The Secret War

14

Out of the past

Valerie mopped the perspiration from her face. She had given up trying to keep it powdered hours before. It vas eight o'clock at night, and they had only arrived at Jibuti at ten o'clock that morning, yet she felt as limp and washed out as if she had lived for a month under the blazing, fiery sun that burnt up the capital of French Somaliland.

Their journey had not proved too fortunate. With previous records in her mind and a supreme confidence in her abilities as an air woman, she had attempted the seventeen hundred and fifty mile flight from Alexandria in one hop, but on the previous afternoon her plane had developed engine trouble over the Red Sea and she had been forced to come down at Massawa.

The Eritrean capital had been literally crawling with Italian troops and all the auxiliaries who infest the principal base of a big military campaign. The harbour, if you could call it that, was packed with transport, Hospital ships, cruisers and submarines, which stretched long the coast as far as the eye could see. Thousands of men, looking in the distance like a swarm of ants, corked frantically upon the new mole which would protect the anchorage. Innumerable engines puffed and snorted as they drew their loads over the intricate network of light railways. Legions of blacks were unloading munitions and supplies from countless lighters at every wharf. The town itself was a positive hive of activity. Italian soldiers thronged the pavements of all the principal streets, and every one of them seemed to e hurrying somewhere. Thousands of Askaris, lithe, smartly turned out native troops, the coloured tassels in their tarbooshes lending a note of colour to the scene, marched, drilled and manoeuvred in every available open space.

Beds were not to be obtained at any price, and they had been compelled to sleep with their clothes on in the plane.

Valerie had located the trouble, and, first thing next morning, they had set off on their last four hundred miles to the south.

After Massawa, Jibuti seemed a quiet backwater yet, as the headquarters of all the neutral hangers on in the war, it was crowded to capacity.

Christopher's money and Lovelace's method of dealing with cosmopolitan innkeepers secured them two rooms in a small hotel. They at once made inquiries about Abu Ben Ibrim, and found that every guttersnipe in Jibuti knew the house of the powerful Arab. Lovelace wrote a letter mentioning Melchisedek of Alexandria and requesting an interview, It was dispatched by hand, and a reply came back that Ben Ibrim would receive them, in the cool of the evening, at nine o'clock. Through most of the day they had remained sweltering in the hotel while the inhabitants of the town apparently slept.

Owing to the intense heat, Government offices and most business houses opened at five in the morning, closed at nine, and did not open again until eight in the evening, as Lovelace told his friends, but, new to this slice of tropical Africa, Christopher and Valerie had refused to lie down during the broiling hours, and were now feeling the fatigue consequent upon their ill advised activity.

Lovelace was still upstairs dozing on his bed when, at last, the sun set and they moved out on to the terrace. For a little while they sat there sucking down iced drinks and panting for a breath of air in the close hot darkness.

Behind them the big bar which was also the only lounge of the hotel had just commenced its nightly traffic. As in other French Colonies, no colour bar was exercised, and all who could pay were welcome. The place was of the middle grade, as Lovelace had thought it imprudent to advertise their presence by attempting to secure better accommodation. A wireless had been switched on which drowned the buzz of the big refrigerator behind the bar; some couples had already started dancing; black, brown, yellow, and white men were drifting in. A few coffee coloured Eurasian girls in European clothes were present, but no white women. The honors’ of the house were being done by a brigade of black Somalis, who, naked to the waist, displayed fine shoulders and beautiful breasts. They twitched their 'hips and shook their short silk skirts provocatively as they moved among the tables, but there was nothing sordid about the spectacle. Their shrill chatter in the dialect of the port was like that of a crowd of happy children.

The only other occupant of the terrace was a tall thin man, seated alone, at a table near by. After glancing at them once or twice he rose, bowed courteously and, introducing himself as Baron Foldvar, asked if they would take pity on his loneliness by allowing him to offer them a drink.

Valerie smiled an acceptance and motioned to a vacant chair beside her. The stranger possessed a delicate aristocratic countenance with sad, grey eyes set deep finder heavy brows. A scar, running from the corner of his mouth to the left side of his chin, marked his 'sate but did not mar it.

