and a khaki column appeared on
the winding road. The housewife, whose aching eyes had searched the road
for Boudru all day, saw them too.
"Look," she cried, "look! The English soldiers are coming. Do you see?"
_They were coming!_
The man from Stettin rushed up to the bedroom, and jumped into the oak
chest.
"Not tell the English! Not tell!"
Fifteen or twenty soldiers were to be heard grounding rifles and
throwing off their equipment in front of the house.
Entered here Sergeant Stansfield, and shouted gaily to the housewife,
but the moment he looked into her pale and worn face he understood that
some sorrow had befallen her. Before he could hold her she had slid
silently down on the floor, at his feet, and covered her face.
"Ah,--ah,--ah! O God, help and pity me! They have taken my little son,"
she cried.
At this moment a soldier rushed in at the door. "I think there is a man
who looks like a Boche trying to get out of the bedroom window!" he
said. "Will you come, Sergeant? Quick!"
The sergeant went quickly, and returned with some men with fixed
bayonets and led them up to the bedroom: He told them to break in. The
man was on his knees, with his horrible hands lifted up in supplication.
The soldiers kicked the man up and made him go downstairs into the front
room.
"See!" said a soldier, who held his bayonet ready, "there is blood on
his sleeve." The Hun cursed within his heart.
"It was none of my shedding," he whimpered.
"I had not said so," returned the sergeant quietly.
"We are here to find that out. Perhaps you know something about the lost
child?"
"I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!" the Hun answered fervently.
At that moment there was a sort of earthquake upstairs, a clash of
falling bricks and slates, a crashing pandemonium that sent everyone's
heart to his mouth. A shell had struck the roof. Then the ceiling above
bulged like a stuffed sack and burst in a cloud of pink-yellow dust.
Something dropped with a dead thud fair and square in the centre of the
fine oak refectory table. Sergeant Stansfield bent forward, looked, and
then started back. He gave a cry and turned sickly white. On the table
lay _the little huddled form of Boudru_. The morning sun that had been
paling the candles in the sconces, struck the golden hair and staring
eyes, that had a few hours before, held all the spring-time; struck,
too, a heavy scarlet patch on the little overall, as the sergeant
tenderly turned the little body over....
"Oh! God of Mercy!... How horrible! A bayonet through his heart ..." he
muttered. The Hun's sleeve spotted with blood came back to his mind, and
filled him with blind, unreasoning rage.
"You swine," he said. "I'll----"
The man from Stettin suddenly felt his heart stop beating. He stood
petrified for a moment; then he clutched the table with one feverish
movement; and when he saw the pale cherub face, he became covered at
once with perspiration. Then the terror, which had paralyzed him a
second or so, gave way to the wild instinct of self-preservation. He hit
out wildly with both arms, kicking out at the same moment. In a second
he was out in the hall, and had locked the door behind him. A door
opened somewhere outside, and they heard him running down the garden.
Some of the men snatched their rifles, rushed to the window, and threw
it open. Four or five shots rang out simultaneously, and the stench of
cordite was wafted back on the sharp morning air as the man from Stettin
fell in a crumpled heap, his face buried in a clump of violets. The
sergeant went into the garden.
"Hum!" he remarked after an instant, "dead, did you say? He's as dead as
a doornail ... anyway, it's nothing to do with us! If ever a soul went
straight to hell," he muttered to himself, "it was that red devil's."
IV
THE STORY OF A SPY
Donald McNab, private (and distinguished ornament) of the London
Regiment, leaned his elbows on the little oak table in the bar of the
"Three Nuns," and eyed me with withering contempt. From a corner of the
settle I stared--with a wholly unsuccessful attempt to look
unconcerned--at a quaint old painting of Sergeant Broughton who first
taught Englishmen to box scientifically. When the great are really
wrathful it ill becomes pigmy people to jabber or argue. So I waited
with bent head and respectful silence to which the passing moods of such
an erratic genius are entitled.
When McNab and I had met an hour or so before we had been on the most
friendly terms. We had both ordered our pint of beer, filled our pipes,
and retired to a corner in the bar parlour feeling at peace with the
world--barring of course the German Empire and their allied forces.
