, I shall have a few reports.
You'd better let them know at the Admiralty, and what time you want to
go over."

Surgeon-Major Thomson shook hands with the General and turned towards
the door.

"When I come back," he said, "I hope I'll be able to convince even you,
sir."

CHAPTER X

Surgeon-Major Thomson awoke about twelve hours later with a start. He
had been sleeping so heavily that he was at first unable to remember his
whereabouts. His mind moved sluggishly across the brief panorama of
his hurried journey--the special train from Victoria to Folkestone;
the destroyer which had brought him and a few other soldiers across the
Channel, black with darkness, at a pace which made even the promenade
deck impossible; the landing at Boulogne, a hive of industry
notwithstanding the darkness; the clanking of waggons, the shrieking
of locomotives, the jostling of crowds, the occasional flashing of an
electric torch. And then the ride in the great automobile through the
misty night. He rubbed his eyes and looked around him. A grey morning
was breaking. The car had come to a standstill before a white gate,
in front of which was stationed a British soldier, with drawn bayonet.
Surgeon-Major Thomson pulled himself together and answered the
challenge.

"A friend," he answered,--"Surgeon-Major Thomson, on his Majesty's
service."

He leaned from the car for a moment and held out something in the hollow
of his hand. The man saluted and drew back. The car went along a rough
road which led across a great stretch of pastureland. On the ridge of
the hills on his right, little groups of men were at work unlimbering
guns. Once or twice, with a queer, screeching sound, a shell, like a
little puff of white smoke, passed high over the car and fell somewhere
in the grey valley below. In the distance he could see the movements of
a body of troops through the trees, soldiers on the way to relieve their
comrades in the trenches. As the morning broke, the trenches themselves
came into view--long, zig-zag lines, silent, and with no sign of the
men who crawled about inside like ants. He passed a great brewery
transformed into a canteen, from which a line of waggons, going and
returning, were passing all the time backwards and forwards into the
valley. Every now and then through the stillness came the sharp crack
of a rifle from the snipers lying hidden in the little stretches of
woodland and marshland away on the right. A motor-omnibus, wit