in the summer of that same year, the thundercloud burst over europe, and france, at her moment of need, reaped the fine harvest of her colonial policy. black men and brown mustered to the call of her bugle as men having their share of france. gerard de montignac scrambled like his brother officers to get to the zone of battles. he was seconded in the autumn, was promoted colonel a year later, and was then summoned to paris.
in a little room upon the first floor in a building adjacent to the war office gerard discovered baumann, of the affaires indigènes, but an uplifted baumann, a baumann who had grown a little supercilious towards colonels.
“ah, de montignac!” he said, with a wave of the hand. “i have been expecting you. yes. will you sit down for a moment?”
gerard smiled and obeyed contentedly. there were so many baumanns about nowadays, and he never tired of them. baumann frowned portentously over some papers on his desk for a few moments, and then, pushing them aside, smoothed out his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“yours is a simpler affair, de montignac. i am happy to say,” he said, with a happy air of relief. “the governor-general is in paris. you will see him after this interview. he wants you again in morocco.”
“it is necessary?” gerard asked, unwillingly.
“not a doubt of it, my dear fellow. you can take that from me. the governor-general is holding the country with the merest handful of soldiers, and there are—annoyances.”
“serious ones?”
“very. bartels, for instance.”
“bartels?” gerard repeated. “i never heard of him.”
far away from the main shock of the battles, many curious and romantic episodes were occurring, many strange epics of prowess and adventure which will never find a historian. bartels was the hero of one, and here in baumann’s clipped phrases are the bare bones of his exploit.
“he was a non-commissioned officer in the german army . . . enlisted on his discharge in our foreign legion—was interned in august, 1914, and got away to melilla.”
“in the spanish zone, on the coast. yes,” said gerard.
“he was safe there and on the edge of the riff country. he got into touch with a more than usually turbulent chieftain of those parts, abd-el-malek, and also with a german official in spain. from the german officials bartels received by obscure routes fifteen thousand pounds a month in solid cash, minus, of course, a certain attrition which the sum suffers on the way.”
“of course,” said gerard.
“with the fifteen thousand—call it twelve—with the twelve thousand pounds a month actually received, and abd-el-malek’s help, bartels has built himself a walled camp up in the hills close to the edge of the french zone, where he maintains two thousand riflemen well paid and well armed.”
gerard leaned forward quickly.
“but surely a protest has been made to spain?”
baumann smiled indulgently.
“how you rush at things, my dear de montignac!”
“it will be ‘gerard’ in a moment,” de montignac thought.
“of course a protest has been lodged. but spain renounces responsibility. the camp is in a part of the country which she has officially declared to be not yet subdued. on the other hand, it is in the spanish zone—and we have enough troubles upon our hands as it is, eh?”
gerard leaned back in his chair.
“that has always been our trouble, hasn’t it? the unsubdued spanish zone,” he said, moodily. “what does bartels do with his two thousand riflemen?”
“he wages war. he comes across into french morocco, and raids and loots and burns and generally plays the devil. and, mark you, he gets information; he chooses his time cleverly. when we are just about to embark fresh troops to france, that’s his favourite moment. the troops have to be retained, rushed quickly up country—and he, bartels, is snugly back on the spanish side of the line and we can’t touch him. bartels, my dear de montignac”—and here baumann, of the affaires indigènes, tapped the table impressively with the butt of his pencil—“bartels has got to be dealt with.”
“yes,” gerard replied. “but how, doesn’t seem quite so obvious, does it?”
baumann gently flourished his hand.
“we leave that with every confidence to you, my dear colonel.”
gerard pushed his chair back.
“oh, you do, do you! i don’t know that i’ve the type of brain for that job,” he said, and thought disconsolately how often he had jeered at the officers who simply passed everything that wasn’t in “the book.” he would very much have liked to take the same line now. “how does this fellow bartels get his twelve thousand pounds?”
“through tetuan probably. we don’t quite know,” said baumann.
“and where exactly is his camp on the map?” gerard asked next.
“we are not sure. we can give you, of course, a general idea.”
“we have nobody amongst his two thousand men, then?”
“not a soul. so, you see, you have a clear field.”
“yes, i see that, and i need hardly say that i am very grateful,” said de montignac.
baumann was not quick to appreciate irony even in its crudest form. he smiled as one accepting compliments.
“we do our best, my dear gerard,” and gerard beamed with satisfaction. he had heard what he had wanted to hear, and he would not spoil its flavour. he rose at once and took up his cap.
“i will go and see the governor-general.”
“you will find him next door,” said baumann. “we keep him next door to us whilst he is in paris, so far as we can.”