Everything, in fact, made for peace and goodwill between us; yet,
because I had spoken with some levity about our incomplete spy system,
McNab's wrath had come down on my head like the proverbial "hundred of
bricks."
"It seems strange," I had remarked to him, "that the Huns can always
forestall our most carefully-prepared plans through their almost perfect
spy system. Our fellows must be dead stupid at the game. Why aren't
these German vipers ever nabbed?"
"Dead stupid!" McNab had exclaimed, after gazing at me for a minute in
dazed stupefaction at my unspeakable temerity in challenging the
proficiency of the British Army. "Get under your Blanco pot!"
Now, when McNab used this picturesque term to me I knew that there was a
storm brewing. He only used the expression when he wished to be
particularly "cutting," and I received his reproof with, I hope, a
correct realisation of my own insignificance.
The old world had rolled along for another twenty minutes ere McNab
shifted his legs, cleared his throat, and interfered with what was left
in his tankard.
"I wonder," he said musingly to himself, "if these poor yobs over here
will ever know the true 'istory of this bloomin' war?" Then back came a
smile to his face and he shook his head, indicating, perhaps, that he
had answered the question to his complete satisfaction. The joyousness
at the thought of some of those unrecorded slices of military history
caused my friend to drop again into a contemplative mood, and he
started humming a little tune under his breath:
Hello! Hello! who's your lady friend?
Who's the little girlie by your side?
I've seen you with a girl or two,
Oh, oh, oh, I AM surprised at you!
Hello! Hello! what's your little game?
Don't you think it's time your ways to mend?
That's not the gal I saw you with at Brighton,
Oh, oh, oh, who's your lady friend?
"If it is not a rude question," I ventured, after another few moments,
"did you ever see the capture of a German spy over in France, Mr.
McNab?"
"Who are you getting at ... trying to pull my leg?" he demanded, with
increased suspicion.
"Come, come," I laughed, "let us agree to differ about our--er--inferior
spy system."
"Superior," he insisted.
I surrendered before the gleam of his eye. Fool that I had been, ever to
have imagined that I could conquer McNab's steely glance!
"Superior then, if you prefer it."
McNab's eyes, which had glared with indignation, lost their fire and
assumed their normal expression of calm and relentless despotism, and
the red flag of agitated displeasure disappeared from his tanned face.
He seized with alacrity the olive branch (also another tankard of beer)
which I held out to him.
"The history of the British Army," he observed as he blew at his ale
"'minds me of a married soldier's letter to his wife. The most
interesting parts are all left out ... do you get me?"
McNab tilted his hat at a perilous angle on one side of his head, and
thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
"Touching upon some of those unwritten exploits of the Army," I darkly
hinted: "I'll bet I can find a brilliant historiographer not a hundred
miles away from the 'Three Nuns' who could dictate a few of 'em that
would fairly make the _Daily Mail_ turn green with envy--eh, McNab?"
"I know the brilliant bloke you mean," my friend conceded modestly,
"though calling me 'orrible names like that would brand you as a swanker
or a gentleman wot had left his manners in the hall in any barrack room
from here to Hindustan. When we were resting at Quality Street near
Loos, for example"--he paused a moment, and with a playful dig from his
banana-like thumb nearly knocked me on the floor--"why, name of a dog!
There you have a case in point!"
"A case of a swanker?"
"A case of one of those spies. We caught the perisher. Begad, we did!"
McNab put the red-hot end of a cigarette into his mouth, stammered with
wrath in a medley of international profanity at the unexpected warmth,
and would not be comforted till his favourite barmaid had placed a
slice of cooling lemon on his tongue.
"My first introduction to the entertaining sport of spy tracking," he
mumbled, "was at Loos, where I was sent with several hundred other chaps
to help push the Huns out of the Hohenzollern Redoubt. At the present
moment, as you know (or ought to by this time), I am a military genius
'ighly thought of at the War Office, a strategist Kitchener has his eye
on, and a model soldier quoted every day by my colonel as a shining
light to the regiment. But of course you must remember that a few months
ago I was practically a yob at the game, and now of the fame (and the
extreme shyness that seems to come with it) of my later avatar.
