第31章 INVASION OF ENGLAND(7)

"I'll have to commandeer this," he said."Run back to Cromer.Don't crush my men, but go like the devil!""We heard firing here," explained the officer " at the Coast Guard station.The Guard drove them back to the sea.He counted over a dozen.They made pretty poor practice, for he isn't wounded, but his gravel walk looks as though some one had drawn a harrow over it.I wonder," exclaimed the officer suddenly, "if you are the three gentlemen who first gave the alarm to Colonel Raglan and then went on to warn the other coast towns.Because, if you are, he wants your names."Ford considered rapidly.If he gave false names and that fact were discovered, they would be suspected and investigated, and the worst might happen.So he replied that his friends and himself probably were the men to whom the officer referred.He explained they had been returning from Cromer, where they had gone to play golf, when they had been held up by the Germans.

"You were lucky to escape," said the officer "And in keeping on to give warning you were taking chances.If I may say so, we think you behaved extremely well."Ford could not answer.His guilty conscience shamed him into silence.With his siren shrieking and his horn tooting, he was forcing the car through lanes of armed men.They packed each side of the road.They were banked behind the hedges.

Their camp-fires blazed from every hill-top.

"Your regiment seems to have turned out to a man!" exclaimed Ford admiringly.

"MY regiment!" snorted the officer."You've passed through five regiments already, and there are as many more in the dark places.They're everywhere!" he cried jubilantly.

"And I thought they were only where you see the camp-fires,"exclaimed Ford.

"That's what the Germans think," said the officer."It's working like a clock," he cried happily."There hasn't been a hitch.As soon as they got your warning to Colonel Raglan, they came down to the coast like a wave, on foot, by trains, by motors, and at nine o'clock the Government took over all the railroads.The county regiments, regulars, yeomanry, territorials, have been spread along this shore for thirty miles.Down in London the Guards started to Dover and Brighton two hours ago.The Automobile Club in the first hour collected two hundred cars and turned them over to the Guards in Bird Cage Walk.Cody and Grahame-White and eight of his air men left Hendon an hour ago to reconnoitre the south coast.Admiral Beatty has started with the Channel Squadron to head off the German convoy in the North Sea, and the torpedo destroyers have been sent to lie outside of Heligoland.We'll get that back by daylight.And on land every one of the three services is under arms.On this coast alone before sunrise we'll have one hundred thousand men, and from Colchester the brigade division of artillery, from Ipswich the R.H.A.'s with siege-guns, field-guns, quick-firing-guns, all kinds of guns spread out over every foot of ground from here to Hunstanton.They thought they'd give us a surprise party.They will never give us another surprise party!"On the top of the hill at Overstrand, the headwaiter of the East Cliff Hotel and the bearded German stood in the garden back of the house with the forbidding walls.From the road in front came unceasingly the tramp and shuffle of thousands of marching feet, the rumble of heavy cannon, the clanking of their chains, the voices of men trained to command raised in sharp, confident orders.The sky was illuminated by countless fires.Every window of every cottage and hotel blazed with lights.The night had been turned into day.The eyes of the two Germans were like the eyes of those who had passed through an earthquake, of those who looked upon the burning of San Francisco, upon the destruction of Messina.

"We were betrayed, general," whispered the head-waiter.

"We were betrayed, baron," replied the bearded one.

"But you were in time to warn the flotilla."With a sigh, the older man nodded.

"The last message I received over the wireless," he said, "before I destroyed it, read, 'Your message understood.We are returning.Our movements will be explained as manoeuvres.

And," added the general, "The English, having driven us back, will be willing to officially accept that explanation.As manoeuvres, this night will go down into history.Return to the hotel," he commanded, "And in two months you can rejoin your regiment."On the morning after the invasion the New York Republic published a map of Great Britain that covered three columns and a wood-cut of Ford that was spread over five.Beneath it was printed: "Lester Ford, our London correspondent, captured by the Germans; he escapes and is the first to warn the English people."On the same morning, In an editorial in The Times of London, appeared this paragraph:

"The Germans were first seen by the Hon.Arthur Herbert, the eldest son of Lord Cinaris; Mr.Patrick Headford Birrell--both of Balliol College, Oxford; and Mr.Lester Ford, the correspondent of the New York Republic.These gentlemen escaped from the landing party that tried to make them prisoners, and at great risk proceeded in their motor-car over roads infested by the Germans to all the coast towns of Norfolk, warning the authorities.Should the war office fail to recognize their services, the people of Great Britain will prove that they are not ungrateful."A week later three young men sat at dinner on the terrace of the Savoy.

"Shall we, or shall we not," asked Herbert, "tell my uncle that we three, and we three alone, were the invaders?""That's hardly correct," said Ford, "as we now know there were two hundred thousand invaders.We were the only three who got ashore.""I vote we don't tell him," said Birrell."Let him think with everybody else that the Germans blundered; that an advance party landed too soon and gave the show away.If we talk," he argued, "We'll get credit for a successful hoax.If we keep quiet, everybody will continue to think we saved England.I'm content to let it go at that."