"It was quite simple. They had put up some additional wire, however--"
"Where?"
"There was a break," he would explain. "I have told you--between their
trenches. I had used it before to get through."
"But how could you go through?"
"Like a snake," he would say, smiling. "Very flat and wriggling. I have
eaten of the dirt, mademoiselle."
Then he would stop and cut, very awkwardly, with his left hand.
"Go on," she would prompt him. "But they had put barbed wire there. Is
that it? So you could not get through?"
"With tin cans on it, and stones in the cans. I thought I had removed
them all, but there was one left. So they heard me."
More cutting and a muttered French expletive. Henri was not a
particularly patient cripple. And apparently there was an end to the
story.
"For goodness' sake," Sara Lee would exclaim despairingly; "so they
heard you! That isn't all, is it?"
"It was almost all," he would say with his boyish smile.
"And they shot at you?"
"Even better. They shot me. That was this one." And he would point to
his arm.
More silence, more cutting, a gathering exasperation on Sara Lee's part.
"Are you going on or not?"
"Then I pretended to be one of them, mademoiselle. I speak German as
French. I pretended not to be hurt, but to be on a reconnoissance. And
I got into the trench and we had a talk in the darkness. It was most
interesting. Only if they had shown a light they would have seen that
I was wounded."
By bits, not that day, but after many days, she got the story. In the
next trench he slipped a sling over the wounded arm and, as a Bavarian
on his way to the dressing station, got back.
"I had some trouble," he confessed one day. "Now and then one would
offer to go back with me. And I did not care for assistance!"
But sometime later there was trouble. She was four days getting to that
part of it. He had got behind the lines by that time, and he knew that
in some way suspicion had been roused. He was weak by that time, and
could not go far. He had lain hidden, for a day and part of a night,
without water, in a destroyed barn, and then had escaped.
He got into the Belgian costume as before, but he could not wear a sling
for his wounded arm. He got the peasant to thrust his helpless right
hand into his pocket, and for two days he made a close inspection of
what was going on. But fever had developed, and on the third night,
half delirious, when he was spoken to by an officer he had replied, of
all tongues, in English.