After the Somali waiter had been summoned and a fresh round of drinks ordered Baron Foldvar inquired suavely, `Do you go to Addis Ababa, or have you just come down the line?'

'We only arrived in Jibuti this morning,' Christopher told him, 'and we're hoping to be able to transact our business here so that it won't be necessary for us to go up into the interior.'

`Indeed!' The older man raised his eyebrows. `Your case is unusual. Nine out of every ten white people in Jibuti are either coming or going from Addis in these days. The tenth only remains here because he cannot beg, borrow, or steal enough money for his ticket.'

`Are you just back or on your way up?' Valerie asked.

`I go up on tomorrow's train. An abominable trip; so I'm informed. Insolent native officials from whose persecution there is no escape except by bribery; the most disgusting food; and even the water offered in the buffets of the wayside stations quite undrinkable so that one must go with a private supply of Vichy if one would escape enteric. I have travelled much but I confess that I find the prospects of this journey particularly unalluring.'

Christopher sipped the orange juice that the waiter had just set down before him. `It sounds beastly. Thank goodness we'll be travelling by plane if we do have to go. Have you heard anything fresh about the war?'

`The vanguard of the Italian columns are reported to have entered Dessye, the Emperor's battle headquarters.'

`Is that so? If it's true, they're moving mighty rapidly. D'you think they can keep it up?'

Baron Foldvar shrugged. `It is impossible to say. Anything might happen in such a crazy war as this. When the Italians opened their campaign I am quite certain they never dreamed of achieving the swift progress they have made in the last fortnight. Now that they have initiated this lightning thrust who shall predict how far it may penetrate?'

`The Italians have changed their policy then.' Valerie leaned forward. `We know practically nothing about the actual war but you seem very well informed. Do tell us what's been going on.'

'I know very little,' their new friend replied gravely, 'but at one time I was an officer on the Imperial Austrian General Staff. Before the Great War I was for some time Assistant Military Attaché to the Austrian Embassy in London. That is why, pardon me if I seem to boast, many people have been kind enough to say that I speak very good English.'

`You do indeed,' Valerie agreed. 'But you were saying. ..'

`That as a Staff Officer it was my duty to study all problems which might give rise to future wars. Particularly with reference to Italy because, in those days, although they were both members of the Triple Alliance, the interests of Austria Hungary and Italy differed upon so many points.'

`The last twenty years have altered all that,' Christopher remarked.

`Yes, Mussolini has changed the Italian mentality a great deal. Under Fascism the national self confidence has increased out of all recognition but his influence has not been sufficient to eradicate the Italian army's memory of their defeat at Adowa in 1896. That defeat has been much exaggerated. It was largely due to the parsimonious attitude of the Government in Rome who refused to grant even one tenth of the money for the Italian expedition against Menelik that the British had voted for their General Napier when he marched against the Emperor Theodore and penetrated as far as Magdala in the previous decade.

'In actual fact, they lost less than a thousand white troops and between three and four thousand Askaris; while both performed prodigies of valour during that disastrous retreat fighting against overwhelming odds. Yet they've never been able to get rid of the idea that they were badly beaten. Perhaps that is not altogether surprising as, almost unsuspected by them, Menelik gathered together over a hundred thousand warriors secretly in the mountains and fell upon them when they were still in the initial stages of their retirement.

`In any case, that memory still dominated De Bono's policy at the opening of the present campaign. He was terrified of pushing his outposts forward even another mile unless he could support them with masses of troops. Yet he could not advance his main forces until roads were made behind them at every step to ensure the delivery to them of adequate ammunition and supplies. Hence the extraordinary slowness of the Italians initial operations. The war opened on October 3rd; by the 6th they had already avenged Adowa and a few days later they took the sacred city of Aksum, both less than twenty five miles from the Eritrean frontier. Then they stuck. It took them over a month to advance another sixty miles to Makale because they were proceeding with such extreme caution.

