PART ONE—THE SECRET OF THE SCUPPERS
CHAPTER I
Tells briefly of the extraordinary episode which ended his service in the Flying Corps, and gives also a glimpse of his adventurous career.
The reports in the American newspapers of the loss of Tom Slade, aviator, were read by his many admirers and friends with a sense of shock and with feelings of personal bereavement.
Notwithstanding that his former comrades on this side of the water had not seen him for more than two years and knew that the character of his service, as well as his temperament, would be sure to take him where danger was greatest, the accounts of his dramatic end, set forth in cold type, seemed hardly believable.
It is the one familiar name in the casualty lists which brings the war home to one more forcibly than does the loss of a whole division.
But for all that, we received the news pretty calmly and made little fuss until after the great metropolitan dailies had mentioned poor Tom as a national hero. Then we sat up and took notice. When the Tribune phoned to our local Scout Council for a photograph of Tom (“any photo would do,” they said) our own Bulletin published an editorial which would have made poor Tom ashamed to walk down Main Street. And when the Times blazoned forth the heading,
our Bulletin got another photo from Tom’s scout patrol and printed it on the front page. Then the Girls’ Patriotic League got hold of this picture and had it enlarged, and it was displayed for a week or more in the window of Blanchard’s Drug Store.
All we needed was a little nudge from New York and then we paid our tribute proudly and handsomely.
But there was one quarter where pride was lost in a sense of personal sorrow and bereavement, and that was in the local scout troop, of which Tom had been a member and a moving spirit.
I remember very well meeting Roy Blakeley as I stepped off the train that afternoon and, knowing him for the light-hearted youngster that he was, his condition seemed pitiable.
“Have you got a New York paper?” he asked me. “Is it true?”
He had evidently been waiting for the evening papers which came down on the train that I usually take, and as he stood there, trim and spruce in his scout regalia, his hat on the back of his head as usual, and craning his neck for a glimpse of the paper even before I unfolded it, his evident grief went to my heart.
“Yes, it’s true, I’m afraid,” I said.
“You remember about Quentin Roosevelt,” he almost pleaded. “They thought for a while he was saved—taken prisoner——”
“Yes, that hope was justified, Roy,” I told him, “because all that was known for a few days was that he had been in combat with a Hun plane and had not returned. This is different. You’ve got to face the fact and not flinch, just the same as Tom faced the enemy—without flinching.”
I opened the paper and we stood there together in a little recess of the Bridgeboro Station, and while I read the article aloud Roy’s eyes were riveted upon it, as if he almost doubted the truth of my words. In the Temple Camp office in the big bank building across the street hung a service flag with a single star upon it. It was there that Tom Slade had been employed. I noticed how Roy’s eyes wandered over to it every few seconds as if that, since it still hung there, somehow proved the falsity of the published reports.
The War Department confirmed today the Associated Press report of the loss of Thomas Slade, aviator, in the fighting west of Rheims, while in pursuit of an enemy plane. Slade, who was known among his comrades as “Thatchy,” was exceptionally popular and his tragic fate has cast a feeling of gloom throughout the section where he had been lately stationed. His superiors in the Rheims section had no hesitancy in describing his last exploit as unquestionably showing skill and daring of the first order, and his loss will be keenly felt in the service.
Further details of Slade’s end are awaited, but it is feared that little more than the bare facts of this sensational climax of his career will be forthcoming. A strong touch of human interest characterizes his final part in the war by reason of an announcement the youthful flier is said to have made to some of his comrades. When the Germans crossed the Marne in their recent advance a Boche machine dropped bombs upon a Red Cross hospital near Epernay, killing two women nurses. Slade himself was a patient in the hospital at the time, recovering from a slight wound he had received near La Chapelle. He was on the veranda of the little hospital at about dawn, following his restless habit of wandering about within the prescribed limits, and chafing under a convalescence which he believed was needlessly keeping him from service. He saw the Boche plane drop the bombs in the first light of dawn and watched it escape while two French fliers pursued it. One of the nurses, a French girl, had cared for the young American, and his comrades in the hospital are said to have recalled that his sorrow and anger were so great that he expressed the resolve to find and kill this Hun messenger of frightfulness if he lost his own life in doing so.
This resolve was kept in the dramatic combat which ended Slade’s career.
By what means he identified the enemy machine is not known, but he is known to have pursued it till both machines disappeared in the clouds over the enemy lines. The character of the tragic conflict which took place in the concealment of that dizzy height can only be conjectured, but the enemy plane was seen to fall, and the strong wind which had blown up in the west brought it into the little village of La Toi, just within the Allied lines. The machine was a total wreck and though its pilot was quite dead and frightfully mangled from his tremendous fall, it was evident from a wound on his forehead that he had paid the penalty of his cowardly and despicable act before he fell less than five minutes after his fall Slade’s machine was seen to descend, first coasting, then fluttering as if without control, and when still more than a thousand feet in the air it plunged headlong to the ground. Its occupant was seen falling separately and both are known to have struck upon the rocky hillside where the Germans made such stubborn resistance in the fighting of last Tuesday. It is a matter of deep regret that the body of the gallant young American, crushed and mangled as it must have been, did not fall within the American lines.
