et. And St. Alban ought
to have known it, unless, as he afterwards said, the whole thing
from the first awful moment in the cabin was simply walled out of his
consciousness, until he began dimly to realize up there in the sun, in
the crowd, that he was being threatened and blurted out his words from a
sort of awful disgust."

Again he paused.

"Plutonburg was right about having St. Alban in the crater of the pit.
But he was wrong to measure him by his Prussian standard. St. Alban came
on to London. He got the heads of the War Office together and told
them. I was there. It was the devil's own muddle of a contrast. Outside,
London was ringing with the man's striking act of personal heroism.
And inside of the Foreign Office three or, four amazed persons were
listening to the bitter truth."

The Baronet spread out his hands with a sudden gesture.

"I shall always remember the man's strange, livid face; his fingers that
jumped about the cuff of his coat sleeve; and his shaking jaw."

Sir Henry went over and sat down at the table. For a good while he was
silent. The sun filtering through the limbs of the great oak-trees made
mottled spots on his face. He seemed to turn away from the thing he had
been concerned with, and to see something else, something wholly apart
and at a distance from St. Alban's affairs.

"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."