`Even when Marshal Badoglio took over at the end of November he failed at first to draw the best results from his General Staff's appreciation of the situation and the policy of a creeping advance in mass was continued. But the Abyssinians played into his hands. Instead of waiting, as they should have done, to ambush his columns in the precipitous gorges of the Tigre, they massed to attack him in the open.

`It was child’s play, with his modern armaments, to defeat and scatter them. Once the main bodies of the enemy had been met and routed he had little to fear in the way of hordes of fanatical warriors suddenly appearing from nowhere. Being a first class soldier he altered his policy completely and began to push his flying columns forward.

`They are still advancing. His aeroplanes spray the heights on either side of his columns, as they thrust their way onward, with mustard gas. Not to kill the miserable natives, but to make the heights untenable. A humane form of warfare if one regards it soberly since it prevents continued skirmishes which would

otherwise entail death and many casualties on both des.

`The Italians still have a long way to go and every dusty mile they cover carries them farther from their bases. If the Emperor will succeed in checking them with the masses of new troops he is still assembling, or the Italians will achieve their main objective, Addis Ababa, before the rains come, remains to be seen.' `That's the most interesting resume of the campaign I’ve heard so far,' Christopher acknowledged handsomely. `I take it you were through the European war, Baron?'

`Yes. I fought in it, of course,' the older man sighed. `A hideous tragedy which few of my generation can ever forget.'

`Did you fight against the Russians or the Italians?' 'Valerie asked.

`The Russians, in the early days; then I was taken prisoner. On that account I was also compelled to witness many of the horrors of the Russian Revolution.' `But how interesting,' Valerie exclaimed, `actually to have lived through history in the making. Won't you tell us what it was really like?'

Baron Foldvar spread out his thin, elegant hands. It is a long story and a sad one. For many people, the profiteers and so on, the war was a glorious opportunity. Even for some young men who fought it was my a marvelous adventure, but for me, it was the end of everything. If you wish I will tell . . . but no. `The private tragedy of a stranger would only bore you.'

`No, please?' Valerie insisted. 'I was only a baby t the time of the Great War but it affected all my generation tremendously and so few of us really know anything about it. Please tell us, unless speaking of our memories pains you too much.'

The Austrian smiled for the first time. `How I envy you both your youth and eagerness to hear even of terrible things if it may serve to increase your knowledge. Ah well, my own youth, at least, was unimpaired by tragedy. Twenty two years ago I was a Captain of Huzzars in Vienna.

`What a city it was in those days ! It is still beautiful although only the empty shell remains now that it is no longer the capital of an Empire but only of a Province. Then, it was the gayest, the most romantic city in the world; a perfect paradise for lovers. To drive up the hill to Grinzing in the evening and dine there, with a pretty girl, in one of the wine gardens while the musicians played Strauss beside your table and the fairy lamps twinkled in the trees above. For poor and rich alike what more had life to offer? I suppose I should be grateful that my early years were set in pleasant places and that I lived them during a peaceful well ordered epoch. How right the British statesman, Sir Edward. Grey, was when on the eve of the Great War he said “One by one the lights of Europe are going out.” There is no nation where youth has been privileged to have its fling with the same carefree happiness and security since.

`But I digress. In the autumn of 1913 I met the lady who was afterwards to be my wife. All through the winter I wooed her. Love affairs did not reach their climaxes so swiftly then because young girls of good family were very carefully chaperoned. It was at first an affair of hesitant greetings and shy confidences when we met at big gatherings in the houses of our mutual friends, Then of smuggled notes; apparently chance but, actually, carefully arranged meetings when we were riding in the Prates and stolen half hours at dusk when I clambered over the high wall of her garden.

'The Viennese women are notoriously the most beautiful in the world, perhaps through the admixture of races in the old Austro Hungarian Empire since the upper classes of them all frequented the capital; but among all those superbly beautiful women the lady of my heart was surely the most beautiful. At least I thought so and, although you may find it difficult to believe now, I was considered a very handsome young in those days; also as a Cavalry Officer in one of crack regiments who had been transferred to the General Staff I was naturally much sought after, so I had ample opportunity to meet all the loveliest girls in Vienna.

