After that he stood with each arm in the grip of a warder.

‘Mr Ivery,’ I said, ’last night, when I was in your power, you indulged your vanity by gloating over me.  I expected it, for your class does not breed gentlemen.  We treat our prisoners differently, but it is fair that you should know your fate.  You are going into France, and I will see that you are taken to the British front.  There with my old division you will learn something of the meaning of war.  Understand that by no conceivable chance can you escape.  Men will be detailed to watch you day and night and to see that you undergo the full rigour of the battlefield.  You will have the same experience as other people, no more, no less.  I believe in a righteous God and I know that sooner or later you will find death—­death at the hands of your own people—­an honourable death which is far beyond your deserts.  But before it comes you will have understood the hell to which you have condemned honest men.’

In moments of great fatigue, as in moments of great crisis, the mind takes charge and may run on a track independent of the will.  It was not myself that spoke, but an impersonal voice which I did not know, a voice in whose tones rang a strange authority.  Ivery recognized the icy finality of it, and his body seemed to wilt, and droop.  Only the hold of the warders kept him from falling.

I, too, was about at the end of my endurance.  I felt dimly that the room had emptied except for Blenkiron and Amos, and that the former was trying to make me drink brandy from the cup of a flask.  I struggled to my feet with the intention of going to Mary, but my legs would not carry me . . .  I heard as in a dream Amos giving thanks to an Omnipotence in whom he officially disbelieved.  ’What’s that the auld man in the Bible said?  Now let thou thy servant depart in peace.  That’s the way I’m feelin’ mysel’.’  And then slumber came on me like an armed man, and in the chair by the dying wood-ash I slept off the ache of my limbs, the tension of my nerves, and the confusion of my brain.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Storm Breaks in the West

The following evening—­it was the 20th day of March—­I started for France after the dark fell.  I drove Ivery’s big closed car, and within sat its owner, bound and gagged, as others had sat before him on the same errand.  Geordie Hamilton and Amos were his companions.  From what Blenkiron had himself discovered and from the papers seized in the Pink Chalet I had full details of the road and its mysterious stages.  It was like the journey of a mad dream.  In a back street of a little town I would exchange passwords with a nameless figure and be given instructions.  At a wayside inn at an appointed hour a voice speaking a thick German would advise that this bridge or that railway crossing had been cleared.  At a hamlet among pine woods an unknown man would clamber up beside