"We took over some temporary billets at a shady little spot not far
behind the British trenches which was then known as 'Quality Street,'"
he continued, "and, as I not unreasonably supposed that the smartest and
most intelligent bloke in the regiment would be sent to 'elp the
colonel, I requested the Dog's Leg (Anglice--lance-corporal) to point
out his abode to me.
"'Ask the Quarter Bloke over along in the end cottage, old sport,' he
said with a grin, 'he'll be most 'appy, I've no doubt to personally
conduct to the old pot-an-pan, and while you're there just ask him to
let you have that jug of defaulters' extra milk for me.' It was a
'wheeze' among the boys to send a poor innocent bloke off for this
milk. The point of the 'wheeze' is in the fact that as defaulters are
chaps doing jankers (Anglice--punishment) they are hardly likely to get
any extra milk dished out to them. I did not see the joke at first; but
on application to that autocratic beggar--Quartermaster King was his
tally--he fully explained things to me in that witheringly sarcastic
manner peculiar to sergeant-majors and quarter-blokes.
"'Defaulter's milk?' echoed he. 'Why, you lop-eared leper, you've got
corpuscular fool wrote as plain as a motor lorry number all over your
ugly face. If I wasn't sure that you was not more of a born idiot than a
ruddy knave, etc., etc., etc., I would have you slick in mush before
your feet could touch the ground!'
"Much crest-fallen, and terribly mortified, I returned to the cottage
which had been selected to shelter me noble self, only to be met there
with a volley of derisive laughter, repeated demands for the jug of
Defaulter's milk, and questions about the quarter bloke's health.
"'A cat may look at a _King_,' said the Dog's Leg, and fell backwards
out of the open window at his own joke, breaking 'is collar bone. One
should never forget, at every time, as the Scriptures say, that pride
allus goes before a fall, and that all the King's 'orses and all the
King's men can't not even pick 'im up again!"
My murmured compliments on his amazing aptness in the knowledge of Holy
Writ were checked by a sudden discovery that my best silver cigarette
case had vanished from the table.
"Which of you civilians has stole the gentleman's silver case?"
This question, uttered not in the friendliest possible terms, was
addressed to a young gentleman with a very pimply face, and
kaleidoscopic coloured socks, of the genus Slacker, who had suddenly
found the painting of Sergeant Broughton an object of absorbing
interest.
This inquiry meeting with no response from the Slimy Slacker, (to use
McNab's expressive name for him), he gave utterance to a sigh of
resignation.
"I believe, sir," suggested an old gentleman who was warming his toes at
the fire, "that you deposited the gentleman's cigarette
case--er--inadvertently in your own pocket!"
"Why, strike me crimson!" cried McNab, diving his beef-steakish hands
into his tunic pockets. "Why, so I did! I'm the biggest giddy fool at
that kind of wheeze that ever lived. It's a knock-out, ain't it? Never
mind--'_honi soit qui mal y_ eighteen pence,' as the French poet bloke
said!
"It so happened that on the very next day our old man's servant went
sick, and in spite of my extreme youth and innocence, I was selected
from the crowd to fill the vacant billet. And then it was that the
Colonel realised that fate had dropped a heaven-sent blessing on his
knees in the shape of a--well, in the shape of an ingenious bloke like
me. He lifted up his voice in thanksgiving for that the British Army
held warriors so wise, and then looked up his whiskey and cigars.
"At one end of Quality Street there stood a Y.M.C.A. hut. On the next
day when I pushed the door of this Bun-Wallah's paradise open, the first
person I saw was old Tommy--Tommy wot had fought up and down the
Godforsaken veldt with me for three years on end, Tommy who had always
the knack of droppin' out of the blue from nowhere.
"'Well, 'ere's a go!' he cried dropping half a cup of boiling coffee
down another chap's neck, as 'is smile broadened, 'it's a 'ell of a time
since I struck you.'
"I saw the dawn of recognition on his ugly mug; and I could have guessed
to a word the joyful expressions of welcome that were springing to his
lips."
McNab paused.
"Quite so," I prompted, seeing the change that took place in my friend's
face.
"I am afraid I should have guessed dead wrong," continued McNab with his
eyes downcast. "However, what he did spit out was: 'strike me up a
gum-tree if it ain't the bloke what borrowed 'alf a crown off me when I
was quartered at the "Shot" in '98.'
