the sun was already above the horizon, flashing over Haut Alsace
at his feet.

The _Laemmergeyer_ was a speck in the sky, poised over France.

Up out of the infinite and sunlit chasm came a mocking, joyous hail--up
through the sheer, misty gulf out of vernal depths: _Cuck_-oo! _Cuck_-oo!
_Cuck_-oo!

CHAPTER IV

RECONNAISSANCE

And that was the way Carfax ended--a tiny tragedy of incompetence compared
to the mountainous official fiasco at Gallipoli. Here, a few perished
among the filthy salamanders in the snow; there, thousands died in the
burning Turkish gorse----

------------------

But that's history; and its makers are already officially damned.

But now concerning two others of the fed-up dozen on board the mule
transport--Harry Stent and Jim Brown. Destiny linked arms with them; Fate
jerked a mysterious thumb over her shoulder toward Italy. Chance detailed
them for special duty as soon as they landed.

It was a magnificent sight, the disembarking of the British overseas
military force sent secretly into Italy.

They continued to disembark and entrain at night. Nobody knew that British
troops were in Italy.

The infernal uproar along the Isonzo never ceased; the din of the guns
resounded through the Trentino, but British and Canadian noses were
sniffing at something beyond the Carnic Alps, along the slopes of which
they continued to concentrate, Rifles, Kilties, and Gunners.

There seemed to be no particular hurry. Details from the Canadian
contingent were constantly sent out to familiarize themselves with the
vast waste of tunneled mountains denting the Austrian sky-line to the
northward; and all day long Dominion reconnoitering parties wandered among
valleys, alms, forest, and peaks in company sometimes with Italian
alpinists, sometimes by themselves, prying, poking, snooping about with
all the emotionless pertinacity of Teuton tourists preoccupied with
_wanderlust_, _kultur_, and _ewigkeit_.

And one lovely September morning the British Military Observer with the
Italian army, and his very British aid, sat on a sunny rock on the Col de
la Reine and watched a Canadian northward reconnaissance--nothing much to
see, except a solitary moving figure here and there on the mountains,
crawling like a deerstalker across ledges and stretches of bracken--a few
dots on the higher slopes, visible for a moment, then again invisible,
then glimpsed against some lower snow pa