Bates grinned widely.
“It’s a lot more work, but it does mean better grub, sir,” he confided.
“Very well. Don’t mention it to anyone, and I’ll see what can be done. It shouldn’t be difficult, since you’ve earned the first stripe already.”
Martin found his brigadier at the mess. A few minutes’ conversation with the great man led him to a greater in the person of the divisional general. Yet a few more minutes of earnest talk, and he was in a car, bound for General Grant’s headquarters, which he reached late that night. It was long after midnight when the two retired, and the son’s face was almost as worn and care-lined as the father’s ere the discussion ended.
Few problems have been so baffling and none more dangerous to the Allied armies in France than the German spy system. It was so perfect before the war, every possible combination of circumstances had been foreseen and provided against so fully, that the most thorough hunting out and ruthless punishment of enemy agents has failed to crush the organization. The snake has been scotched, but not killed. Its venom is still potent. Every officer on the staff and many senior regimental officers have been astounded time and again by the completeness and up-to-date nature of the information possessed by the Germans. Surprise attacks planned with the utmost secrecy have found enemy trenches held by packed reserves and swarming with additional machine-guns. Newly established ammunition dépôts, carefully screened, have been bombed next day by aeroplanes and subjected to high-angle fire. Troop movements by rail over long distances have become known, and their effect discounted. Flanders, in particular, is a plague-spot of espionage which has cost Britain an untold sacrifice of life and an almost immeasurable waste of effort.
Small wonder, then, that Martin’s forehead should be seamed with foreboding. If his suspicions, which his father shared, were justified, the French Intelligence Department would quickly determine the truth, and no power on earth could save Angèle and her mother from a firing party. France knows her peril and stamps it out unflinchingly. Of late, too, the British authorities adopt the same rigorous measures. The spy, man or woman, is shown no mercy.
And now the whirligig of events had placed in Martin’s hands the question of life or death for Mrs. Saumarez and Angèle. It was a loathsome burden. He rebelled against it. During the long run to Paris his very soul writhed at the thought that fate was making him their executioner. He tried to steel his resolution by dwelling on the mischief they might have caused by thinking rather of the gallant comrades laid forever in the soil of France because of their murderous duplicity than of the woman who was once his friend, of the girl whose kisses had once thrilled him to the core. Worst of all, both General Grant and he himself felt some measure of responsibility for their failure to institute a searching inquiry as to Mrs. Saumarez’s whereabouts when war broke out.
But he was distraught and miserable. He had a notion—a well-founded one, as it transpired—that an approving general had recommended him for the Military Cross; but from all appearance he might have expected a letter from the War Office announcing his dismissal from the service.
At last, after a struggle which left him so broken that at a cordon near Paris he was detained several minutes while a sous-officier who did not like his looks communicated with a superior potentate, he made up his mind. Whate’er befell, he would give Angèle and her mother one chance. If they decided to take it, well and good. If not, they must face the cold-eyed inquisition of the Quai d’Orsay.
Luckily, as matters turned out, he elected to call on Mrs. Saumarez first. For one thing, her house in the Rue Henri was not far from a hotel on the Champs Elysées where he was known to the management; for another, he wished to run no risk of being outwitted by Angèle. If she and her mother were guilty of the ineffable infamy of betraying both the country of their nationality and that which sheltered them they must be trapped so effectually as to leave no room for doubt.