“He might have——” Roy began in a kind of daze.
“No, my boy,” I told him, “we may as well face the fact. No man in the history of this world ever fell a thousand feet without having his life crushed out. Even if he landed on a haystack instead of a jumble of rocks, it would have killed him. Look here——”
I felt as if I were myself guilty of some form of brutal frightfulness as I pointed to the little supplementary notice upon the substance of which I supposed that the government had based its official confirmation of Tom’s death.
An official report to Washington states that a German aviator, flying over the American lines, dropped the cap which Slade had worn into an American camp. It contained the metal identification disk which the young flier had worn on a cord around his neck, and a small badge linked with it which is thought to signify some honor greatly prized in the ranks of the Boy Scouts of America. With these trinkets was a note in German saying that young Slade had been buried in the village of Pevy and that a cross with his name upon it had been placed over his grave.
I think neither of us spoke for fully a minute. I am sure that Roy could not have trusted himself to speak.
“So you see,” I finally said, “that even the Huns recognized his gallantry and his heroism.”
“They had to,” said Roy with a kind of pitiful defiance.
We strolled up the hill, neither of us speaking.
“You know what badge it was, don’t you?” he asked.
His earnest question and the evident struggle he was having with himself gave me a momentary pang of regret, almost of shame, that I had never taken a very lively interest in the Scouts and especially in this one who had died a hero.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t, Roy,” I confessed.
“It was the Scouts’ Gold Cross,” he said. “It means he risked his life to save a fellow when he was a scout. . . It was a little sick fellow that he saved.”
“His wearing it shows how he always remembered the Scouts, doesn’t it?” I observed weakly, for I hardly knew what to say.
“None of the people here really knew him,” he said, ignoring this remark.
“He was probably of a more retiring nature than you, Roy,” I said. But the pleasantry was lost upon him.
We strolled on up the hill in silence and stood for a moment chatting in front of his home, which is one of our show places here in Bridgeboro.
“Mr. Ellsworth found him down in Barrel Alley,” Roy said; “he was a hoodlum. After he got to be a scout he went ahead of us all. Even Mr. Temple had to admit it—and you know how kind of grouchy—as you might say—Mr. Temple is sometimes.”
I nodded, smiling.
In a general way, I did know the story of how John Temple had become interested in the Scouts through the reclamation by them of this hapless orphan, and before I left for France myself (which was on the following Friday), I learned more of the young hero’s history. I have since had reason to regret that I did not look more carefully at the several pictures of the boy which were displayed in Bridgeboro after the news of his death reached us. They were pictures of a Boy Scout, to be sure, and two years makes such a difference in a boy’s appearance that I dare say I would not have recognized the aviator from the stolid-faced, khaki-clad youngster whose photo our local paper reproduced with such vaunting pride.
It was Mr. Ellsworth, that untiring scoutmaster, who told me the story of Tom as far as he knew it. He said that as Tom had been the best all-around hoodlum in town, so he had become the best all-around scout; that it was attributable directly to Tom’s wonderful reformation that Mr. Temple had been drawn, neck and shoulders, as he said, into the scouting movement and had founded and endowed Temple Camp in the Catskills, which I believe has come to be regarded as one of the finest scout camps in the country.
He told me how Tom had left the Scouts to work on a transport; how his ship had been torpedoed and he had been taken aboard a German submarine and incarcerated in a German prison camp. From that point information about him was scanty and contradictory. He had escaped (so Mr. Ellsworth had heard) from the prison camp and somehow had made his way to France where he was next heard from as a motorcycle dispatch rider.
How and when he had got into the Flying Corps Mr. Ellsworth did not know, for he had been heard of as an aviator only a month or two prior to the shocking news of his heroic end.
For a week or two after the news came, the name of this heroic young scout was on every lip, but I must confess that when I went away the thought which lingered with me most persistently was not so much that of the young fellow whose career had been so varied and remarkable but of that comrade of his scouting days who took the young aviator’s loss home to himself with such a sense of personal bereavement. Stouthearted champion as he was of his friend’s prowess, I verily believe that the heart which beat under that trim scout regalia was still buoyed up with a forlorn hope that some belated report might yet prove the government’s authenticated announcement to be false. There was a kind of heroism in this challenge to careful and methodical old Uncle Sam which I am afraid appealed to me more even than did Tom’s exploits and noble sacrifice, and I felt that if I could only do the impossible and assure Roy that his friend still lived and would come home, it would afford me a keener joy than I had ever known.
I cannot for the life of me say what the reason was for Roy’s making a particular confidante and companion of me during the few days that I remained in Bridgeboro. Perhaps his memory of our stroll up the hill together the day the sad news reached town, and the fellowship of sympathy which then sprang up between us, made him regard me as in some special way his friend.
