"Have no fear," said the hunchback as a last piece of advice, "you're as safe with me as you could be with anybody. A poor chap, like I used to be, must know a good bit about the country. I ran away from a circus when I was a boy, so I learned early how to take care of myself. There's one rule—avoid the roads!"
"But an army might camp in the fields."
"At night, perhaps, but by day it is marching and that, not through the fields, but along the roads. In the old days, when men fought with cold steel, one could push troops over rough country and each company could forage for its own food, travel its own road and be ready for fighting when it was time to fight.
"There is nothing like that now. An army is ten times as large. It is fed at regular hours, in regulated companies, on a diet regulated in advance, cooked by motor kitchens supplied by a provision train of a score of heavy motor-trucks which are traveling at a regulated number of miles from a central supply depot.
"As a health measure it cannot be more than a certain number of miles from drinkable water. Even on the march, the ammunition column must be kept in close connection with the guns. It must operate or advance behind a cavalry screen, and, at all times, must be in direct communication with its staff officers. All that means travel on hard roads, at a certain pace, over a certain route, so that a general can know, at any given minute, where every section of his army is to be found. It is that which is in front of us, and we've got to outguess it and outmarch it."
The hunchback had filled his pockets and attended to a number of minor matters as he talked. Now he slipped out of the well and waited for the boy to follow, carefully closing the hole in the well curb after him.
"You're not going to carry that cage all the way to France, surely?" queried Horace in surprise, as he noted that Croquier held the black eagle in his hand.
His companion raised his eyebrows.
"Think you that I am going to donate it for the Germans?"
"Leave it in the tunnel," the boy said; "they'll never find it there."