I am telling you this not after his own fashion of telling it, as Archer repeated it to me, for evidently Slade had no idea at all of the story possibilities of his own experiences.
The result of his thinking was that with a piece of broken glass from his headlight he hurriedly dug a deep hole in the earth in which he deposited his papers, filling the hole again and smoothing it over. By the sheer power of his will he kept his wits while he was doing it and having finished he had barely the strength to bang with a rock against the hard surface above him.
“What did you think it was?” Archer says he asked him.
“I thought it was a tank,” Slade answered, “and I wasn’t going to take any chances with my messages till I knew for certain everything was all right.” The result proved that this precaution had been a wise one.
I suspect that those few seconds of frantic banging, while he fought a losing battle against his ebbing consciousness, were perhaps the most terrific in all his adventurous career. He told Archer that his head swam and that finally he fell exhausted, struggling like a maniac for each breath he drew, his eyes throbbing madly.
He did not know whether the hard roof actually moved, for everything seemed to be moving now, and he was wavering on the edge of unconsciousness. The last rational thought that he remembered having was that the tank must have been deserted. His leg slipped between the spokes of his wheel, he heard a strange noise, saw a little round light, and thought it was a spark which would ignite the fumes and....
What he really saw as he passed out of that borderland of consciousness was a star in the bright, clear heaven.
They lifted him, limp and all but lifeless, out of that poisoned dungeon and laid him on the cool earth and searched him for his papers. They had taken the little village of La Pavin in a night attack. The huge metal monster which had shut him in stood hard by and when he came to his senses he saw it there, brutal in its power and its ugliness—heartless, irresistible, horrible. For I will tell you on my own account that of all the engines of combat or of locomotion which man has made there is nothing so loathesome in its suggestiveness of soulless cruelty as one of these same monster tanks.
But Herr Von Something-or-other did not find the papers of the messenger, and the messenger only smiled when they asked him about them. They raised the broken motorcycle and looked about beneath it with flashlights. But there were no papers. And so they took the messenger into the village and put him in the little dressing station there and gave him oxygen and used a pulmotor and brought him round. He said afterwards (I mean long afterwards) that the Germans had treated him well, been kind to him, and that he did not believe all the tales of German atrocities which he had heard. He said these Germans seemed like friends. I mention this because he was subsequently accused of professing sympathy for them and came very near to being court-martialled for it. Archer says it was just his blunt sense of common fairness, a notable characteristic of his, and that what he said has reference only to the treatment he received on that particular occasion. In any event, nothing came of it.
Slade was taken, along with some of the defenders of La Pavin, to the big prison camp at Azoudange, on the Marne Canal a few miles east of Nancy. You will remember that as the place from which the balloon observer thought that troops were being sent forward toward the lines. It is in Lorraine, not far from Saarburg.