However it was, on the morning that I left home for the long journey which was to mean so much to us both, I found Roy swinging his legs from the railing of my porch waiting, so he explained, to help carry my luggage down to the station. In the stressful days to follow I always remembered him as he looked then—a roguish smile upon his face which had been so clouded with his brave grief, his scout hat on the back of his curly head and the scarf he always wore hanging loosely around his neck. I was quite taken aback by this undeserved attention.
“You said you didn’t know much about the Scouts,” he reminded me. “One thing about them is that a scout has to do a good turn every day, and I just happened to think this would be a good one.
“I hope I may be able to return it some day,” I said, quite overwhelmed.
“Then I’d only have to do another one,” he answered briskly. “You’d only make matters worse.”
“I see,” I laughed, letting him take one of my grips.
So we went down the hill together and I was glad to see that his accustomed buoyancy was gaining the upper hand at last. We did not speak of Tom until the train had actually come to a stop and he handed me my grip.
“As long as you’re going over there,” he said, rather hesitatingly, “maybe you’ll hear more about Tom—how he died, I mean.”
“France is a big place, Roy,” I warned him, “but if I can get any details be sure I’ll remember them to tell you; I’ll remember that I owe you a good turn,” I added.
Thus we parted. And I am afraid, as I said before, that I thought more about Roy on the way over than I did about his dead hero pal. As the great ship made her perilous way in silence and darkness through the danger zone, I thought of the trim figure which had waited for the evening papers at the station on that sorrowful day, of the service flag with its single star hanging in the window across the street, and of this same trim figure, with its brown face and clear eyes and curly hair, swinging its legs from the railing of my porch, waiting to do me a good turn.
I am afraid that I did not think so much about that lonely, rough-made grave in the little village of Pevy in devastated, bleeding France.
CHAPTER II
Tells how I chanced to learn something of Slade’s career and of the circumstance which was destined to send me out of France.
My own adventures as a correspondent on the west front would seem tame enough in comparison with the exploits which I purpose to relate, and I will not weary you with a rehearsal of my experiences and observations, especially since the account of these has appeared from day to day in two of our American newspapers.
I am afraid that amid the roar of battle and with the continual sight of death and bloodshed all about me I gave little thought to the young fellow from my home town in far-off America who had given his life for the great cause. What had seemed glorious and heroic in Bridgeboro was divested of much of its dramatic and noble quality by the sights which I beheld each day. I was present when Arliss, that daring young ace, fell to his death, and I knew, or at least I thought at the time, that no career could have been more adventurous than his and no death so splendid.
I did not, however, forget to make inquiries in responsible quarters about the death of Tom Slade and being for a time in the neighborhood of his final exploit, I was able to gather a few details which amplified and unquestionably confirmed the accounts of his career and death as published in America.
It was not until long afterward that I learned from a very responsible source how Slade had got into the Flying Corps, a matter which interested me greatly, since the last his friends in America had heard of him before the news of his death came, he had been in the Motorcycle Service. This and much other astonishing information I received during my journey in the Alps of which you shall hear the true account. I say true account because it has been published in connection with that frightful journey that I assisted a deserter, a report which has not one word of truth in it.
I purpose, as well as I may, to recount this whole extraordinary business exactly as it unfolded itself to me, rather than to attempt a consecutively ordered narrative; and whatever it may lose in the way of skilfull story-writing, it will at least have the solid advantage of being the plain truth, plainly told. I am quite certain that no one except myself is in a position to tell of this journey and I am equally certain that I would rather die tomorrow than go through again the unspeakable horrors which I experienced.
So much for myself, and I will pick out of all this jumble of amazing happenings with their tragic climax, the episode of my stay in the hospital near Epernay as being a convenient and appropriate starting-point for my tale.
This hospital, as it turned out, was the one where Tom had spent upwards of a month recovering (according to the American newspapers) from a “slight wound.” The “slight wound,” as I learned, had all but killed him. A cruel wound in the head it was, received in an exploit which was only less extraordinary than the one which shortly afterward put an end to his career.
I mean to tell you of this incident as I learned it from the surgeons and nurses, and also of one or two still earlier adventures of the young flyer which I heard of while I was under treatment.
But first I must tell you of an experience of my own which put me in the way of learning these things and laid the foundation, as I might say, for my learning other things.
I was gassed. I have read various accounts of how people act and feel when they are gassed and I have seen an actor in the movies demonstrate these agonies by many graceful contortions, but the only thing that I can remember about the actual occurrence was that my head felt just as one’s foot feels when it is “asleep.” I remember trying to shake my head, just as one shakes his foot.
I suppose I was not gassed very badly or I would not be here now. In the days of my suffering I was told that I had only myself to blame which, of course, was a great consolation to me. I do not know what became of my mask, but I still have my fountain pen and I should like to show it to you. The silver filigree work which covers it is changed to a rich green color, making the whole thing very beautiful and altogether unique. Fritzie did this with his abominable gas. I do not know what kind of gas it was, but I treasure my pen as being a sample of clever artcraft work, made by the Germans—though not made in Germany.
CHAPTER III
Tells how I looked at the Scuppers through a field glass, and of how I resolved on a very hazardous enterprise.
I must tell you in some detail of this experience of my own since, as I said, the whole story hangs upon it.
