Indeed, to close this important matter now, Archer got considerably more than the three tacks from the leather seat. He got a lock-nut from that “inferrnal combustion engine,” (I suppose he meant internal), a splinter of fabulous value from the casing of a Hun altimétre, and something which looked like an American collar button, but which he assured me had had an adventurous career above the clouds. He found it in the car of the machine and if it was a collar button, why, it might possibly have been worn by the Kaiser, so it was of priceless value in any case. “What arre you doing herre?” Archer says he finally managed to ask, “in a Hun——”
“I’m standing here,” said Slade in a dry way which Archer says was characteristic of him. “Help me lift out this bag of sand, will you? There isn’t any time to talk. I escaped in this thing from the prison camp at Azoudange. They sent away pretty near the whole guard. They’re goin’ to attack. They didn’t know I knew anything about aviation. Hurry—you’ll have to sit there.”
“What became of the fellerr that went up afterr you back therre?” Archer asked.
“He had to go down,” said Slady dryly; “on account of the weather. Hurry up. I’ve been hanging over you waiting for you to show me a place to light, but you never would and that’s just like you. It wasn’t till you got stuck, just as I knew you would, and moved your light all around that I got a good squint. Chuck it out—quick.”
Archer climbed the step and looked into the cosy little car of a German Albatross, two-seater fighting plane. Throwing his light about, he saw in a quick glance the luxurious seat of the pilot and the plainer one for the accompanying flier—a heavy bag of sand lashed upon it. He saw the compass, the altimétre, the revolution counter, and something which he said looked like a shade roller all wound round with oilskin.
“Don’t touch that,” Slade warned as Archer’s souvenir-loving fingers lingered about it; “its the rolling-map—it shows a lot of things behind the German lines.”
Archer climbed into the car, the floor of which was covered with water like a leaky boat, and threw the bag from the seat he was to occupy.
“You might have had sense enough to know you could never get anywheres in the flat country tonight,” Slade told him. “Why didn’t you follow the Marne ridge?”
“’Cause I didn’t know about it,” Archer confessed frankly.
“Where are you going—to Paris?”
“Yes, or the nearest point of communication.”
“Good I picked you up,” said Slade.
Archer said he was so “flabberrgasted” at this almost miraculous meeting with Slade that it was some minutes before he realized the significance of all that had occurred. “You couldn’t make Slady talk,” he told me. “He’d only say what was necessary and even then he was kind of clumsy telling things. That was why he never botherred much with girrls, I guess. Maybe that’s why they neverr botherred with him.”
“Maybe one did bother with him and you didn’t know anything about it,” I suggested.
“Nix,” said Archer, with great decision.
Then he went on to tell me at some length much that he himself did not learn until afterward, and even then extracted from his hero much as a dentist draws teeth. “I had to give him gas to get anything out of him,” he said.
It was a very remarkable story, and I will tell it now.
One night about a month before this Slade, on his motorcycle, had been carrying a message from headquarters at Louzanne to a point some twenty miles distant when his machine ran into a shell hole near the village of La Pavin. This village was held by the French under constant menace from the enemy.
The hole was very deep and Slade’s head striking a part of his machine as he fell, he was stunned and lay unconscious in the ragged excavation for what he afterwards judged must have been several hours.
When he regained consciousness he found himself in a predicament which must have struck horror even to such a stolid nature as his. There he lay upon the wreck of his machine in a stifling atmosphere of gasolene. Where he was he could not imagine at first but he was thoughtful enough not to strike a match to light his acetylene searchlight which, moreover, as he later found, was broken.
Presently as he was able to gather his wits, he remembered what had happened, but why the sickening fumes of gasolene should permeate the place he could not guess until, feeling about above him, he discovered the appalling cause of this condition. The shell hole was completely closed by a hard, irregular surface which felt warm to the touch.
I leave you to imagine his feelings. He told Archer that he knew his consciousness was but temporary. “I knew I’d faint any minute,” he said. Yet he displayed enough of his characteristic calmness to reflect that this complete closing of the hole could not have been of long duration or he would be dead already. Whatever happened must have happened within a very few minutes, he thought.
