Michelle nodded quickly. “Lucy, I go to tell you now about my brother. But all the same, though I believe you, promise me you will not tell the old nurse a word of what I say.”
“I promise,” said Lucy, wondering.
An ever-present fear, the look that Madame de la Tour’s glance had held when she first saw Lucy’s face, lighted Michelle’s clear eyes as she bent forward and whispered:
“My brother Armand is a spy for the French army. Once already after the first German victory he made his way into the town.”
“How could he!” breathed Lucy with fast beating heart, sudden glorious possibilities awaking in her thoughts.
“I tell you how,” said Michelle, her voice trembling with pride and emotion at her brother’s gallant exploit. Changed from Michelle’s slow and halting English, the story of Armand de la Tour’s entrance into the captured town was this:
During an attempted night-raid made by a dozen Germans on the French trenches before Château-Plessis, one of the Germans fell, mortally wounded, in no-man’s-land, close to the French lines. Armand, wearing the uniform of a German soldier, leaped out and took the fallen man’s place in the darkness. The German attacking party, with Armand among them, regained their own trenches, the Germans surprised at the sudden pause in the rifle fire from the French side. Dawn found the spy inside the town, having made a perilous way in on pretense of special duty. Once under the shelter of his mother’s roof, he obtained the information he came for and at nightfall returned to the German trenches. Having arranged with his friends on the French side a preconcerted time and place, he went over the top in a pretended attack and reached his own lines in safety.
This feat had led directly to the capture of the town by the French and American troops—the action in which Lucy’s father had been wounded.
There was no chance, so far as the Allies knew, of learning anything in Château-Plessis now, but Michelle and her mother knew that anxiety on their behalf would lead Armand to run great risks to enter the town again, and they dreaded lest he attempt it.
“If he should, Michelle,” cried Lucy, thrilled at this story of unselfish heroism, “he could take back word from Captain Beattie of what they long to know.”