You will understand that at the time of Tom’s tragic exploit the big bulge in the straining line which the Germans had made in their drive toward the Marne, and which was known as the Marne salient, had been entirely wiped out by the allied forces. The line ran almost straight between Soissons and Rheims with the little village of Pevy, where the Germans had erected the cross, lying a short distance within the enemy lines. So the line remained for some time while Marshal Foch was pressing forward elsewhere.
My first experience of actual warfare was when I joined the boys near Jonchery, prepared to accompany them northward toward the Aisne River. There was not much fighting in that advance. The Germans picked up like a lot of squatters and retreated so fast that twice we lost touch with them altogether, but we had the heroic satisfaction of capturing no end of deserted baggage. I think I never saw so many musical instruments and parrots as they left behind, and, indeed, the love of pets and music which those wretches showed has always been a matter of marvel to me. One of these squawking birds, I remember, was flapping its wings, all bewildered, upon the top of a post, to which (I was told) several British Tommies had been tied and tortured, and shrieking, “Cut their throats, cut their throats!” at the top of its expressionless voice. They are strange people who are so gentle and patient that they can teach these birds as no others can and then can play a tune on the mandolin and then torture a man to death.
After several days of this inglorious marathon race, the Germans made a stand upon the summit of a hill. I understood that our immediate objective was Pevy, which I remembered as the village where Tom’s grave was, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to know that this place must presently fall to our troops and that the grave would be at least on friendly soil.
But Pevy was not to be so easily taken. The hill which confronted us descended in an almost sheer precipice upon the near side and I think I never saw such a rocky chaos as it presented.
My friend, Lieutenant Wells, let me view it through his field glass, and a more depressing, bleak and desolate place I never beheld—a jungle of gray boulders it was, and naked earth, as if the hill had been split open like an apple and one-half taken away.
“That’s where Fritzie mowed us down a while ago, when he was headed for the Marne,” said the lieutenant.
“You mean from the summit?” I asked.
“Yes, our boys tried to scale that stone-yard and stop the advance. We outnumbered them three to one just there, but they held out. Some of us got on top, but it was no use.”
I don’t know what put it into my head unless it was the knowledge that this place was near upon Pevy and west of Rheims, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was the very “rocky hillside” which the American newspaper had mentioned as the place where Tom fell. I remembered the phrase “in the fighting west of Rheims,” and also “the rocky hillside where the Germans put up such a stubborn resistance.”
“Do you suppose that is where Slade, the aviator, fell?” I asked.
“Thatchy?” he queried. “Yes, it is. Just a little to the left,” he added, moving the glass for me. “Do you see two big rocks with points? One a little higher than the others?”
Our detachment had gone on along the road which flanked the hill, for, of course, there was no intention of surmounting the forbidding place, and it was important that we pass out of range of it before the enemy gain the vantage point of the summit.
For half a minute I looked upon the very spot where Slade had fallen—two big, gray rocks somewhat more than midway up that cheerless cliff and I thought of that traveller described in a poem of Scott’s, who died in some remote, forlorn spot—unfriended and alone. The two rocks formed a sort of gutter on the precipitous hill, and a quantity of descending debris had fallen against them, forming a chaotic mass there.
“I suppose he rolled down against those and caught there,” I said, still looking at the place through the glass.
“Guess so,” said the lieutenant, half interested. “They call them the Scuppers. I heard a couple of Signal Corps men saying that the Huns must have found Slade in the Scuppers—God-forsaken looking place, huh?”
I could not speak just then. Of all the lonesome places to die, that gray, cold, forsaken waste seemed the most terrible—a spot more barren and heartless than the sea, and ugly with a kind of brutal ugliness. And that, I reflected, was where Tom Slade of my own home town in far-off America fell to his heroic death. I wondered how long he had lain there and suffered beyond the help of surgeons and nurses.
“He’s buried in Pevy,” I said; “they had the decency to take him there and give him a Christian grave.”
The lieutenant had already taken his glass from me and was moving away. He was not greatly interested in Tom Slade.
“Do you think,” I said, “that if I climbed up there and looked at the place, I could manage to get the rest of the way to the summit and join the detachment before they reach Pevy? I want to be in at the finish.”
“You might do it in a newspaper or in the movies,” he said, for he would never let me forget that I was a fountain-pen warrior.
“Please remember,” said I (for I was getting a little weary of such talk), “that the correspondents have done great work in this war. As for the movies, I’ll show you that I am as good as Douglas Fairbanks himself, for I am going to climb——”
“Scale that dizzy height, you mean,” he taunted; “that’ll sound good in a special article.”
“Indeed!” said I. “Well, then, I am going to ‘scale that dizzy height’ and see where Tom Slade fell, for he came from the little town in Jersey where I belong.”
“You’ll be killed by the Germans,” said he.
“You forget I have my trusty fountain pen with me,” I replied, scathingly.
He tried to dissuade me, saying that when I reached the summit I was just as likely to fall in with the enemy as with our own men and that unless I expected to defeat them single-handed I had better follow the route prescribed by the officers. But I was a free agent in such matters; no charge of desertion or disobedience could be laid against me, and I was resolved that come what might I would take some memento from that lonely spot back to my young friend in America.
