Sixty hours elapsed before Martin was able to unwrap the puttees from off his stiff legs and cut the laces of boots so caked with mud that he was too weary to untie them. In that time, as the official report put it, “enemy trenches extending from Rue du Bois to Houplines, over a front of nearly three miles, were occupied to an average depth of one thousand yards, and our troops are now consolidating the new territory.”

A bald announcement, indeed! Martin was one of the few who knew what it really meant. He had helped to organize the victory; he could sum up its costs. But this record is not a history of the war, nor even of one young soldier’s share in it. Martin himself has developed a literary style noteworthy for its simple directness. Some day, if he survives, he may tell his own story.

When the last of twelve hundred prisoners had been mustered in the Grande Place of Armentières, when the attacking battalions had been relieved and the reserve artillery was shelling Fritz’s hastily formed gun positions, when the last ambulance wagon of the “special” division had sped over the pavé to the base hospital at Bailleul, Martin thought he was free to go to bed.

As a matter of fact, he was not. Utterly spent, he had thrown himself on a cot and had slept the sleep of complete exhaustion for half an hour, when a brigade major discovered that “Captain Grant” was at liberty, and detailed him for an immediate inquiry. The facts were set forth on Army Form 122: “On the night of the 10th inst. a barrel of rum, delivered at Brigade Dump No. 35, was stolen or mislaid. It was last seen in trench 77. For investigation and report to D.A.Q.M.G. 50th Div.” That barrel of rum will never be seen again, though it was destined to roll through reams of variously numbered army forms during many a week.

But it did not disturb Martin’s slumbers. A brigadier general happened to hear his name given to an orderly.

“Who’s that?” he inquired sharply. “Grant, did you say?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the brigade major.

“Don’t be such a Heaven-condemned idiot!” said the general, or, rather, he used words to that effect. “Grant was all through that push. Find some other fellow.”

Brigade majors are necessarily inhuman. It is nothing to them what a man may have done – they think only of the next job. They are steeled alike to pity and reproach. This one was no exception among the tribe. He merely thumbed a list and said to the orderly:

“Give that chit to Mr. Fortescue.”

So a subaltern began the chase. He smelt the rum through a whole company of Gordons, but the barrel lies hid a fathom deep in the mud of Flanders.

That same afternoon Martin woke up, refreshed in mind and body. He secured a hot bath, “dolled up” in clean clothes, and strolled out to buy some socks from “Madame,” the famous Frenchwoman who has kept her shop open in Armentières throughout three years of shell fire.

A Yorkshire battalion was “standing at ease” in the street while their officers and color sergeants engaged in a wrangle about billets. The regiment had taken part in the “push” and bore the outward and visible signs of that inward grace which had carried them beyond the third line German trench. A lance corporal was playing “Tipperary” on a mouth-organ.

Someone shouted: “Give us ‘Home Fires,’ Jim” – and “Jim” ran a preliminary flourish before Martin recognized the musician.

“Why, if it isn’t Jim Bates!” he cried, advancing with outstretched hand.

The lance corporal drew himself up and saluted. His brown skin reddened as he shook hands, for it is not every day that a staff captain greets one of the rank and file in such democratic fashion.

“I’m main glad te see you, sir,” he said. “I read of your promotion in t’ Messenger, an’ we boys of t’ owd spot were real pleased. We were, an’ all.”

“You’re keeping fit, I see,” and Martin’s eye fell to a pickelhaube tied to the sling of Bates’s rifle.

“Pretty well, sir,” grinned Bates. “I nearly had a relapse yesterday when that mine went up. Did ye hear of it?”

“If you mean the one they touched off at L’Epinette Farm, I saw it,” said Martin. “I was at the crossroads at the moment.”

“Well, fancy that, sir! I couldn’t ha’ bin twenty yards from you.”

“Queer things happen in war. Do you remember Mrs. Saumarez’s German chauffeur, a man named Fritz Bauer?”

“Quite well, sir.”

“We caught him in ‘No Man’s Land’ three nights ago. He is a major now.”

Jim was so astonished that his mouth opened, just as it would have done ten years earlier.

“By gum!” he cried. “That takes it! An’ it’s hardly a month since I saw Miss Angèle in Amiens.”

Martin’s pulse quickened. The mouth-organ in Bates’s hand brought him back at a bound to the night when he had forbidden Jim to play for Angèle’s dancing. And with that memory came another thought. Mrs. Saumarez in Paris – her daughter in Amiens – why this devotion to such nerve centers of the war?

“Are you sure?” he said. “You would hardly recognize her. She is ten years older – a woman, not a child.”

