possible, though dangerous
beyond words, to cross the inundated country that lay between the Belgian
Front and the German lines, and even with good luck to go farther.

Henri, for instance, on that night before had left the advanced trench
at the railway line, had crawled through the Belgian barbed wire, and
had advanced, standing motionless as each star shell burst overhead, and
then moving on quickly. The inundation was his greatest difficulty.
Shallow in most places, it was full of hidden wire and crisscrossed with
irrigation ditches. Once he stumbled into one, but he got out by
swimming. Had he been laden with a rifle and equipment it might have
been difficult.

He swore to himself as his feet touched ground again. For a star shell
was hanging overhead, and his efforts had sent wide and ever increasingly
widening circles over the placid surface of the lagoon. Let them lap to
the German outposts and he was lost.

Henri's method was peculiar to himself. Where there was dry terrain he
did as did the others, crouched and crept. But here in the salt marshes,
where the sea had been called to Belgium's aid, he had evolved a system
of moving, neck deep in water, stopping under the white night lights,
advancing in the darkness. There was no shelter. The country was flat
as a hearth.

He would crawl out at last in the darkness and lie flat, as the dead lie.
And then, inch by inch, he would work his way forward, by routes that he
knew. Sometimes he went entirely through the German lines, and
reconnoitered on the roads behind. They were shallow lines then, for
the inundation made the country almost untenable, and a charge in force
from the Belgians across was unlikely.

Henri knew his country well, as well as he loved it. In a farmhouse
behind the German lines he sometimes doffed his wet gray-green uniform
and put on the clothing of a Belgian peasant. Trust Henri then for being
a lout, a simple fellow who spoke only Flemish--but could hear in many
tongues. Watch him standing at crossroads and marveling at big guns that
rumble by.

At first Henri had wished, having learned of an attack, to be among those
who repelled it. Then one day his King had sent for him to come to that
little village which was now his capital city.

He had been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing.
Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri
was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were g