Little I thought at the time what that memento would be.
CHAPTER IV
Tells of how I visited the Scuppers, and of the first of two discoveries which I made there.
You are to understand that the road which we had followed from Jonchery appeared from a distance to run straight into this precipitous jungle of rock and broken earth, but a short way from the base it verged to the westward, running through a dense wood and, as our officers were well aware, led up the easy west slope of the hill.
It was thought unlikely that the slight advantage which their precedence up this hill might give them would tempt the Germans to pause and give battle there, for they were running as suburbanites run to catch their trains. But if they should emerge upon the top of this towering cliff before our boys had verged out of range of it into the woods there might be an unhappy story to tell. I did not realize it while I was tramping along rather faster than is my wont, but I knew afterward that this peril had been averted by a pretty narrow calculation on the part of our officers and some pretty good sprinting of the men.
As it turned out, our detachment was well out of range of the height and pushing rapidly westward through the protecting woods when I found myself standing alone in the shadow of the rock-ribbed ascent. A better target one could scarcely imagine, and I reflected on the danger in which I was placing myself for no better reason than a sentimental, perhaps a sort of morbid, desire to see the spot where Tom Slade had fallen.
One advantage I had, and that was the declining sun which flickered the rocks with glints of changing light, and I consoled myself with the thought that it would soon be dusk.
Between myself and the cliff lay an expanse of marshland a quarter of a mile or so in width, I should say, and into this I plunged, wallowing through the mushy undergrowth and stumbling the more because I must keep my eyes fixed upon the summit of the hill.
No sign of life was there upon that frowning cliff, only the little crimson glints, coming and going as the light failed.
Once and again I fancied these to be soldiers, and a particularly steady glare in what seemed to be a clump of foliage troubled me with misgivings lest the light might be reflected from the steel of a machine-gun.
I had thought of carrying a large bunch of swamp growth by way of camouflaging myself, but it was quite difficult enough to move through the swamp without that handicap. Once I got a footing upon something hard and the pressure of my weight sent the other end of it bobbing up out of the mushy scum, and I was startled to see a skeleton leg with a few shreds upon it sticking up and hanging over at the knee in a gruesome manner. A German helmet lay near the skull, which I had trodden upon. As I plodded on the ghastly thing settled itself again into the marsh as if it had been prematurely awakened out of a peaceful slumber.
I was pretty thoroughly drenched when I reached the foot of the hill and it occurred to me that by rolling in the dry earth there I might acquire an appearance conforming to the hue and character of my surroundings. That done, I began my climb.
The ascent was not quite as precipitous as it had looked from a distance, but it was all up and down, the loose earth sliding so in places that I kept slipping back and seemed to make no more progress than a horse on a treadmill. Moreover, there was great danger from descending stones in these places, for the whole land above seemed in process of erosion and one big rock, in the shelter of which I paused to rest, went tumbling away below me leaving me sprawling.
At last, after fifteen or twenty minutes of this strenuous, lose-and-gain progress, I reached the little area of vegetation where the Scuppers, so-called, were located. Here I had a splendid birds-eye view of the road over which we had come and the swamp and the adjacent woods around the west slope of the hill. The ascent, I saw, must be very gradual there, and I realized what I had not realized before, that if our boys were so fortunate as to catch the enemy between themselves and this cliff there would be something else besides stones rolling down. Perhaps that was part of the plan of our officers. They never confided anything to me.
What I was immediately concerned with was the Scuppers themselves. The little oasis of a few square yards in which I stood consisted of a jumble of rock with sparse vegetation poking out between, and a miscellaneous collection of nature’s odds and ends which had struck up a sort of fraternity here like outcasts in some unmolested haunt. Trees which had broken away from above grew at crazy angles, their roots having taken precarious hold upon the soil, and the whole conglomerate mass was held by the two great jagged rocks known as the Scuppers. These rocks, as I could see now, must have been very deeply imbedded and the comparatively small portion of them which protruded from the earth formed a continuous ledge or gutter for some yards, against which all of this distorted natural furniture rested. Perhaps some sailor had first called them the Scuppers, and although on close view they bore no resemblance to the scuppers of a ship, the name was not inappropriate.
In my picnicking and summer rambles I have visited many places with darkly suggestive names—Hell’s Kitchens, Devil’s Punch-bowls, and the like—cosy nooks, as a rule, with nothing more appalling about them than seductive shade and quiet, but here indeed was a spot after Satan’s own heart. In one place a great half-exposed root formed a sort of cave, its drooping tentacles hanging like a bead curtain at the entrance. And the almost horizontal posture of the tree-trunks and the deformed branches of foliage made dim recesses and deathlike nooks. Yet the place was picturesque, too, affording a certain feeling of cosiness and dubious security, perched as it was midway of that torn, naked ascent.
