He said afterward that he had counted on the noise of the monster to guide him to it but that he supposed his visit was in an interval of disuse caused by the ever-increasing scarcity of ammunition.
Early in the morning he set forth with a little snack which Jeanne had prepared for him and following the woods path was soon lost in the hilly forest. I have myself seen this forest at its edge and how any human being could hope to locate a particular object in it is beyond my comprehension. The woods path which ends near Grigou’s cottage follows a meandering course over the densely wooded summit and winding down the western slope develops into the single street of Talois village. I should say it might be five miles over the hill as the crow flies and more than ten by the path.
It was long after dark when Slade returned, very weary and apparently discouraged. He had seen nothing but dead men in the woods, he said. Not a sign was there of any open way along which artillery might be hauled—not so much as a wagon track. He was in a very ill mood and Jeanne tried to console him by saying that as long as he tried it was not disgrace if he failed.
“Sure it’s a disgrace if you fail,” he answered in a surly tone.
“I tell him ziss is no—what you call—deesgrace.”
Then he made one of those puzzling observations of his—the kind which Archer was always quoting.
“You can’t disgrace yourself either without disgracing a lot of other people. If you could it wouldn’t be so bad. That’s why I wouldn’t want the place where I live disgraced—or the whole air service, either.”
Jeanne apparently did not appreciate this line of reasoning and probably thought Slade rather a queer fellow.
The next morning at daylight he set forth again and returned long after dark, dog tired. He had wandered over the west slope of the hill down as far as the village where he had talked with Germans, making his inquiries as plain as he dared. The sum total of the information he had gained was just nothing at all and he returned with the gloomy realization of the needle-in-the-haystack character of his quest. I suspect that Slade was not a good loser—perhaps because he was not accustomed to losing.
“I got one more day,” he said doggedly.
The next day he carried his explorations whither his fancy took him and hoped for luck. This hill, so called, is in reality a sort of jumble of hill. Deep gullies intervened to balk the traveller and the undergrowth and secondary slopes, if I may so call them, make an orderly exploration quite impossible. I do not see how it could have been otherwise. That he should stumble upon a piece of artillery in all that litter of wilderness would have been sheer luck. What he sought was a road of communication between this unknown monster and the village. But there was no road. He returned a little after dark in great dejection.
“He will not spik to me,” said the girl. “I tell him so—they are crazee—how you say—to send him. He will not even spik to me—or drink ze wine.”
Slade was always punctilious in obeying orders; he had the dogged, mechanical submission of a German in that regard. He went out in the field, hauled the plane about, tied a strip of surgical bandage, which he always carried, to the end of a stick, and held it up to note the direction of the wind.
It was at that moment that the cheerful, sympathetic French girl, seeing his dejection, uttered the simple words which were to have such momentous consequences.
“See—wait—I will gif you ze souvenir—so you remember.”
I do not know whether Slade’s mood permitted him a smile in memory of Archibald Archer at the mention of that familiar word. But I do know that he answered (rather rudely, I am afraid) that he didn’t want any souvenir.
I like to think how great things are sometimes brought about by the turn of a hair—how Columbus, for instance, all but turned back in the fateful moment when land was sighted. And I pay my tribute here to that frail, brave, cheerful little maid in devastated France, who all unknowingly muzzled that big gun forever. And here’s to the Boy Scouts of America too and all their precious lore of woodcraft.
In another five seconds Tom Slade would have been flying southward, defeated, chagrined, ashamed. But Jeanne came running out in her pretty, cheery way and handed him a charred splinter of wood.
“You know how I tell you ze house it shake when ziss beeg noise—here—you see? Ziss come zen out of ze sky where you fly up. You take ziss to Americ’ for souvenir—you see? Vive l’Amerique!”
Tom Slade held this splintered fragment down by the tiny bulb which illumined his compass.
“It flew here, you mean?”
“Out of ze sky—so.”
There was a moment’s pause, she told me—a fateful moment.
“I never knew that grew here; it’s swamp larch.” He smelled of it and scratched it with his fingers. “Hmmm.” It was charred and left his fingers black and sticky. “Hmmm,” he said again, “it’s swamp larch all right—resin just like cedar—hmmm.” He held it close under the little light and examined it more carefully. He turned it this way and that. He scraped off some of the charred, pungent resin, and sniffed it. He bit a splinter off and chewed it a little. “Hmm.”
She was pleased at his interest and said something which I think was very pretty. “Now you will forgive me about ze picture?”
Tom Slade, of the Flying Corps, turned off the tiny light, shut off his gas, and climbed down from his seat. It was the airman who climbed into that machine. It was the scout who got out of it.
“I know where the gun is now,” he said simply. “A minute ago you said, ‘Vive l’Amerique!’ Now I say, ‘Vive la France! Vive Jeanne!’”
I am glad that at least he had the gallantry to say that.