"I was pretty well worked up at this remark; but I said to him with
quiet dignity: 'I believe, Tommy, that I sent it back by post.'
"'You sent me back a threepenny bit,' he says, with a very naughty word,
'and told me it was my 'alf crown worn down.'
"'Come, come, old chum!' I laughed, 'let us forget all about that, such
a thing is really only "very small beer" indeed.'
"'Humph!' grunted Tommy. 'It was a blighted small 'alf crown, too.'
"'Sit down,' he continued, clutching me by the wrist and dragging me
into a vacant chair. It was not in champagne, of course, that we drank
each other's health. But you can always trust old Tommy to have a little
pig's ear hidden somewhere. 'What's the matter with a bottle of Bass?'
says he to me. ''Tis against ole Kitchener's wishes,' says I. 'Of course
it is,' says Tommy; 'and wot is more, it's the ruin of dear ole
England--God bless it!' 'Rot yar innards--let's go and 'ave some,' I
says bein' always one to reason out matters to a logical conclusion.
"There is a large slag heap in the neighbourhood of Quality Street where
the French and Germans met early in the war. They wanted each other's
company exclusive on this here heap. Well, they met, and fell to arguin'
whether the French should 'ave it as a mounting for a few machine-guns
or the Germans should keep it for sniping purposes. Hence the air was
soon clouded with shells, shrapnel, and all other deadly diseases.
Seeing the children had got over their shyness in this little fright and
had really played quite a good game, this particular slag heap was
bearing abundant fruit in the way of trophies. Furthermore, Tommy
suggested that it would be indeed nice if we could make our way there
one evening and collect a few German helmets, bayonets, and other
curiosities for the old people at home.
"As a result of our confabulation we found ourselves about ten that
night crawling up a hedge towards the slag heap in question. When we did
get there we went and lost our blighted selves. How long we were
crawling and twisting about that Gawd-forsaken heap or which way our
lines lay I'd no means of knowing. But poor old Tommy rolled down a bank
with an armful of German helmets and other trophies, making a noise like
a fire engine galloping up the Mile End Road. Then suddenly one of those
German flares fell on the ground about a hundred yards away, and all
things, including Tommy and I, shone out in their naked splendour. Then
you can take it from me we _did_ see where we were.
"I thought Tommy was having a bad attack of epileptic fits for a moment,
till it transpired that he had flumped down on a dead Boche in
endeavouring to escape the searching glare of the flare. After the
thing had burnt its giddy self out Tommy crawled crab-fashion over into
the providential cutting in which I had taken shelter. He was wiping his
forehead with the back of his hand, and he looked very solemn and rather
frightened. 'Did you spot that chap crouching in that V-shaped cutting
down there?' he said. 'I thought he was one of our old crowd at first,
but what with that cursed light and the excitement I could not be
certain.'
"'I saw nothing.'
"'Just before the flare went up I noticed a flash lamp; one of those
things used to give signals with. I got an awful turn then.'
"'Rot,' I said: 'I don't believe a word of it.'
"'Do you mind coming over this way then?' said Tommy.
"In the pitch-black darkness, guided by Tommy, I stumbled up a path
which I'll swear was all of a one in three gradient. We came out upon a
little ledge overlooking what we now knew to be the German lines. Tommy
motioned me to keep my eye on the V-shaped cutting in the slag below us.
"'I think the beggar is down in the extreme angle of the V,' he
whispered as he crawled beside me.
"Then I overbalanced, fell over the ridge, and dropped clean on to
something soft and yielding below. Red specks dotted the blackness
before my eyes for a few moments as I bounced on the hard stones. I
jumped up with a jerk and spun round to find, blocking my path, a
menacing figure regarding me over the barrel of a Browning pistol. In
the other hand he held an electric torch.
"'Don't move,' he said in good English.
"His tone was quiet and crisp, an' his face showed me that 'e was out
for blood.
"'I have it in my mind almost to be sorry for you, British Tommy,' he
said calmly, 'You know too much. I am going to decide on the best way to
dis----'
"He got as far as 'dis'--when something leaped out of the shadows and he
was hurled back with a sudden rush. It was Tommy, and he swung his heavy
Boche rifle and stove the man down with terrific force. There was a
dreadful half-choked, whimper and then silence.
