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Page 122
The Baronet paused.
"St. Alban went about the thing in his thorough, persistent
manner. He didn't trust to subordinates. He went himself.
That's what took him out on the English line. And that's how he
came to be wounded in the elbow.
"It wasn't very much of a wound - a piece of shrapnel nearly
spent when it hit him. But the French hospital service was very
much concerned. It gave him every attention.
"The man came into Paris when he had finished. The French
authorities put him up at the Hotel Meurice. You know the Hotel
Meurice. It's on the Rue de la Rivoli. It looks out over the
garden of the Tuileries. St. Alban was satisfied with the
condition of affairs in France, and he was anxious to go back to
London. Arrangements had been made for him to go on the hospital
transport.
"He was in his room at the Meurice waiting for the train to
Calais. He was, in fact, fatigued with the attention the French
authorities had given him. Everything that one could think of
had been anticipated, he said. He thought there could be nothing
more. Then there was a timid knock, and a nurse came in to say
that she had been sent to see that the dressing on his arm was
all right. He said that he had found it easier to submit to the
French attentions than to undertake to explain that he didn't
need them.
"He was busy with some final orders, so he put out his arm and
allowed the nurse to take the pins out of the split sleeve and
adjust the dressing. She put on some bandages, made a little
timid curtsey and went out.
"St. Alban didn't think of it again until the German U-boat
stopped the transport the next morning in the Channel. He wasn't
disturbed when the submarine commander came into his cabin. He
knew enough not to carry any papers about with him. But
Plutonburg didn't bother himself about luggage. He'd had his
signal from the factory chimney at Auteuil. He stood there
grinning in the cabin before St. Alban; that Satanic, Chemosh
grin that the artist got in the Munich picture.
"`I used to be something of a surgeon,' he said, `Doctor Ulrich
von Plutonburg, if you will remember. I'll take a look at your
arm.'
"tit, Alban said he thought the man might be moved by some humane
consideration, so he put out his arm.
"Plutonburg took the pins out of the sleeve and removed the
bandage that the nurse had put on in the Hotel Meurice. Then he
held it up. The long, cotton bandage was lined with glazed
cambric, and on it, in minute detail, was the exact position of
all the Allied forces along the whole front in the region of the
Somme, precisely as they had been massed for the drive on July
first!"
I cried out in astonishment. "So that's what you meant," I said,
"by the trailed thing turning on him!"
"Precisely," replied the Baronet. "The very thing that St. Alban
labored to prevent another from doing, he did awfully himself!"
The big Englishman's fingers drummed on the table.
"It was a great moment for Plutonburg," he said. "No living man
but that Prussian could have put the Satanic humor into the rest
of the affair."
He paused as under the pressure of the memory.
"St. Alban always maintained that from the moment he saw the long
map on the bandage everything blurred around him, and began to
clear only when he spoke on the deck. He used to curse this
blur. It made him a national figure and immortal, but it
prevented him, he said, from striking the Prussian in the face."
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