“We haven’t been shot up so much since Waterloo.  It’s been appalling.  For days and nights we’ve been fighting and marching.  Whenever we stopped even for a moment we fell on the ground and were asleep before we touched it.  Half the fellows I knew have been killed.  I think as long as I live I’ll hear the drumming of those guns in my ears, and, confound ’em, I still hear ’em in reality now.  If you turn your attention to it you can hear the confounded business quite plainly!  But what I do know, Scott, is that we’ve been winning!  I don’t know where I am and I haven’t a clear idea of what I’ve been doing all the time, but as sure as we’re in France the victory is ours.”

“But won by the French chiefly” John could not keep from saying.

“Quite true.  Our own army is not large, but it has done as much per man.”

“And the moral support,” added John.  “The French have felt the presence of a friend, a friend, too, who in six months will be ten times as strong as he is now.”

“Where is Lannes?” asked Wharton.

“He’s got your job, Wharton,” replied John with a smile.  “He’s Envoy Extraordinary and Bearer of Messages concerning Life and Death between the armies.  As soon as he landed he went directly to the British commander, and they’re now conferring in a tent.  That will never happen to you.  You will never be closeted with the leader of a great army.”

“I don’t know.  I may not be able to fly like the Frenchman, but he can’t handle the wireless as I can, and he isn’t the chain-lightning chauffeur that Carstairs is.  Please to remember those facts.”

“I do.  But here comes Lannes, the man of mystery.”

Lannes seemed preoccupied, but he greeted Carstairs and Wharton warmly.

“I’m about to take another flight,” he said.  “No, thank you so much, but I’ve time neither to eat nor to drink.  I must fly at once, though it’s to be a short flight.  Take care of my friend, Monsieur Jean the Scott, while I’m gone, won’t you?  Don’t let him wander into German hands again, because I won’t have time to go for him once more.”

“We won’t!” said Carstairs and Wharton with one voice.  “Having got him back we’re going to keep him.”

Lannes smiling sprang into the Arrow.  The willing young Englishmen gave it a mighty push, and rising into the blue afternoon sky he sailed away toward the south.

“He’ll be back all right,” said Carstairs.  “I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing can ever catch that fellow.  He’s a wonder, he is.  One of the most difficult jobs I have, Scott, is to give the French all the credit that’s due ’em.  I’ve been trained, as all other Englishmen were, to consider ’em pretty poor stuff that we’ve licked regularly for a thousand years, and here we suddenly find ’em heroes and brothers-in-arms.  It’s all the fault of the writers.  Was it Shakespeare who said:  ’Methinks that five Frenchmen on one pair of English legs did walk?’”