Fortunately our families were much of the same standing so the obstacles to be overcome before we could marry were mostly the products of our own imaginations. In the spring of 1914, when I screwed up courage to ask her father for an interview, he listened to my proposals with the utmost kindness and a few days later our engagement was announced. In June we were married; having received the blessing of both our families and the good wishes of a host friends. I had obtained long leave from my military duties for the honeymoon and we settled down to enjoy two utterly carefree months in the country on an estate which formed part of my patrimony.

Five weeks later I was recalled by telegram. We had been shocked and distressed by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand but, in our bliss, we had not bothered our heads about the quarrel with Serbia which followed. Indeed, we had hardly seen a paper. We were utterly absorbed in the supreme joy of possessing each other. That I should wake each morning beside my beautiful young wife seemed a miracle. The new way which she dressed her hair seemed infinitely more important than the threatening note drafted by some elderly diplomat in our foreign office.

'I left at once for Vienna. Few of us had the power realise it then, but one by one the lights of Europe re going out, a civilisation and free intercourse between free people which it had taken centuries to build was to be destroyed in one mad hour, and it does not look as if it will ever come again in our lifetime. Ten million men, at least, were earmarked for death within the next few years, although they could not know it; most of them young, healthy, happy people like myself, and not a fraction of them had the least interest in the quarrel for which they died.

`I resigned my Staff appointment in order to be with my regiment. Any young man would have done the same. But my resignation was not accepted. Instead, I was sent to a Divisional Headquarters not far from the Russian frontier. The Division was composed of Czechish soldiers. The Czechs were a subject people who had always hated Austrian rule, much as the Irish have always been resentful of English domination. Perhaps we should have been wiser to have given them some form of home rule when their Deputies pressed for it before the war. Of course, they have their own republic now, but when the war broke out they were in a ferment of discontent, and they welcomed it as a chance to gain their liberty.

'Instead of fighting for us, whole battalions of them, led by their own officers, marched over to the Russians, with all their equipment and their bands playing. We did what we could to stem the tide of desertion, but in a few hours Austrian machine guns and Austrian bullets were being used to massacre the handfuls of loyal troops with which we attempted to hold the frontier. Within three days of the opening of the war I was taken prisoner by the Russians.'

The Baron paused to drink from his glass of lager which the ice had long since melted. Valerie eased her position a little; even now the sultry night had come her garments were still sticking to her. After a moment the Austrian went on

`It was not so bad at first. Some sense of chivalry still existed between the officers on both sides. The normal feelings of decency and humanity inherent in most men of every nation had not then been destroyed by the hideous hate propaganda which later turned honourable opponents into savages,

`The Russians sent me under escort with a number of other prisoners to Kiev. There I endeavoured to get news of my young wife. I could learn nothing definite, but from prisoners who were captured later I heard rumours that, in the national emergency, she had become a nurse and was tending the wounded on the Polish front.

`During those awful empty weeks of dull prison routine the one overwhelming craving which obsessed me was to get back to ,her. The war had not settled down sufficiently for a regular service of prisoners' letters and parcels to be established. She wrote to me, I don't doubt, but I never received any of her letters. In those early days of the war everything was chaotic. Our only news was hearsay rumours that the German drive on Paris had been checked, but that the Russian steamroller was lumbering down towards Berlin; rumours of our friends fighting on many fronts and that this or that relation had taken up some kind of national work. I could not stand the uncertainty and inaction, so I determined to escape.

`I will not weary you with details of those feverish days of preparation for the attempt, or the excitement of the actual dash for liberty, which I made with two other officers. We got away, but we were caught again two days later.

`As a punishment we were separated and each of us transferred to a harsher form of captivity. I was sent to Omsk in Siberia a little ugly town that, although it was the centre of a Government controlling thousands of square miles of territory, seemed to be composed only of many hundred shoddy, wooden buildings scattered over a great area.

`It always seemed to be raining there, except when it was snowing; and in winter the cold was intense. To appreciate the torture that cold can be you must not think of winter in Switzerland, where you are well fed and wrapped in warm furs, but of a bleak plain where the wind cuts like a knife, through garments worn paper thin, to an ill nourished body.

