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Page 56
He nodded slowly. "Perhaps."
"But we had trenches like these at Trenton and you know what happened," I
objected.
"I know, but--" again that mysterious smile, "those Trenton trenches were
not exactly like these trenches. Hello! They're signalling to us. They
want to know who we are."
In reply to orders wig-wagged up to us from headquarters in a white
farmhouse, we flung forth our identification streamers, blue, white and
red arranged in code to form an aerial passport, and received a wave of
approval in reply.
As we swung to the northwest, moving parallel to the river and about four
miles back of it, I studied with my binoculars the trenches that
stretched along beneath us in straight lines and zigzags as far as the
eye could see. I was familiar with such constructions, having studied
them on various fields; here was the firing trench, here the shelter
trench and there the communicating galleries that joined them, but what
were those groups of men working so busily farther down the line? And
those other groups swarming at many points in the wide area? They were
not digging or bracing side-wall timbers. What were they doing?
I had the wheel at this moment and, in my curiosity, I turned the machine
to the east, forgetting Mr. Astor's admonition that we were not allowed
to pass the rear line of trenches.
"Hold on! This is forbidden!" he cried. "We'll get in trouble."
Before I could act upon his warning, there came a puff of white smoke
from one of the batteries and a moment later a shell, bursting about two
hundred yards in front of us, made its message clear.
We turned at once and, after some further manoeuvring, sailed back to
Baltimore.
We dined together that night and I tried to get from Mr. Astor a key to
the mystery that evidently lay behind this situation at the Susquehanna.
At first he was unwilling to speak, but, finally, in view of our
friendship and his confidence in my discretion, he gave me a forecast of
events to come.
"You mustn't breathe this to a soul," he said, "and, of course, you
mustn't write a word of it, but the fact is, dear boy, the wonderful fact
is we're going to win the battle of the Susquehanna."
I shook my head. "I'd give all I've got in the world to have that true,
Mr. Astor, but von Hindenburg is marching against us with 150,000 men,
first-class fighting men."
"I know, and we have only 60,000 men, most of them raw recruits. Just the
same, von Hindenburg hasn't a chance on earth." He paused and added
quickly: "Except one."
"One?"
"If the enemy suspected the trap we have set for them, they could avoid
it, but they won't suspect it. It's absolutely new."
"How about their aeroplane scouts? Won't they see the trap?"
"They can't see it, at least not enough to understand it. General Wood
turned us back this afternoon as a precaution, but it wasn't necessary.
You might have circled over those trenches for hours and I don't believe
you would have known what's going on there. Besides, the work will be
finished and everything hidden in a couple of days."
I spurred my imagination, searching for agencies of destruction, and
mentioned hidden mines, powerful electric currents, deadly gases, but
Astor shook his head.
"It's worse than that, much worse. And it isn't one of those fantastic
things from Mars that H. G. Wells would put in a novel. This will work.
It's a practical, businesslike way of destroying an army."
"What? An entire army?"
"Yes. There's an area on this side of the Susquehanna about five miles
square that is ready for the Germans--plenty of room for a hundred
thousand of them--and, believe me, not one man in ten will get out of
that area alive."
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