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."
I hesitated to interrupt Sir Henry. But he had got my interest
desperately worked up about what seemed to me great unjointed
segments of this affair, that one couldn't understand till they
were put together.
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