Bates laughed. He dropped his voice.

“She was always a bit owd-fashioned, sir. I’m not mistakken. It kem about this way. It was her, right enough. Our colonel’s shover fell sick, so I took on the car for a week. One day I was waitin’ outside the Hotel dew Nord at Amiens when a French Red Cross auto drove up, an’ out stepped Miss Angèle. I twigged her at once. I’d know them eyes of hers anywheres. She hopped into the hotel, walkin’ like a ballet-dancer. Hooiver, I goes up to her shover an’ sez: ‘Pardonnay moy, but ain’t that Mees Angèle Saumarez?’ He talked a lot – these Frenchies always do – but I med out he didn’t understand. So I parlay-vooed some more, and soon I got the hang of things. She’s married now, an’ I have her new name an’ address in my kit-bag. But I remember ’em, all right. I can’t pronounce ’em, but I can spell ’em.”

And Lance Corporal Bates spelled: “La Comtesse Barthélemi de Saint-Ivoy, 2 bis, Impasse Fautet, Rue Blanche, Paris.”

“It looks funny,” went on Jim anxiously, “but it’s just as her shover wrote it.”

Martin affected to treat this information lightly.

“I’m exceedingly glad I came across you,” he said. “How would you like to be a sergeant, Jim?”

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.

He was also fortunate in the fact that his soldier chauffeur, when given the choice, decided to wait and drive him to the Rue Henri. The man was candid as to his own plans for the evening.

“When I put the car up I’ll have a hot bath and go to bed, sir,” he said. “I’ve not had five hours’ sleep straight on end during the past three weeks, an’ I know wot’ll happen if I start hittin’ it up around these bullyvards. Me for the feathers at nine o’clock! So, if you don’t mind, sir – ”

Martin knew what the man meant. He wanted to be kept busy. One hour of enforced liberty implied the risk of meeting some hilarious comrades. Even in Paris, strict as the police regulations may be, Britons from the front are able to sit up late, and the parties are seldom “dry.”

So officer and man removed some of the marks of a long journey, ate a good meal, and about eight o’clock arrived at Mrs. Saumarez’s house. Life might be convivial enough inside, but the place looked deserted, almost forbidding, externally.

Indeed, Martin hesitated before pressing an electric bell and consulted a notebook to verify the street and number given him by the subaltern on the night von Struben was captured. But he had not erred. His memory never failed. There could be no doubt but that his special gift in this direction had been responsible for a rapid promotion, since military training, on the mental side, depends largely on a letter-perfect accuracy of recollection.

When he rang, however, the door opened at once. A bareheaded man in civilian attire, but looking most unlike a domestic, held aside a pair of heavy curtains which shut out the least ray of light from the hall.

“Entrez, monsieur,” he said in reply to Martin, after a sharp glance at the car and its driver.

Martin heard a latch click behind him. He passed on, to find himself before a sergeant of police seated at a table. Three policemen stood near.

“Your name and rank, monsieur?” said this official.

Martin, though surprised, almost startled, by these preliminaries, answered promptly. The sergeant nodded to one of his aides.

“Take this gentleman upstairs,” he said.

“Is there any mistake?” inquired Martin. “I have come here to visit Mrs. Saumarez.”

“No mistake,” said the sergeant. “Follow that man, monsieur.”

Assured now that some dramatic and wholly unexpected development had taken place, Martin tried to gather his wits as he mounted to the first floor. There, in a shuttered drawing-room, he confronted a shrewd-looking man in mufti, to whom his guide handed a written slip sent by the sergeant. Evidently, this was an official of some importance.

“Shall I speak English, Captain Grant?” he said, thrusting aside a pile of documents and clearing a space on the table at which he was busy.

“Well,” said Martin, smiling, “I imagine that your English is better than my French.”

He sat on a chair indicated by the Frenchman. He put no questions. He guessed he was in the presence of a tragedy.

“Is Mrs. Saumarez a friend of yours?” began the stranger.

“Yes, in a sense.”

“Have you seen her recently?”

“Not for ten years.”

Obviously, this answer was disconcerting. It was evident, too, that Martin’s name was not on a typed list which the other man had scanned with a quick eye. Martin determined to clear up an involved situation.

“I take it that you are connected with the police department?” he said. “Well, I have come from the British front at Armentières to inquire into the uses to which this house has been put. A number of British officers have been entertained here. Our people want to know why.”

He left it at that for the time being, but the Frenchman’s manner became perceptibly more friendly.

“May I examine your papers?” he said.