I had scarcely begun my exploration of this curious island, as it might be called, when something crunched beneath my foot. It proved to be a glass disk which I recognized as one of the sort forming the goggles worn by aviators. Part of the metal frame and some heavy material like khaki were attached to it, so I concluded that the goggles had formed a part of the cap (as the newspapers had called it) or, more properly, the mask, used by the fallen airman.
This small find confirmed my own surmise and the lieutenant’s statement that this lonesome, uncanny place was indeed the scene of Slade’s tragic death, and, as I stood there with the fragment in my hand, I thanked Heaven that our boys were even now on their way to take the village of Pevy where the poor remains of the dead American lay. I wondered why the Germans—barbarians that they were—had gone to the trouble and encountered the perils of recovering his maimed body. There is no question that Germans have little spasms of humanity, just as the Anglo Saxons may have spasms of cruelty. And that, I thought, must be the explanation. They did it without thinking!
But what a thing to do. It must have involved risk and no little ingenuity to get Slade’s body up that frightful precipice. It puzzled me to know why they had done it and pretty soon, when I discovered an explanation, it staggered and amazed me. They had done it because—— Oh, I would not let myself think of it—it was incredible....
And I thought of Roy Blakeley, Tom’s friend, who had believed in him, trusted him, worshipped him. How could I go back and tell Roy what I had found?
But I am running a little ahead of my narrative. It is hard to set this matter down in orderly fashion. Even now I feel the cold chill of speechless horror which came over me, in that little dank cave formed by the tree root as I sat there almost stupefied ten or fifteen minutes after my second discovery, of which I must now tell you.
Even now, whenever I smell fresh earth, it takes me back to that dim, ghastly spot and renews the feeling of unutterable dismay and sickening disgust which I felt then.
CHAPTER V
Tells of my second discovery and brings me to the point of startling revelations.
This thing which I had inadvertently stepped on had, I suppose, been a part of the cap, so-called, which the Germans had dropped behind the allied lines along with Slade’s identification disk and the “small badge linked with it which was supposed to signify some honor greatly prized in the ranks of the Boy Scouts of America.” It did not occur to me as strange that the newspaper had called it a cap when in point of fact it was one of those goggle masks sometimes worn by airmen.
The discovery of this broken trifle spurred me to further scrutiny of the place and I groped about in the gathering dusk but without result. There was no sign to show where the aviator had fallen and had it not been for the merest chance I should never have made the discovery which, alas, bore a darker significance than did the innocent little piece of glass which I had crushed under foot.
I was just about to continue my climb up the hill when I noticed one of those great birds which are a common and ghoulish sight in the theatre of war, circling overhead. These sinister creatures will follow a retreating army for miles, intent and undiscouraged, and apparently knowing if it is the purpose of that army to make a stand and fight I have seen them veer away and disappear when some advantageous ground for fighting has been reached and passed. Near Blanzy, where no one dreamed that the retreating foe would give battle, a big flock of them hovered all day waiting for the routed Germans to reach that place and rally on the high ground. And they did not wait in vain. No military plans or probabilities escape them.
Well, I was watching this ungainly harbinger of death as it flopped about, its thin, naked, ugly neck extended in its horrid quest, and wondering if its presence boded ill for our boys or for the foe, when my gaze was drawn to a spot among the upper branches of the tree over which the bird was circling.
This tree, the only one to hold its head up in that desert of deformities, had probably acted as a check and prop for falling material. A mass of tangled brush had sprung up about it and many rocks found a precarious lodgment among its half-exposed roots.
What I noticed in this tree appeared in the dusk to be an area of brown fungus upon the trunk some twenty feet or more from the ground. I probably would not have thought twice about it had I not noticed a loose end of it moving slightly with the breeze, which gave the whole thing an appearance of not belonging there.
Still, I dare say I should have gone my way without further investigation except that this loose end, fluttering like a beckoning signal in that dismal spot, haunted me. I started away and turned back again. The great bird had gone and not a thing was there moving overhead—nothing save this little loose, stirring object, whatever it was, its outline growing dim in the dusk.
Doubtless the mere fact that it moved would have attracted me as I stood in the deathlike gloom of that chaotic jungle, but even as I watched my imagination conjured it into a kind of beckoning finger and I experienced a strange chill, as of apprehension, as it fluttered up there among the branches.
An impulse came upon me to climb the tree and dispel my vague fancies by a closer look at this object. It was not without difficulty that I managed to “shinny” up the trunk, but the lower branches once reached, I was able to pass easily from one to another until I was on a level with the brown object.
I had but to touch it to find that it was no fungus growth at all, but the remnant of a khaki jacket wound so tightly about the trunk that even on this closer inspection it seemed a very part of the tree. It must have been wetted and dried again by much rain and sun, for it was stiff and hard and clung to the bark when I tried to remove it. The part which blew loose was one of the sleeves and as I pulled this in my effort to detach the whole, the brittle, rotted fabric tore and came away like bark. It must have been there for a long time.
At one place, as I passed my hand over it, I encountered a hubble, very hard, and upon working the jacket loose I found this to be a watch in the flap pocket.
You are to suppose that this singular find greatly excited and interested me and it was in a trembling suspense that I carefully detached and dropped the thing to the ground.
