The car ran up a side road and halted before a little hut. Captain
O'Neill alighted.
"We bad the misfortune, in the attack this morning," he said, "to lose one of our most useful people. The enemy had employed him, recently, in excavating certain of their great underground stations, which I have mentioned; but last night they had him in a front-line trench, which we took this morning. He has volunteered to return to his post, if we can place him behind the lines, but, I regret, he is in no condition for further service. Therefore, we must send a substitute."
Captain O'Neill led the way into a candle lighted room, where a man was lying in bed. Civilian clothes—the rags of a French refugee from the other side of the lines—hung on the wall beside him. The man was very weak, with hands which drooped from the wrist as he half sat up as the captain entered. The man's name, the captain informed the lads, was Jean Brosseau.
Captain O'Neill produced a map, a duplicate of the ones which the lads had been given several days before. The man in bed now detailed to them the exact nature and purpose of the markings and spots. It was all lined off into little squares and oblongs, each described with a letter and number. These were for the guiding of the guns—because, for each tiny square on the German side of the lines, there was a battery or a couple of batteries behind the French front, whose business was solely to sweep that square with high explosive shells, gas shells and shrapnel, when the battle was on.
To escape those shells, the Germans again were burrowing, Brosseau pointed out. Some places they had burrowed far too deep to be endangered by shells; but their ways of egress were not known. These were covered with camouflage.
Hal took down the shirt from the wall; vermin crawled in it. Captain O'Neill had not made the mistake of having it steamed or washed or disinfected; vermin and filth of underground communications soiled the rags of Jean Brosseau's jacket, his trousers, his cap. Hal, without ceremony, stripped off his uniform and underclothes. His body was clean and without calluses; the cleanliness was soon remedied. Then he dressed, to give him all the time possible to become accustomed to the garments of a French citizen in the hands of the enemy.
The reverberations of the guns outside had increased mightily; they seemed to double again to topmost intensity. Captain O'Neill frowned a little as he heard them and glanced at his watch. A motorcycle clattered up and stopped outside; a man knocked at the door, delivered a message to Captain O'Neill, and departed. Captain O'Neill read the message and tore it to bits. Hal and Chester waited without question; but the sick man had to ask:
"We have lost ground, sir?"
"No, no! All goes well—very well, except for us here," Captain
O'Neill replied. "The time is moved forward; that is all."
He bent again over the map.