'Month after month dragged by. There was hardly a soul in the prison who could speak more than a few words of my language. I learnt Russian, but my spirit grew numb from continuous physical discomfort and the knowledge that I was many thousands of miles from home. In that remote place no post ever reached me, and news of the war itself was of the vaguest. All one could do was to cling to life and hope on that the war would soon be over. I could learn nothing of my wife, but all through those dark days the thought of her warm loveliness and our eventual reunion was the one thing which sustained me.

`The revolution in St. Petersburg, when it came, had no effect upon us prisoners. We heard tell of it, of course, but the Whites, who represented the old regime, dominated an area as big as Austria Hungary, of which Omsk was nearly in the centre. The Ural Mountains and vast tracts of unmapped forest lay between it and the cities where the Reds had their first successes. The dreary round of prison life went on much as before.

`When the news of the peace of Brest Litovsk filtered through we appealed to be sent home; but in the meantime spasmodic outbreaks had been taking place from one end of Russia to the other. The Red virus was spreading. Every town and village had its secret committee. The White officers were wholly occupied with their attempts to check the Revolution; they had no time to spare for the repatriation of prisoners or the means to send them home even if they had wished to do so.

`Within six months we had half a dozen different Governors. They could do nothing but tell us that, for the time being, we must stay where we were. There was a revolt among the prisoners, engineered in secret by the Bolsheviks, who were out to make any sort of trouble for the Whites. Realising the root from which the mutiny sprang, the authorities acted with the utmost brutality. Scores of the prisoners were shot down and the rest of us were herded into kennels so that a handful of troops could keep us covered with machine guns and prevent a repetition of the outbreak.

'Shortly afterwards fighting began in the streets of Omsk itself. For several days it was indecisive, but in the end the Reds gained the upper hand. All my fellow prisoners were then released except the officers. As representatives of the old order we were condemned to die.

`Those ruffians shot down my friends in batches. I dropped before they fired and feigned death. I allowed myself to be carted off and buried alive in a hastily dug trench with the bodies of the others. I nearly died of" suffocation, but, when the murderers had gone, I clawed my way out through the thin layer of earth they had shoveled on top of us. Then I started to walk home.

`I found the whole country in ferment. The hand of every man was raised against his brother. I dared not go near a town of any size, because, by that time, the Reds were in possession of all the railways.

I took to the forests, living on berries and roots and the occasional charity of solitary peasants that I encountered who seemed as utterly bewildered as myself. No one knew what was happening outside his immediate area. Everyone was terrified of strangers. The accepted policy was to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Reds and Whites were hated with equal intensity, and both were murdered by the country people on every possible occasion when they thought they would be able to escape reprisals. I lived in a nightmare from which it seemed that I should never waken as, week after week; I progressed a few miles farther south.

'Often I had to make detours which delayed me many days. Once I built a raft to float myself across a broad river, but of its name I have no idea. Countless hours were wasted in hiding from ragged bands of desperate looking men. Sometimes sheer starvation compelled me to go into villages, and the sights I saw then do not bear a full description. Wholesale massacre seemed to have depopulated the land. Every hamlet had its quota of naked corpses rotting where they lay, and the survivors must have fled to the forests or the mountains. I saw women with their breasts cut off and bayonets left sticking in their swollen stomachs. Men with their eyes gouged out and their finger nails torn away. Little children who had been clubbed to death or impaled upon wooden stakes. If there is a God in Heaven He will call the Bolsheviks to account for the unbelievable barbarities they perpetrated during those years in order to achieve a political idea. Liberal minded theorists in every country are seeking to excuse them now. The human memory is short, atrocities are soon forgotten, but the blood and tortured agony of countless thousands of their own people still cry out against them, and any country which tolerates their disciples lays itself open to the possibility of similar horrors. They are at work in India today, and Spain. At any time there ...'

The Baron broke off and passed his hand across his eyes. `Forgive me. It is all years ago now; but when I was in Russia I saw such terrible sights with my own eyes that I am apt to get over excited when I think of what may be in store for other countries. Where was I?'