How came it there? How long had it been there? I think no relic of a human presence in that cheerless, melancholy spot could have affected me more and started such a train of thoughts as did this rag which a living person had once worn. As to who had worn it, there seemed but one answer—it was the jacket of Tom Slade.
And this supposition I was presently to confirm.
But even before I had reached the ground there appeared to my mind’s eye a picture of the last scene in the venturesome life of the young airman, here in this cheerless jungle, and I shuddered as I thought of it, and of the heroic triumph which preceded his hideous end. I made no doubt that in his frightful fall the jacket had caught upon some sharp branch of the tree and held him, who shall say for how long, suffering—more likely dead. And when the inert, mangled form had become extricated and gone down, this tattered remnant had remained blowing in the wind and rain, marking the spot where he had fallen, until the beating storms had plastered it against the trunk, save for the little moving shred which I had seen. And so the khaki jacket, like everything else which came into that crazy, derelict community, had become a part of it, seeming, as I have said, like a bit of brown fungus on that lonely tree....
CHAPTER VI
Tells of the appalling secret which was revealed to me in the Scuppers and of my decision with regard to it.
I now approach a point in my story where it is difficult for me to write calmly, yet I wish to unfold this wretched business to you exactly as it unfolded itself to me. What I learned that night was all I ever knew until I knew all, and much was to happen before that time. It is not easy, sitting here now and with the whole amazing story in mind, to reproduce my mental state so that you may see and feel exactly as I saw and felt then.
Reaching the ground, I took the bundle of stiffened shreds and crawled into the little cave formed by the tree roots, for it was now nearly dark and I was cautious enough not to turn my flashlight on in the open.
I think I never experienced such a feeling of suspense as when I hurriedly rummaged the rotted pockets of this bleached rag which had once been part of the uniform of the boy from my own home town, in far-off America, Roy Blakeley’s friend, the young hero who had begun as a Boy Scout and gone to his death in a glorious dramatic triumph. And I was thrilled as I repeated his name to myself—Tom Slade.
In the sickening, earth-smelling dampness of that little grotto I ransacked the pockets of the tattered garment, my searchlight laid upon a piece of rotted wood so that its glare was cast upon my work. The watch I found to be at one end of a coarse, brass, lock-link chain, at the other end of which was fastened an oilskin wallet with an ingenious system of folds and interfolds intended to exclude water and dampness. The chain was long enough so that the watch could rest in the breast and the wallet in the hip pocket. There was no hip pocket here, of course, and the wallet I found in the rotted folds of the garment. I think it must have been plastered fast between the jacket and the tree-trunk. Probably it had been jerked out of the trousers pocket when the victim fell from the tree.
Three things about the watch interested but did not surprise me. It had stopped at twenty minutes after five, presumably the time of Slade’s fall; it was of American manufacture, and the initials T. S. were engraved upon the back of it. Here was confirmation, if I needed any, of the identity of its owner. It was very much the worse for rain and weather, but these facts were plainly discernible.
The oilskin wallet was of German manufacture, exactly like one which the boys had taken from a dead Boche and which I had seen and examined. That wallet of poor dead Fritzie’s had contained a childishly sentimental letter from Frankfort. This one, as you shall hear, contained documents of quite a different character.
The first thing I brought forth was the photograph of a girl—a very pretty girl indeed, if I am any judge. As I looked at it I had a vague recollection of having seen the girl somewhere—at a patriotic gathering in Bridgeboro, I thought, or perhaps it was just on Main Street, or in the library or the post-office. Anyway, she was no French girl and I could have vowed that I had seen her in Bridgeboro. So here, at least, was a pretty touch in the harrowing catastrophe. Tom had had a girl—as every soldier should have.
You will not be impatient if I run over the contents of this wallet with some particularity. The next thing was half of a half sheet of note paper, torn from a letter presumably, and with an irrelevant memorandum written on the other side The letter was from our young lady, I felt sure, and I thought it rather an ungallant treatment of her missive. The few sentences on this fragment ran thus. I copy them from the scrap itself.
looked about it seemed as if everyone in Bridgeboro was there. And of course the Boy Scouts and that excruciating imp of a Blakeley boy were on hand—Ruth’s brother, you know. Oh, by the way, who do you suppose is in the old place on Terrace Avenue? Guess. The Red Cross ladies and I’m working with
That was all, but it took me back home to Bridgeboro with a rush! And here, thought I, with half the world between us, here in this ghostly, forlorn scene of tragedy, am I reading of that “excruciating imp”—Roy Blakeley! Of course the Red Cross ladies were plying their needles in a vacant store on Terrace Avenue—I knew that well enough. But what was the grand affair at which the whole of Bridgeboro seemed to be present?
Poor Roy, poor Tom, poor girl, all to be stricken in one way or another because some bloody tyrant thought he owned the earth.
But I found companionship and solace in those few broken sentences and it was with wistful thoughts of home that I turned the scrap over and read in another hand:
See Capt. Pfeifer about list and supplies from Berry-au-Bac.
