“What arre you doing herre?” Archer says he finally managed to ask, “in a Hun——”
“I’m standing here,” said Slade in a dry way which Archer says was characteristic of him. “Help me lift out this bag of sand, will you? There isn’t any time to talk. I escaped in this thing from the prison camp at Azoudange. They sent away pretty near the whole guard. They’re goin’ to attack. They didn’t know I knew anything about aviation. Hurry—you’ll have to sit there.”
“What became of the fellerr that went up afterr you back therre?” Archer asked.
“He had to go down,” said Slady dryly; “on account of the weather. Hurry up. I’ve been hanging over you waiting for you to show me a place to light, but you never would and that’s just like you. It wasn’t till you got stuck, just as I knew you would, and moved your light all around that I got a good squint. Chuck it out—quick.”
Archer climbed the step and looked into the cosy little car of a German Albatross, two-seater fighting plane. Throwing his light about, he saw in a quick glance the luxurious seat of the pilot and the plainer one for the accompanying flier—a heavy bag of sand lashed upon it. He saw the compass, the altimétre, the revolution counter, and something which he said looked like a shade roller all wound round with oilskin.
“Don’t touch that,” Slade warned as Archer’s souvenir-loving fingers lingered about it; “its the rolling-map—it shows a lot of things behind the German lines.”
Archer climbed into the car, the floor of which was covered with water like a leaky boat, and threw the bag from the seat he was to occupy.
“You might have had sense enough to know you could never get anywheres in the flat country tonight,” Slade told him. “Why didn’t you follow the Marne ridge?”
“’Cause I didn’t know about it,” Archer confessed frankly.
“Where are you going—to Paris?”
“Yes, or the nearest point of communication.”
“Good I picked you up,” said Slade.
Archer said he was so “flabberrgasted” at this almost miraculous meeting with Slade that it was some minutes before he realized the significance of all that had occurred. “You couldn’t make Slady talk,” he told me. “He’d only say what was necessary and even then he was kind of clumsy telling things. That was why he never botherred much with girrls, I guess. Maybe that’s why they neverr botherred with him.”
“Maybe one did bother with him and you didn’t know anything about it,” I suggested.
“Nix,” said Archer, with great decision.
Then he went on to tell me at some length much that he himself did not learn until afterward, and even then extracted from his hero much as a dentist draws teeth. “I had to give him gas to get anything out of him,” he said.
It was a very remarkable story, and I will tell it now.
One night about a month before this Slade, on his motorcycle, had been carrying a message from headquarters at Louzanne to a point some twenty miles distant when his machine ran into a shell hole near the village of La Pavin. This village was held by the French under constant menace from the enemy.
The hole was very deep and Slade’s head striking a part of his machine as he fell, he was stunned and lay unconscious in the ragged excavation for what he afterwards judged must have been several hours.
When he regained consciousness he found himself in a predicament which must have struck horror even to such a stolid nature as his. There he lay upon the wreck of his machine in a stifling atmosphere of gasolene. Where he was he could not imagine at first but he was thoughtful enough not to strike a match to light his acetylene searchlight which, moreover, as he later found, was broken.
Presently as he was able to gather his wits, he remembered what had happened, but why the sickening fumes of gasolene should permeate the place he could not guess until, feeling about above him, he discovered the appalling cause of this condition. The shell hole was completely closed by a hard, irregular surface which felt warm to the touch.
I leave you to imagine his feelings. He told Archer that he knew his consciousness was but temporary. “I knew I’d faint any minute,” he said. Yet he displayed enough of his characteristic calmness to reflect that this complete closing of the hole could not have been of long duration or he would be dead already. Whatever happened must have happened within a very few minutes, he thought.
“That was just like Slady,” Archer said, as he told me about it. “He neverr got excited. He always just sat down and thought what was the best thing to do next.”
Yet I think he must have been somewhat unnerved then. In any case, he felt of his gasolene tank and found that the feed pipe had been wrenched away; not so much as a drop of gasolene was there left in it. The slightest spark in that horrible, dark prison would have resulted in a death more terrible than any which the ingenious Huns could have devised.
Again Slade felt of the warm, hard surface above him and ran his fingers in the interstices which seemed straight and regular. The surface was of a warmth much greater than the stifling warmth of his prison, like a warm radiator.
His head began to pound and he suffered from a straining feeling about his eyes, which was ominous, as an army surgeon has since told me. Yet with the few remaining minutes of life which apparently remained to him, Tom Slade crouched upon the wreck of his machine and thought.
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.
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.
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.
“Did you ever see any of Slade’s handwriting?” it occurred to me to ask.
“Surre. Why?”
“Have you any of it now?”
“Nope,” said Archer; “he didn’t botherr about letterrs. Why?”
“I just wondered,” I replied; “I think I may have seen his handwriting.”
“Maybe back in Bridgeboro, hey?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Go on with the story.”
“Well,” said Archer, “as near as I can rememberr, this is what he wrote—half a dozen notes—all the same:
“The Germans are massing from Champrey as far east as the mountains. They are going to attack tomorrow. This is to let you know. They are going to advance in close formation.”
Having written these notes, Archer says Slade told him he went out and picked up as many stones. There was some string which had come around packages sent to prisoners from the American Red Cross, and with this he bound each note to a stone. On a junk heap near the barracks he had often noticed certain stiff, rusty pieces of heavy wire turned into eyes at one end. They were two feet or so long and he had always supposed them to be old ramrods from rifles or muskets. He picked out half a dozen of these, tied the eye ends together with a piece of string and hung them about his neck so that they depended against his back and under his jacket and trousers. The stones he distributed in his pockets.
Then he went to a sordid little shack where languished a certain French soldier, Lauzerne by name, whom he knew and liked. Here is a time when I should like to know just what he said. But at least I know what Lauzerne said. Slade asked him if he would be willing to help him in a certain matter that night “if things came around right.” Lauzerne asked what it was, for, though presumably of French impulsiveness and generosity, he was a cautious poilu. Slade told him (“I suppose in that stupid drawl of his,” Archer observes) that if a certain German airplane should make a landing on the grounds that night he hoped to go away in it and advise the allies of their peril.
“Ziss ees—what you say—crazee!” exclaimed Lauzerne.
To which Slade replied that all he wanted Lauzerne to do was to turn the propeller for him, but that he wasn’t sure of anything yet.
We have it on his own authority that Lauzerne looked at him with dismay for full half a minute and that Slade said, “What’s the matter with you?”
Then it was that Lauzerne threw his hands into the air, his fingers spread wide, and uttered the national exclamation of France, more eloquent than the Marseillaise:
“Oi, la, la! Oi, la, la!”
2. The supreme and final test for an airman before he enters upon his regular war duties.
3. A condition in which a number of guards around the enclosure being removed, those remaining must lengthen their patrols in order to cover the ground.
4. Approaching a balloon in an airplane and puncturing it with a rocket.