`You were telling us of your journey home,' Valerie said almost in a whisper.

'Ah, yes! Well, I lived as a wild beast, and, like an animal, I shunned all contact with men, convinced that the whole race had degenerated into packs of bloodthirsty hunters. I was still over five hundred miles from the old Austrian frontier when I sickened and was stricken down with cholera.

`I was wrong to think that charity was dead in the hearts of all men. I owe my life to a moisjhik who found me and carried me to his shack. He and his family nursed me through the crisis of the fever. I recovered, but every one of them caught the cholera from me and died. I was so weak that, after I had buried them, I had to lie up there for a long time before I could begin to stagger south again. The adventures which befell me and the hardships I encountered would take a dozen nights to tell, but the one thought which braced me up was that if only I could keep going I should eventually get home and find my beautiful young wife again. At last, a lean, starved skeleton, I crept out of Russia.

'But the country that I entered was not a part of Austria as it used to be. It was a new Republic where the people were hostile to Austrians and refused to speak German or succour a German speaking stranger. The war was long since over, but the whole of Central Europe was still in turmoil and racial feeling was running high. The peasantry were little better off than those I had left on the other side of the frontier. True, their homes were not being burnt over their heads by merciless Commissars who accused them of giving help to the Whites, but their barns were empty, thousands of them were dying from the influenza plague which ravaged Europe after the war, the breasts of the nursing mothers were bone dry, their feverish eyes buried deep in their emaciated faces, while the children who survived on starvation rations were twisted with rickets and prematurely old. The people had the same wolfish look that I had grown to know so well in Russia, yet they were too weak and apathetic to do much work upon their farms. It seemed as if they were just waiting for death to take them; convinced that things had gone too far for the world ever to right itself again.

`When I reached Austria, a filthy, broken down, penniless tramp, no one to whom I spoke would believe my story and lend me money for a train fare. Starvation was rampant there also; work at a standstill, and everybody bankrupt. I had to tramp even the last hundred miles until I entered Vienna.

`I went straight to my house. It was empty, shut up, and to let. For a little I just walked about the streets not knowing what to do. In spite of all that I had seen while begging my way through the country, I had somehow expected my house and servants to be ready to receive me if I could only reach the end of my journey. The blow was a terrible one and I almost lost the last remnant of sanity which lingered in my brain; already half crazed from years of acute privation. Then I thought of Sacker's Hotel.

'Old Madame Sacker, who owned the place, was a great character. Every member of the Austrian nobility before the war was known to her, and many of us counted her a dear friend. She is dead now, but her hotel is still, I think, the most comfortable in Vienna. Its cuisine has a European reputation, and there is that personality about the place which makes it far more attractive than some of its larger rivals. I went to Sacker's and, before the waiter could stop me, slipped through the bar, which adjoins the street, to her private office on the ground floor.

'Dear soul, she knew me, once I gave my name, in spite of my ragged beard and tattered, mud soiled clothing. I can see her now as she wept over me and sought to comfort me. When I had told her my story I collapsed from strain and weakness. She had me bathed and put to bed, then sent for my friends. For some days I was delirious and for weeks I hovered between life and death. At last I was fit to be moved, but she would not allow me to talk about my bill. Before the war she had amassed a great fortune; afterwards she gave it all away in credit to old clients like myself whom the war had ruined. She was a great woman whom I am very proud to have known. when I was fit to go about again, I found that everything was changed. It was a new world that I did not understand. Little by little my exhausted brain began to take in all that had happened in my long absence and some aspects of the almost unbelievable situation. I was still Baron Foldvar, but I had no money, no estates. My family had believed me dead; a cousin had succeeded to my properties for a time. Later, when the Exchange collapsed, he had sold them all for the price of a ticket to America. He was living there in the most desperate poverty, so rumour said, barely supporting life by giving German lessons.

There was nothing to be done. Old friends that I met were in a similarly unhappy situation. Some had become professional dancing partners, others guides. They were glad to take any job which would secure them one square meal a day. Their women I shudder to think of it, but more than half of those delicately nurtured girls I had known as a young man were living as cocottes; often to keep destitute parents or husbands and brothers disabled in the war who could not find employment at any price. That was what the war did for my beloved Austria.

