But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to
happen on June 15th. I would never have grasped this if I hadn't
once happened to meet a French staff officer, coming back from
West Africa, who had told me a lot of things. One was that, in
spite of all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real
working alliance between France and Britain, and that the two
General Staffs met every now and then, and made plans for joint
action in case of war. Well, in June a very great swell was coming
over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a
statement of the disposition of the British Home Fleet on mobilization.
At least I gathered it was something like that; anyhow, it was
something uncommonly important.
But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London--
others, at whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call
them collectively the 'Black Stone'. They represented not our Allies,
but our deadly foes; and the information, destined for France, was
to be diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used, remember--
used a week or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes,
suddenly in the darkness of a summer night.
This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a
country inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that
hummed in my brain as I swung in the big touring-car from glen to glen.
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