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Page 121
"You must have wondered like everybody else," he said, "why the
Allied drive on the Somme accomplished so little at first. Both
England and France had made elaborate preparations for it over a
long period of time. Every detail had been carefully, worked
out. Every move had been estimated with mathematical exactness.
"The French divisions had been equipped and strategically
grouped. England had put a million of fresh troops into France.
And the line of the drive had been mapped. The advance, when it
was opened on the first day of July, ought to have gone forward
irresistibly from cog to cog like a wheel of a machine on the
indentations of a track. But the thing didn't happen that way.
The drive sagged and stuck."
The big Englishman pressed the table with his clinched hand.
"My word!" he said, "is it any wonder that the devil, Plutonburg,
grinned when he put up his automatic pistol? Why shoot the
Englishman? He would do it himself soon enough. He was right
about that. If he had only been right about his measure of St.
Alban, the drive on the Somme would have been a ghastly
catastrophe for the Allied armies."
I hesitated to interrupt Sir Henry. But he had got my interest
desperately worked up about what seemed to me great unjointed
segments of this affair, that one couldn't understand till they
were put together. I ventured a query.
"How did St. Alban come to be on the hospital transport?" I said.
"Was he in the English army in France?"
"Oh, no," he said. "When the war opened St. Alban was in the
Home Office, and, he set out to make England spy-proof. He
organized the Confidential Department, and he went to work to
take every precaution. He wasn't a great man in any direction,
but he was a careful, thorough man. And with tireless,
never-ceasing, persistent effort, he very nearly swept England
clean of German espionage."
Sir Henry spoke with vigor and decision.
"Now, that's what St. Alban did in England - not because he was a
man of any marked ability, but because he was a persistent person
dominated by a single consuming idea. He started out to rid
England of every form of espionage. And when he had accomplished
that, as the cases of Ernest, Lody, and Schultz eloquently
attest, he determined to see that every move of the English
expeditionary force on the Continent should be guarded from
German espionage."
Sir Henry paused and poured out a cup of tea. He tasted it. It
was cold, and he put the cup down on the table.
"That's how St. Alban came to be in France," he said. "The great
drive on the Somme had been planned at a meeting of military
leaders in Paris. The French were confident that they could keep
their plans secret from German espionage. They admitted frankly
that signals were wirelessed out of France. But they had taken
such precautions that only the briefest signals could go out.
"The Government radio stations were always alert. And they at
once negatived any unauthorized wireless so that German spies
could only snap out a signal or two at any time. They could do
this, however.
"They had a wireless apparatus inside a factory chimney at
Auteuil. It wasn't located until the war was nearly over.
"The French didn't undertake to say that they could make their
country spy-proof. They knew that there were German agents in
France that nobody could tell from innocent French people. But
they did undertake to say that nothing could be carried over into
the German lines. And they justified that promise. They did see
that nothing was carried out of France." The Baronet looked at
me across the table.
"Now, that's what took St. Alban across the Channel," he said.
"The English authorities wanted to be certain that there was no
German espionage. And there was no man in England able to be
certain of that except St. Alban. He went over to make sure. If
the plans for the Somme drive should get out of France, they
should not get out through any English avenue."
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