ark fell. I drove Ivery's big closed car, and within
sat its owner, bound and gagged, as others had sat before him on the
same errand. Geordie Hamilton and Amos were his companions. From what
Blenkiron had himself discovered and from the papers seized in the Pink
Chalet I had full details of the road and its mysterious stages. It was
like the journey of a mad dream. In a back street of a little town I
would exchange passwords with a nameless figure and be given
instructions. At a wayside inn at an appointed hour a voice speaking a
thick German would advise that this bridge or that railway crossing had
been cleared. At a hamlet among pine woods an unknown man would clamber
up beside me and take me past a sentry-post. Smooth as clockwork was
the machine, till in the dawn of a spring morning I found myself
dropping into a broad valley through little orchards just beginning to
blossom, and I knew that I was in France. After that, Blenkiron's own
arrangements began, and soon I was drinking coffee with a young
lieutenant of Chasseurs, and had taken the gag from Ivery's mouth. The
bluecoats looked curiously at the man in the green ulster whose face
was the colour of clay and who lit cigarette from cigarette with a
shaky hand.

The lieutenant rang up a General of Division who knew all about us. At
his headquarters I explained my purpose, and he telegraphed to an Army
Headquarters for a permission which was granted. It was not for nothing
that in January I had seen certain great personages in Paris, and that
Blenkiron had wired ahead of me to prepare the way. Here I handed over
Ivery and his guard, for I wanted them to proceed to Amiens under
French supervision, well knowing that the men of that great army are
not used to let slip what they once hold.

It was a morning of clear spring sunlight when we breakfasted in that
little red-roofed town among vineyards with a shining river looping at
our feet. The General of Division was an Algerian veteran with a brush
of grizzled hair, whose eye kept wandering to a map on the wall where
pins and stretched thread made a spider's web.

'Any news from the north?' I asked.

'Not yet,' he said. 'But the attack comes soon. It will be against our
army in Champagne.' With a lean finger he pointed out the enemy
dispositions.

'Why not against the British?' I asked. With a knife and fork I made a
right angle and put a salt dish in the centre. 'That is the German
concentration. They can so m