Martin handed over the bundle of “permis de voyage,” which everyone without exception must possess in order to move about the roads of western France in wartime.

“Ah!” said the official, his air changing now to one of marked relief, “this helps matters greatly. My name is Duchesne, Captain Grant – Gustave Duchesne. I belong to the Bureau de l’Intérieur. So you people also have had your suspicions? There can be no doubt about it – the Baroness von Edelstein was a spy of the worst kind. The mischief that woman did was incalculable. Of course, it was hopeless to look for any real preventive work in England before the war; but we were caught napping here. You see, the widow of a British officer, a lady who had the best of credentials, and whose means were ample, hardly came under review. She kept open house, and had lived in Paris so long that her German origin was completely forgotten. In fact, the merest accident brought about her downfall.”

One of the policemen came in with a written memorandum, which M. Duchesne read.

“Your chauffeur does not give information willingly,” smiled the latter. “The sergeant had to threaten him with arrest before he would describe your journey to-day.”

It was clear that the authorities were taking nothing for granted where Mrs. Saumarez and her visitors were concerned. Martin felt that he had stumbled to the lip of an abyss. At any rate, events were out of his hands now, and for that dispensation he was profoundly thankful.

“I think I ought to tell you what I know of Mrs. Saumarez,” he said. “I don’t wish to do the unfortunate woman an injustice, and my facts are so nebulous – ”

“One moment, Captain Grant,” interposed the Frenchman. “You may feel less constraint if you hear that the Baroness died this morning.”

“Good Heavens!” was Martin’s involuntary cry. “Was she executed?”

“No,” said the other. “She forestalled justice by a couple of hours. The cause of death was heart failure. She was – intemperate. Her daughter was with her at the end.”

“Madame Barthélemi de Saint-Ivoy!”

“You know her, then?”

“I met her in a Yorkshire village at the same time as her mother. The other day, by chance, I ascertained her name and address from one of our village lads who recognized her in Amiens about a month ago.”

“Well, you were about to say – ”

Martin had to put forth a physical effort to regain self-control. He plunged at once into the story of those early years. There was little to tell with regard to Mrs. Saumarez and Angèle. “Fritz Bauer” was the chief personage, and he was now well on his way to a prison camp in England.

Monsieur Duchesne was amused by the map episode in its latest phase.

“And you were so blind that you took no action?” he commented dryly.

“No. We saw, but were invincibly confident. My father sent the map to the Intelligence Department, with which he was connected until 1912, when he was given a command in the North. He and I believe now that someone in Whitehall overlooked the connection between Mrs. Saumarez and an admitted spy. She had left England, and there was so much to do when war broke out.”

“Ah! If only those people in London had written us!”

“Is the affair really so bad?”

“Bad! This wretched creature showed an ingenuity that was devilish. She deceived her own daughter. That is perfectly clear. The girl married a French officer after the Battle of the Marne, and, as we have every reason to believe, thought she had persuaded her mother to break off relations with her German friends. We know now that the baroness, left to her own devices, adopted a method of conveying information to the Boches which almost defied detection. Owing to her knowledge of the British army she was able to chat with your men on a plane of intimacy which no ordinary woman could command. She found out where certain brigades were stationed and what regiments composed them. She heard to what extent battalions were decimated. She knew what types of guns were in use and what improvements were coming along in caliber and range. She was told when men were suddenly recalled from leave, and where they were going. Need I say what deductions the German Staff could make from such facts?”

“But how on earth could she convey the information in time to be of value?”

“Quite easily. There is one weak spot on our frontier – south of the German line. She wrote to an agent in Pontarlier, and this man transmitted her notes across the Swiss frontier. The rest was simple. She was caught by fate, not by us. Years ago she employed a woman from Tinchebrai as a nurse – ”

“Françoise!” broke in Martin.

“Exactly – Françoise Dupont. Well, Madame Dupont died in 1913. But she had spoken of her former mistress to a nephew, and this man, a cripple, is now a Paris postman. He is a sharp-witted peasant, and, as he grew in experience, was promoted gradually to more important districts. Just a week ago he took on this very street, and when he saw the name recalled her aunt’s statements about Mrs. Saumarez. He informed the Sûreté at once. Even then she gave us some trouble. Her letters were printed, not written, and she could post them in out-of-the-way places. However, we trapped her within forty-eight hours. Have you a battery of four 9.2’s hidden in a wood three hundred meters north-west of Pont Ballot?”

Martin was so flabbergasted that he stammered.

“That – is the sort of thing – we don’t discuss – anywhere,” he said.

