There Slade remained, and there he was on the stormy night of his great adventure, which was to prove his brevet flight[[2]], and bring him face to face with his former comrade, Archer.
I suppose you know that Slade had always taken a great interest in aviation. He had a Boy Scout badge for proficiency in this business, so Archer says, and was pretty thoroughly posted on airplane construction and mechanics. How far into the science these Scout studies took him you may be better able to tell than I, but that they aroused a very intelligent interest in these things there is no doubt. In the early period of his service in the Motorcycle Corps he was attached to the airdrome at Calleaux where he was very popular with the “fledglings.” He tried, indeed, to get into that branch of the service, but without success. Archer says that Slade’s practical knowledge of gas engines was very thorough, he was something of an expert on cycle motors, and seemed perfectly familiar with the type used in aircraft.
I suspect he must have learned a good deal in the hours of leave which he spent among the fliers who were learning in the airdrome at Calleaux. Certain it is that he hobnobbed with them in their barracks, for Archer says that Slade told him of fixing their Victrola and varying the monotony of the single record which they had by boring a hole in it a little off centre, producing a “wierrd kind of music,” as Archer said. For this ingenious novelty Slade was taken up with one of the instructors and permitted to “handle the broomstick” all by himself. Whatever other experiences he had among that fraternal company he did not communicate to Archer, nor to any one else apparently.
ROUGH SKETCH OF THE ROAD TO PEVY.
And so we find him in the big barbed wire enclosure at Azoudange, stolid and silent, with an uncertain quantity of more or less superficial knowledge of aeronautics in his towhead, and all the reckless courage of a heaven-born adventurer.
It was characteristic of Slade that he did not let the guards nor even his fellow prisoners know that he understood German and could speak it fairly well. “What’s the use of telling anything you don’t have to tell?” he said to Archer. “And that was Slady all overr,” Archer remarked. So vivid were these little things he told me of his friend that sometimes I almost felt as if I had known him and I certainly wished that I could have seen him.
Well, a week or so before this stormy night Slade heard a German major who was known among the prisoners by the martial name of Bottle-nose talking to another officer about the quiet sector across the lines where the Americans were playing baseball and having concerts. He listened with ears which would have done credit to a startled hare.
Within two days he knew that preparations were on foot for a surprise attack upon a very large scale; that the Germans were planning to take advantage of the embarrassed condition of communications behind the American lines and the supposed difficulties of observation. Thus bad weather may sometimes be turned to good account. From the confines of his spacious prison he could see the dimmed lights upon the canal near by and hear the voices which told him that barges were passing along toward La Garde, bound for the front in French Lorraine.
On the day before this culminating storm, the wire which enclosed the prison camp and which had been dead for some time (owing, it was said, to the scarcity of fuel and impairment of generating machinery), was electrified, and that very night the entire guard was marched away, save for a few old men and cripples who did “stretch” duty[[3]]. Archer has it from Slade that one of these, an old German with snow white hair, limped back and forth on crutches outside the wires, covering his alloted distance of a couple of hundred yards or more in a steady downpour, and was shot in the morning because he had collapsed in his tracks.