Captain Pfeiffer! Here was a good old German name for a loyal American captain—Pfeiffer! The least he could have done would have been to change it to Fifer. Well, he could kill the Germans with any name, but——
I scrutinized the memorandum a little more intently. List and supplies from Berry-au-Bac. Hmph! Why, Berry-au-Bac was fifteen or twenty miles within the German lines. At the time of Tom’s last service it must have been double that. What had Tom Slade to do with lists and supplies from Berry-au-Bac?
Why, of course, he had descended upon Berry-au-Bac and captured lists and— No, it was absurd.
Puzzled, I turned the scrap of paper over and found some reassurance in those cordial, friendly words written in the girl’s hand. No, sir, we do not turn out spies or traitors in Bridgeboro. How should I know what that memorandum meant? But if my name were Pfeiffer, I’d change it to Fifer or Fife, I knew that much. Tom Slade knew his business, I was sure of that.
So thinking, I unfolded the next paper and found that he knew his business only too well. Here was a rough map showing every last hospital and dressing station beyond the American lines in that sector.
Two were crossed off—blown up, I suppose. There were some twenty or more still to be blown up. Underneath were written these words, as nearly as I can remember them:
Report dressing station foot of Fav Hill joined to one on top—empty—don’t bother. Ask about supplies from Wangardt. Correct list sent to Cap. Dennheimer so I don’t get blame. Tell him G station on other list is full.
And so on, and so on—I could not read any more. The name of that unspeakable wretch, Dennheimer, was quite enough. His deeds of bestial inhumanity were such as to call down the vengeance of Heaven and damn him for all eternity. I knew that he had his minions peering out under their big gas bags and skulking about like the unclean bird I had been watching, putting the doom of certain death on those already wounded. I knew that, like that sinister, cowardly bird, he made it his special function to defile the blue sky, sending his sneaking minions of the air forth upon their barbarous errands. They did not fight, the gallant fliers of this command, they skulked and murdered and fled.
And here in my hands, incredible as it seemed, was the last damning memorial of one of them.
And an American!
With an uncertain hand and a kind of limp disgust, I drew the papers forth and scanned them one after another. I felt sick, sick with a kind of nausea of bewilderment and utter despair. For if this were true (and how could it be otherwise?), then I had no more faith in human nature.
Yes, I had—I had faith in the faith which I knew lived back in Bridgeboro, and I think I drew a little hope, perhaps still a little confidence, from the stout heart which would not even believe that this—this aviator—was dead. Excruciating imp! Hero, I called him, and I resolved that he should never hear this from me. He believed that the worst had not happened, loyal, stouthearted friend and champion and comrade that he was. But death is not the worst.
I need not trouble you with the sordid contents of those other papers; nor have I them at hand to copy. They were the familiar baggage of a traitor and a spy, with all the nice details of sneaking ingenuity and signs of moral turpitude, such as to arouse the wrath of a saint. It will be enough to tell you that if this creature had lived, the hospital at Dormans would probably have seen its agonized victims writhing in flames. And one of our little cemeteries, with its rows of wooden crosses, was to have been torn with jagged holes—I do not know why. There was a detailed report for Dennheimer which would have pleased him had he received it. And Captain Pfeiffer would not have been disappointed.
I sat there, holding the watch in one hand, the wallet in the other, jerking the coarse chain as If I would break it asunder, and separate the American timepiece bearing the initials of an American boy from this other souvenir of cowardice and treachery. Then I looked again at the picture of the girl with the clear, honest eyes, and then at her friendly words about Bridgeboro. And he had torn a piece from that letter to make a treacherous memorandum. The wretch!
So I sat in the darkness and pondered, noticing a spider which hurried back and forth in the small glare of my light, and other irrelevant trifles, as one will do under the stress of shock and sorrow. My head throbbed and I felt a strange disinclination to move.
Could this thing be? Why, he had vowed to be revenged upon those wretches! Had the whole business, first and last, been a treacherous ruse? Had he gained admission to the hospital simply to spy there? Was the newspaper account all wrong and he, the sneak and traitor, been but the hero of some misinformed newspaper correspondent? Everything is green when you look through green spectacles and the only thing I could be certain of now was the unmistakable meaning of these papers and the identity of their possessor. Everything else seemed readily susceptible of a dark and sinister construction.
As I groped in my mind for some saving fact or discrepancy which might explain, or at least raise a doubt, the thought of one final clinching circumstance forced itself upon me and I gave up in hopeless despair. I knew now why the Germans had come here and taken away Slade’s body. It was not his body they were after, but his papers and for these they had searched in vain. The decent burial of his poor remains in some less cheerless spot than here, and the dropping of his American identification disk and scout badge (which apparently he had continued to wear) were perhaps the kindly act of Fritz in one of his erratic, sentimental moods—a fraternal and charitable afterthought.
And this was the secret of the Scuppers—dark and sordid and depressing, like all else there; and so, I was resolved, it should remain—an invisible part of that gloomy derelict community, like the very atmosphere of that grim, cheerless spot to which fate or a merciful Providence had relegated it.