"Tommy stood regarding the still form with a bleached face. He then bent
over him, but without touching, looked up at me.
"'Saved a firing party the trouble,' he said. 'He's dead all right.'
"He straightened himself up.
"'What the devil shall we do with it, McNab?'
"''Tis a spy he was,' I answered, 'and it's ten to one that he has a
code or some kind of papers tucked away on him. Just run through his
pockets before we leave him.'
"'No, no,' Tommy said, 'I can't touch him he'll haunt me, sure.'
"The man was quite dead when I rolled him over. I took from his pockets
a leather bound code book, English, French and German bank notes, and a
gold stop watch.
"'No good stayin' here,' said Tommy, 'I vote we crawl back and talk it
over. This is a crummy old place.'
"When we got back to billets and examined our loot, it was a sure enough
German spy's code book, and it contained a rough sketch of all our
trenches and what not, quite sufficient to use in conjunction with the
squared map he carried. The book was printed in German.
"'You know,' said Tommy, 'we must report this to the Colonel as soon as
we can.'
"'An' be collared for being out at night without a pass first thing? Not
much,' said I.
"'We must hide this loot. They may search us when they find him out
there,' said Tommy, looking to the future.
"'Hide away, then,' I said, but my mind was elsewhere, for all of a
sudden, I had been hit in the eye with a brilliant inspiration.
"The following morning, when I took our ole man his early tea, I found
'im sitting up in bed sucking a fat cigar and bewilderin' himself with
the brigade orders.
"'I beg your pardon, sir!' I says, 'but may I have a word with you?'
"'You know, McNab,' he says, screwing his eye-glass into his eye with a
smile--'you know that I am at any hour of the day or night glad to have
a talk to a man of understanding like yourself.'
"'That's good of you, Colonel,' I says, 'to meet me with such kindness.
But I think, as you say, that I have just a little more than the usual
share of intellec' under my hat, but what I have come to lay before your
notice is this: I have discovered why the Boche guns always register on
our artillery positions the moment they are taken up, and the source of
the leakage of information.'
"'Oh, you have, have you?' says he.
"''Tis a spy, sir,' says I, 'and it's signalling to the Huns he was when
I caught him.'
"'Another blessed spy legend,' he yawned, 'I really thought that you,
McNab, would be the last man to become afflicted with the spy craze. I
have arrested half a dozen so-called spies this week already only to
find they were harmless rustics--'
"'I beg your pardon, Colonel,' I returns, with that chilling dignity
which has at times even made generals falter, 'but there is no legend
about Private McNab's spy.'
"'Then trot out your spy,' he says, 'and I'll come and look 'im over.'
"'I not only caught him red-handed at his nefarious trafficking (them
was the very words I used) ... I not only caught the blighter, but I put
his light out.'
"'What?' he shouts, clutching my arm, 'you killed the poor brute.'
"'_We_ did--me and Tommy, and we found this here code in his fob,' said
I.
"With that I threw the little code book on the bed, and the old man,
after looking through it carefully (he could read German, our old man),
got out of bed and started dressing in a businesslike way.
"'Shut that door, McNab,' says he, 'and let me have the benefit of your
invaluable advice.'
"All of a sudden I was struck with a brilliant inspiration, and I let
the old Colonel have it for what it was worth.
"As it happened the old man thought a mighty lot of it--such a lot, in
fact, that by one o'clock that day he started to imagine the inspiration
had come from his own fertile brain. He liked to think that it was his,
and, Lord bless 'im, I don't grudge him the glory.
"After laying our heads together, the Colonel went back to the artillery
lines and spent three hours talking to the Battery Major, and I looted a
dozen three-pounder rockets of var-i-ous colours out of the stores. In
the afternoon the Colonel called all his officers together, and kept the
blighted motorcycle dispatch riders busy buzzing up and down the line
with messages, till late in the evening.
"'I have called you gentlemen together,' he says to his officer, 'in
order to ask you to corporate with me. I shall fire some rockets from
the slag heap to-night about ten o'clock. On the first of these signals
the Germans will open a very heavy cannonade on our trenches. I'll
trouble you to have your men all in the dug-outs, and under cover at a
quarter to ten!'