“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.