`Naturally, even during my illness, the thought uppermost in my mind had been my wife. Nobody had seen or heard of her for years. My friends either would not or could not tell me what had become of her. At last I traced her. She was in the paupers' ward of a public asylum.

`I went at once to see her. It was very terrible. She did not know me. I did not know her. She was about twenty six then, but she had the appearance of a woman of sixty. Her head was covered with bedraggled wisps of grey white hair; her face was lined and shrunken like that of an old crone. She spat at me. They told me that she spat all the time at any man who came near her. That little, old, shrunken thing who, only a few years before, had been a lovely girl in the first flush of her beauty, reviled me in the most foul and abominable language. Her mind was utterly gone. She was dead; is dead as any living creature could ever be. Only the

ill kept shrivelled husk of her remained, and that was quite unrecognizable.

'Later, they told me her history. In the Russian breakthrough during the first winter of the war, when a large section of our front gave way, she, and the inmates of the hospital to which she was attached, had been captured. She fell into the hands of the Cossacks. They looted the stores and got drunk on the brandy. Their officers could not restrain them. She was only twenty more beautiful than words can say, and our marriage six months before had 'brought her beauty to its zenith.

`How many of them there were I, mercifully, shall never know. She lived through it; but when our troops advanced again and drove the Russians back they found her stark naked on the floor of the hospital canteen, unconscious. Her hair had gone white in a single night and her brain had given way. When she came round she was a raving lunatic.'

As the Baron ceased speaking, Valerie shuddered. 'It just doesn't bear thinking about,' she said softly, 'that such things are possible in our vaulted civilisation. Poor dear and you. I just can't say any more. It's too utterly terrible.'

The Baron shrugged. `Please do not distress yourself. It all happened so long ago and mine was only one of a hundred thousand tragedies which occurred when you were a little, laughing child playing with your dolls.'

`Good God!' exclaimed Christopher. `But don't you see that the same horrors may engulf us again at anytime.,

'Of course,' the Austrian laughed and finished up his beer. 'Life goes on much as it always did. The dictators and the politicians of every country continue to make fresh promises which do not mean a thing. The nonsense talked at the League has caused this miserable population of blacks to defy the power of modern Italy. Mussolini was quite willing to leave the Emperor on his throne providing he would accept Italian advisers and allow the country to be properly policed and civilized. The Abyssinians would never have fought unless they had believed that Britain was coming to their aid. She won't, of course, and in consequence countless hideous tragedies which could have been avoided are being enacted as we sit here. But the politicians will dine no less well tonight in London, Paris and Geneva.'

`You're a cynic,' remarked Christopher. 'In view of what you've been through one can't blame you, but it seems strange that you should be able to laugh about the wickedness and stupidity which initiate such ghastliness.'

Why? Laughter, even though it be hollow, is the only thing left for people like myself. When I go up to Addis Ababa tomorrow , . ,' The Baron broke off as Lovelace suddenly appeared beside their table.

The two men were introduced. The elderly Austrian bowed courteously and pressed the Englishman to name any drink he would care to take with them.

'Sorry,' Lovelace replied rather curtly. `Another time perhaps. I'm afraid, too, that I have to break up the party, Valerie, my dear, I overslept a little and it's a quarter to nine already. We must be off.'

They said good bye to the sad faced Baron and, directly they were out of earshot, Lovelace snapped at Christopher: 'Did that fellow tell you anything about himself?,

'Yes, the history of his war days. He was a prisoner in Russia and had the most ghastly time. I wish all the people we're up against could be forced to go through those six years of his life.'

'The poor dear,' Valerie added. 'I could hardly keep from crying openly when he told us about his wife.'

Lovelace laughed angrily. "Lies, all of it, I'll bet a monkey. He was telling the tale to gain your sympathy and get in with you so that he could learn our plans.

You couldn't know it, but we've been run to earth again. The last time I saw that chap he was talking to the porter at the gate of a house you've good cause to remember just outside Athens. He's one of Zarrif’s men.'