“Naturally. It happens to be also the sort of thing which Mrs. Saumarez drew out of some too-talkative lieutenant of artillery. Luckily, the fact has not crossed the border. We have the lady’s notepaper and her secret signs, so are taking the liberty to supply the Boches with intelligence more useful to us.”

“Then you haven’t grabbed the Pontarlier man?”

“Not yet. We give him ten days. He has six left. When his time is up, the Germans will have discovered that the wire has been tapped.”

Martin forced the next question.

“What of Madame de Saint-Ivoy?”

“Her case is under consideration. She is working for the Croix Rouge. That is why she was in Amiens. Her husband has been recalled from Verdun. He, by the way, is devoted to her, and she professes to hate all Germans. Thus far her record is clean.”

Martin was glad to get out into the night air, though he had a strange notion that the quietude of the darkened Paris streets was unreal – that the only reality lay yonder where the shells crashed and men burrowed like moles in the earth. His chauffeur saluted.

“Glad to see you, sir,” said the man. “Those blighters wanted to run me in.”

“No. It’s all right. The police are doing good work. Take me to the hotel. I’ll follow your example and go to bed.”

Martin’s voice was weary. He was grateful to Providence that he had been spared the ordeal which faced him when he entered the city. But the strain was heavier than he counted on, and he craved rest, even from tumultuous memories. Before retiring, however, he wrote to Elsie – guardedly, of course – but in sufficient detail that she should understand.

Next morning, making an early start, he guided the car up the Rue Blanche, as the north road could be reached by a slight detour. He saw the Impasse Fautet, and glanced at the drawn blinds of Numéro 2 bis. In one of those rooms, he supposed, Angèle was lying. He had resolved not to seek her out. When the war was over, and he and his wife visited Paris, they could inquire for her. Was she wholly innocent? He hoped so. Somehow, he could not picture her as a spy. She was a disturbing influence, but her nature was not mean. At any rate, her mother’s death would scare her effectually.

It was a fine morning, clear, and not too cold. His spirits rose as the car sped along a good road, after the suburban traffic was left behind. The day’s news was cheering. Verdun was safe, the Armentières “push” was an admitted gain, and the United States had reached the breaking point with Germany. Thank God, all would yet be well, and humanity would arise, blood-stained but triumphant, from the rack of torment on which it had been stretched by Teuton oppression!

“Hit her up!” he said when the car had passed through Crueil, and the next cordon was twenty miles ahead. The chauffeur stepped on the gas, and the pleasant panorama of France flew by like a land glimpsed in dreams.

Every day in far-off Elmsdale Elsie would walk to the White House, or John and Martha would visit the vicarage. If there was no letter, some crumb of comfort could be drawn from its absence. Each morning, in both households, the first haunted glance was at the casualty lists in the newspapers. But none ever spoke of that, and Elsie knew what she never told the old couple – that the thing really to be dreaded was a long white envelope from the War Office, with “O.H.M.S.” stamped across it, for the relatives of fallen officers are warned before the last sad item is printed.

Elsie lived at the vicarage. The Elms was too roomy for herself and her baby boy, another Martin Bolland – such were the names given him at the christening font. So it came to pass that she and the vicar, accompanied by a nurse wheeling a perambulator, came to the White House with Martin’s letter. And, heinous as were Mrs. Saumarez’s faults, unforgivable though her crime, they grieved for her, since her memory in the village had been, for the most part, one of a gracious and dignified woman.

Martha wiped her spectacles after reading the letter. The word “hotel” had a comforting sound.

“It must ha’ bin nice for t’ lad te find hisself in a decent bed for a night,” she said.

Then Elsie’s eyes filled with tears.

“I only wish I had known he was there,” she murmured.

“Why, honey?”

“Because, God help me, on one night, at least, I could have fallen asleep with the consciousness that he was safe!”

She averted her face, and her slight, graceful body shook with an uncontrollable emotion. The vicar was so taken aback by this unlooked-for distress on Elsie’s part that his lips quivered and he dared not speak. But John Bolland’s huge hand rested lightly on the young wife’s shoulder.

“Dinnat fret, lass,” he said. “I feel it i’ me bones that Martin will come back te us. England needs such men, the whole wulld needs ’em, an’ the Lord, in His goodness, will see to it that they’re spared. Sometimes, when things are blackest, I liken mesen unto Job; for Job was a farmer an’ bred stock, an’ he was afflicted more than most. An’ then I remember that the Lord blessed the latter end of Job, who died old and full of days; yet I shall die a broken man if Martin is taken. O Lord, my God, in Thee do I put my trust!”