“you are very wise,” said gerard, gravely, and he went next door, which was the war office. there he met his chief, who said:
“you have seen baumann? good! take a little leave, but go as soon as you can. ten days, eh? i will see you in a fortnight at rabat,” and the governor-general passed on to the elysée.
gerard de montignac did not, however, take his ten days. he knew his chief, a tall, pre?minent man, both in war and administration, who, with the utmost good-fellowship, expected much of his officers. gerard spent one day in paris and then travelled to marseilles. at marseilles he had to wait two days, and visited in consequence a hospital where a number of moorish soldiers lay wounded, men of all shades from the fair fasi to the coal-black negro from the south. their faces broke into smiles as gerard exchanged a word or a joke with them in their own dialects.
he stopped a little abruptly at the foot of one bed in which the occupant lay asleep with—a not uncommon sight in the ward—a brand-new medaille militaire pinned upon the pillow.
“he is badly hurt?” gerard asked.
“he is recovering very well,” said the nurse who accompanied him. “we expect to have him out of the hospital in a fortnight.”
gerard remained for a moment or two looking at the sleeper, and the nurse watched him curiously.
“it will do him no harm if i wake him up,” she suggested.
gerard roused himself from an abstraction into which he had fallen.
“no,” he answered, with a laugh. “if i was a general, i would say, yes. but sleep is a better medicine than a crack with a mere colonel. what is his name?”
“ahmed ben larti,” said the nurse, and with a careless “so?” gerard de montignac moved along to the next bed. but before he passed out of the ward he jerked his head towards the sleeper and asked:
“will he be fit for service again?”
“certainly,” she answered. “in a month, i should think.”
gerard left the hospital, and the next morning was back in baumann’s office in paris.
“i have found the man i want,” he said.
“who is he?”
“ahmed ben larti. he is in hospital at marseilles. he has the medaille militaire.”
baumann shrugged his shoulders. “who has it not?” he seemed to say.
“i had better see the governor-general,” said gerard.
baumann became mysterious, as befitted a high officer of intelligence.
“difficult, my young friend,” he began.
“excellent, baumann, excellent,” interrupted gerard, with a chuckle.
baumann pouted.
“i don’t quite understand,” he said.
“and there’s no reason that you should,” gerard answered, politely.
baumann was not very pleased. it was his business to do the mystifying.
“it’s practically impossible that you should see the governor-general again. he is so occupied,” he said, firmly.
gerard got up from his chair.
“where is he?”
“ah!” said baumann, wisely. “that is another matter.”
“then you don’t know,” exclaimed gerard, standing over him.
“no,” answered baumann, and it took gerard the rest of that day before he ran his chief to earth. like other busy men, the governor-general had the necessary time to give to necessary things, and in a spare corner of the colonial office, he listened with some astonishment, asked a few questions, and wrote a note to the war office.
“this will get you what you want, de montignac. for the rest, i agree.”
forty-eight hours later gerard had a long interview with ahmed ben larti in a private ward to which the moor had been removed: and towards the end of the interview, ahmed ben larti made a suggestion.
“that’s it!” said gerard enthusiastically. then his spirits dropped. “but we haven’t got any. no, we haven’t got one.”
“the governor-general,” the moor suggested.
“i’ll send him a telegram,” said gerard de montignac.
now this was in the spring of autumn, 1916, when bartels was in the full bloom of power. his camp was full, for the danger was small, the pay high, and the discipline easy. the moor brought his horse and his rifle, was paid so many dollars a day, and could go home if the pay failed or his harvest called him. but in the autumn bartels in his turn began to suffer annoyance. thus, on one occasion a strange humming filled the air, and a most alarming thing swooped out of the sky with a roar and dropped a bomb in the middle of the camp.
bartels ran out of his hut with an oath. “they’ve located us at last,” he growled. not one of his soldiers had ever seen an aeroplane before, except perhaps the man who was cowering down on the ground close to him with every expression of terror. bartels jerked him up to his feet.
“what’s your name?”
“ahmed ben larti.”
“they make a great noise, but they hurt no one,” bartels declared. “tell the others!”
the others were running for their lives to any sort of shelter. for, indeed, this sort of thing was worse than cannon. and unfortunately for bartel’s encouragements, the aeroplane was coming back. it dropped its whole load of bombs in and around that camp, breaching the walls and destroying the huts and causing not a few casualties into the bargain. there was an exodus of some size from that camp under cover of the night, and bartels the next morning thought it prudent to move.
he moved westwards into the country of the braue’s, and there his second misfortune befell him. his month’s instalment of money did not come to hand. it should have travelled upon mules from tetuan, and a rumour spread that the english had got hold of it. nothing, of course, could be said; bartels had just to put up with the loss and see a still further diminution of his army. within a month the new camp was raided by aeroplanes, and bartels had to move again. from a harrier of others he had sadly fallen to being harried himself.
