The following evening—it was the 20th day of March—I started for France after the dark fell. I drove Ivery’s big closed car, and within sat its owner, bound and gagged, as others had sat before him on the same errand. Geordie Hamilton and Amos were his companions. From what Blenkiron had himself discovered and from the papers seized in the Pink Chalet I had full details of the road and its mysterious stages. It was like the journey of a mad dream. In a back street of a little town I would exchange passwords with a nameless figure and be given instructions. At a wayside inn at an appointed hour a voice speaking a thick German would advise that this bridge or that railway crossing had been cleared. At a hamlet among pine woods an unknown man would clamber up beside me and take me past a sentry-post. Smooth as clockwork was the machine, till in the dawn of a spring morning I found myself dropping into a broad valley through little orchards just beginning to blossom, and I knew that I was in France. After that, Blenkiron’s own arrangements began, and soon I was drinking coffee with a young lieutenant of Chasseurs, and had taken the gag from Ivery’s mouth. The bluecoats looked curiously at the man in the green ulster whose face was the colour of clay and who lit cigarette from cigarette with a shaky hand.
The lieutenant rang up a General of Division who knew all about us. At his headquarters I explained my purpose, and he telegraphed to an Army Headquarters for a permission which was granted. It was not for nothing that in January I had seen certain great personages in Paris, and that Blenkiron had wired ahead of me to prepare the way. Here I handed over Ivery and his guard, for I wanted them to proceed to Amiens under French supervision, well knowing that the men of that great army are not used to let slip what they once hold.
It was a morning of clear spring sunlight when we breakfasted in that little red-roofed town among vineyards with a shining river looping at our feet. The General of Division was an Algerian veteran with a brush of grizzled hair, whose eye kept wandering to a map on the wall where pins and stretched thread made a spider’s web.
“Any news from the north?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “But the attack comes soon. It will be against our army in Champagne.” With a lean finger he pointed out the enemy dispositions.
“Why not against the British?” I asked. With a knife and fork I made a right angle and put a salt dish in the centre. “That is the German concentration. They can so mass that we do not know which side of the angle they will strike till the blow falls.”
“It is true,” he replied. “But consider. For the enemy to attack towards the Somme would be to fight over many miles of an old battle-ground where all is still desert and every yard of which you British know. In Champagne at a bound he might enter unbroken country. It is a long and difficult road to Amiens, but not so long to Chilons. Such is the view of Pétain. Does it convince you?”
“The reasoning is good. Nevertheless he will strike at Amiens, and I think he will begin today.”
He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Nous verrons. You are obstinate, my general, like all your excellent countrymen.”
But as I left his headquarters an aide-de-camp handed him a message on a pink slip. He read it, and turned to me with a grave face.