“That was just like Slady,” Archer said, as he told me about it. “He neverr got excited. He always just sat down and thought what was the best thing to do next.”
Yet I think he must have been somewhat unnerved then. In any case, he felt of his gasolene tank and found that the feed pipe had been wrenched away; not so much as a drop of gasolene was there left in it. The slightest spark in that horrible, dark prison would have resulted in a death more terrible than any which the ingenious Huns could have devised.
Again Slade felt of the warm, hard surface above him and ran his fingers in the interstices which seemed straight and regular. The surface was of a warmth much greater than the stifling warmth of his prison, like a warm radiator.
His head began to pound and he suffered from a straining feeling about his eyes, which was ominous, as an army surgeon has since told me. Yet with the few remaining minutes of life which apparently remained to him, Tom Slade crouched upon the wreck of his machine and thought.
I am telling you this not after his own fashion of telling it, as Archer repeated it to me, for evidently Slade had no idea at all of the story possibilities of his own experiences.
The result of his thinking was that with a piece of broken glass from his headlight he hurriedly dug a deep hole in the earth in which he deposited his papers, filling the hole again and smoothing it over. By the sheer power of his will he kept his wits while he was doing it and having finished he had barely the strength to bang with a rock against the hard surface above him.
“What did you think it was?” Archer says he asked him.
“I thought it was a tank,” Slade answered, “and I wasn’t going to take any chances with my messages till I knew for certain everything was all right.” The result proved that this precaution had been a wise one.
I suspect that those few seconds of frantic banging, while he fought a losing battle against his ebbing consciousness, were perhaps the most terrific in all his adventurous career. He told Archer that his head swam and that finally he fell exhausted, struggling like a maniac for each breath he drew, his eyes throbbing madly.
He did not know whether the hard roof actually moved, for everything seemed to be moving now, and he was wavering on the edge of unconsciousness. The last rational thought that he remembered having was that the tank must have been deserted. His leg slipped between the spokes of his wheel, he heard a strange noise, saw a little round light, and thought it was a spark which would ignite the fumes and....
What he really saw as he passed out of that borderland of consciousness was a star in the bright, clear heaven.
They lifted him, limp and all but lifeless, out of that poisoned dungeon and laid him on the cool earth and searched him for his papers. They had taken the little village of La Pavin in a night attack. The huge metal monster which had shut him in stood hard by and when he came to his senses he saw it there, brutal in its power and its ugliness—heartless, irresistible, horrible. For I will tell you on my own account that of all the engines of combat or of locomotion which man has made there is nothing so loathesome in its suggestiveness of soulless cruelty as one of these same monster tanks.
But Herr Von Something-or-other did not find the papers of the messenger, and the messenger only smiled when they asked him about them. They raised the broken motorcycle and looked about beneath it with flashlights. But there were no papers. And so they took the messenger into the village and put him in the little dressing station there and gave him oxygen and used a pulmotor and brought him round. He said afterwards (I mean long afterwards) that the Germans had treated him well, been kind to him, and that he did not believe all the tales of German atrocities which he had heard. He said these Germans seemed like friends. I mention this because he was subsequently accused of professing sympathy for them and came very near to being court-martialled for it. Archer says it was just his blunt sense of common fairness, a notable characteristic of his, and that what he said has reference only to the treatment he received on that particular occasion. In any event, nothing came of it.
Slade was taken, along with some of the defenders of La Pavin, to the big prison camp at Azoudange, on the Marne Canal a few miles east of Nancy. You will remember that as the place from which the balloon observer thought that troops were being sent forward toward the lines. It is in Lorraine, not far from Saarburg.
There Slade remained, and there he was on the stormy night of his great adventure, which was to prove his brevet flight[2], and bring him face to face with his former comrade, Archer.
I suppose you know that Slade had always taken a great interest in aviation. He had a Boy Sc............