“there is a traitor in the camp,” he said, and he consulted abd-el-malek and stray german visitors from tetuan and melilla. they suspected everybody who went away before the raids and came back afterwards. they never suspected men like ahmed ben larti, who was always present in the camp on these occasions of danger, not overconspicuously present, but just noticeably present, running for shelter, for instance, or discharging his rifle at the aeroplane in a panic of terror. bartels, however, carried on with constantly diminishing forces until the crops were ripening in the following year. then the aeroplanes dealt with him finally.
wherever he pitched his camp, there very quickly they found him out and burnt the crops for a mile around. the villages would no longer supply him with food; his army melted to a useless handful of men; he became negligible, a bandit on the move. ahmed ben larti called off the little train of runners which had passed in his messages to french agents in tetuan, and one dark evening slipped away himself. his work was done, and almost immediately his luck gave out.
a telegram reached gerard de montignac at rabat a week later from the french consul in tetuan, which, being decoded, read: “larti brought in here this morning. he was attacked two miles from here and left for dead. recovery doubtful.”
the last of ahmed’s messengers had been lured into a house in tetuan, and upon him larti’s final message announcing the date of his own arrival had been discovered. further telegrams came to rabat from tetuan. larti had lost his left arm just below the shoulder, and his condition was precarious. he began to mend, however, in a week, but three months passed before a french steamer brought to casablanca a haggard thin man in mufti with a sleeve pinned to his breast, who had once been captain paul ravenel of the tirailleurs.
gerard de montignac met him on the quay and walked up with him to the cantonment at ain-bourdja.
“we have got quarters for you here,” said gerard. “there’s nobody you know any longer here.”
“yes!” said paul.
“we can rig you out with a uniform. the general will want to see you.”
“yes?” said paul.
“you know that you have been on secret service the whole time. the troubles at fez were the opportunity needed to make your disappearance natural.”
paul sat down on the camp bed.
“that was arranged in paris before you went to bartels,” said gerard. “oh, by the way, i have something of yours.”
he opened a drawer of the one table in the tiny matchboard room and, unfolding a cloth, handed to paul the row of medals which he had taken from paul’s tunic when he had searched the house of si ahmed driss in fez.
paul sat gazing at the medals for a long while with his head bowed.
“i have got another to add to these, you know—the medaille militaire,” he said, with a laugh, and his voice broke. “i shall turn woman if i hold them any longer,” he cried, and, rising, he put them back in the drawer. gerard de montignac turned to a window which looked out across the plain of the chaiou?a. he pointed towards the northwest and said:
“years ago, paul, you saved me from mutilation and death over there. i forgot that in mulai idris, and you didn’t remind me.”
“i, too, had forgotten it,” said paul. he looked about the cabin, he drew a long breath as though he could hardly believe the fact that he was there. then he said abruptly:
“i must send a telegram to marseilles!”
gerard de montignac stared at him.
“marseilles?”
“yes, marguerite has been living there all this time.”
“but you were in hospital there, and no one visited you, i know. the nurse told me.”
paul ravenel smiled.
“marguerite never knew i was there. i was always afraid that she would come there by chance. fortunately, she was driving a car. i was just ahmed ben larti. the time had not come.” he looked at gerard and nodded his head. “but i can tell you it was difficult not to send for her. there she was, just a few streets and just a few house-walls between us. there were sleepless nights, with the light shining down on all those beds of wounded men when i could have screamed for marguerite aloud.”
he sent off his telegram from the cantonment post office and then strolled into the town with gerard de montignac. the villa iris was closed; madame delagrange had vanished. petras tetarnis was no doubt driving his delaunay-belleville through the streets of paris. paul looked at his watch and put it back into his pocket with impatience. it was out in the palm of his hand again. he was counting the minutes until a telegram could be delivered in marseilles. he was wondering whether she was already aware—as she had been aware when he had stood behind her on the first night that they met.
a fortnight later mr. ferguson, the lawyer, received a telegram which put him into a fluster. he was an old gentleman nowadays and liable to excitement. he sent for his head clerk, not that pertinacious servant, mr. gregory—he had long since gone into retirement—but another, from whom mr. ferguson was not inclined to stand any nonsense.
“i shall want to-morrow all the necessary forms for securing english nationality,” he said, “and please get me colonel vanderfelt on the trunk line.”
the clerk went out of the office. the old man sat in a muse, looking out of the window upon the plane trees in the square. so here was virginia ravenel’s son coming home, invalided, with a wife. how the years did fly, to be sure! yet though the plane trees were a little dim to his eyes, he heard a voice, fresh as the morning, through that dusty room, and saw the opera house at covent garden with people wearing the strange dress of thirty years ago.
