“What word?”
“That word! You know—that word.”
“Doña?”
“The other one: the one that begins with l and has four letters!”
XIII
IN THE STREET OF THE SPY
The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked with the Belgian colours in concentric circles—black, white, red) turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,” the Commissaire announced in pantomime.
Just five minutes before we had rushed directly under a battery of heavy French guns blazing away like furnaces. I did not know they were French guns—although the accent was marked!—until the Commissaire told me; but then he knew every battery, every cantonment, every airdrome, and every hospital in that little bit of Belgium behind the Yser lines which is still free from the invaders. As we passed the battery, a wave of sulphur had engulfed us, the glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, and that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, had rushed us down the winding Flemish road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and grazing the metallic flanks of lumbering British motor lorries, their canvas sides splashed with Flanders mud, on their way down to the lines. He had rushed us over a little canal where two or three soldiers were fishing sleepily, in spite of the noise of the bombardment. He had dashed us alongside a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long avenue of stunted willows, across an acre of barbed-wire entanglements, and into the town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the splashing sunlight which had just followed the customary morning shower, its claret-red roofs burnished like the morocco binding of old books.
We stepped stiffly from the car on to the slippery cobblestones and stared about us.