I leave you to imagine the effect that all these portentous movements and preparations must have produced in the mind of a prisoner who must needs watch them and be impotent to do anything. The fact that the big prison camp was so near the border and the battle line, where these hurried preparations were intensive, was enough to distress the soul of a patriot. “Slady was all nutty about it,” Archer said.
Late in the afternoon of that memorable day, Slade watched several German officers, intent upon their observations through a powerful field glass. They were evidently watching the observation balloon to which I have already referred. Slade was required to hold an umbrella over the head of “Herr General” while he studied the tiny object which bobbed in the distance.
They were troubled about this little speck for it had an eye—an eye in a long tube, just like their own, which could see a very long way. And the final number of their program of preparation was yet to come. If they were going to get the troops from Pfalzburg through before morning they would have to begin these movements before dark.
“Ich wuensche sein verdammter cable wuerdc zerbrechen,” said Herr General; which meant that he wished the cable of the balloon would break.
If they had waited a little longer they would have had the satisfaction of seeing this aerial eavesdropper hauled down in fear of that very catastrophe. But instead they discussed the possibility of spearing[[4]] the thing by airplane.
Herr General said that no airplane could go out in such weather.
Major Von Something-or-other insisted that it could—that the Germans could do anything.
The upshot of it was that they sent Slade with a message written in German to the telegraph station in the commandant’s quarters. Slade read it on the way and saw that it was a despatch to the great German airdrome near Dossenheim requesting that a skillful flier with rocket equipment be sent at once to the prison camp. Scarcely had he delivered it into the hands of the operator when the young major followed him to make sure that it had been sent. Slade returned to the leaky barracks where he lived and on the way “bunked plunk into Bottle-nose,” as he said, “and had to salute him and say I was sorry.”
From which I take it that Slade’s mind was wool-gathering. I have often wished that I knew his thoughts in reference to his actions. I have sometimes felt that if I could have seen him I might have pierced his inpenetrable stolidness and reserve. These things that I am telling you in a fairly orderly way leaked out of him, as it were, in his subsequent chats with Archer. The nurses here have told me something of Slade’s own talk, but it was fragmentary and unsatisfactory. The more I know of him, the more I wish I could have met him. He was a sort of stormy petrel of the service, and because he “talked clumsy, sorrt of,” as Archer puts it, and said very little at that, he seems to have acquired rather more the reputation of an adventurer than that of a patriot. But if Archer knew anything to his friend’s discredit, he has not told it to me, and probably would not do so since his friend is dead. Very likely he knew of nothing.
But to get back to Slade. What thought he had in mind on that momentous rainy afternoon, who shall say? He told Archer that he sat down in his barracks and wrote half a dozen notes, all in the same phraseology.