"I will tell her, sir," said Horace.
"You will also inform the school to-morrow about Deschamps," the master continued. "It is a matter of pride to Beaufays, I feel, that Belgium's first wounded boy hero should be a lad from our own school. And so, good-bye!"
"Good-bye, sir; good-bye, Dr. Mallorbes," responded Horace.
He hesitated a moment, as though he would have said something more, then plunged across the fields, as the master had bidden him, back to the little village of Beaufays.
The two men watched him for a moment, until his figure was lost in the shadows of the wood on the other side of the field, then set their faces for Liége and—it might be—death.
"I am a good deal disturbed," the doctor began, as they swung out upon the road, "by your suggestion that the Germans possess the exact range of our forts. Where could they get the information?"
"Spies," the master answered. "Belgium is honeycombed with them, has been for years. You know—all the world knows—that Germany spends millions of marks yearly on her secret service system and nearly all her agents are military spies. The exact location of our forts cannot be hidden. It is not a secret. They are plain to see. What is easier for a spy than to search the neighborhood of a fort thoroughly, perhaps on a Sunday morning walk, to find some well-hidden position for a gun of a certain caliber, and to calculate, to the last inch, the exact distance of that position from the fort? It is simplicity itself."
"What of that," said the doctor, "when the gun itself is not there?"
"But when the gun is there!" the master retorted. "When the invasion is accomplished, think of the advantage which such information gives! There is no need to send out scouting parties to bring back estimates of distances; there is no need to waste energy, time, and ammunition in trial shots, during which time the battery might be subjected to fire from the guns of the fort. None of that. Secretly and silently, probably during the night or behind a screen of cavalry, a howitzer may be dragged up to the place selected by the spy and marked in detail on a large scale map. The officer commanding the battery knows the exact direction in which the fort bears and has already worked out the exact angle of elevation for the range. He has nothing to do but to order the aim and elevation and to fire, knowing, in advance, that his shells can fall nowhere but on the fort itself. It is not marksmanship, it is mathematics."
