loafers against the wall got up to saunter after him; the other five honest merchants went inside, and we heard the bolt shoot into its iron slot behind them.
“How about it, Grim?” asked Goodenough then.
“Ready, sir. Will you give the order?”
We filed in a hurry down the steps into the alley, ran in a zig-zag down three passages, and reached another alley with narrow door at its end that faced the street. Grim had made every preparation. There was a heavy baulk of timber lying near the door, with rope-handles knotted into holes bored through it at intervals. The Sikhs picked that up and followed us into the street.
The mechanism of the Administration’s net was a thing to wonder at. As we emerged through the door the “peasants” who were loafing with their backs against the wall got up and formed a cordon across the street. Simultaneously, although I neither saw nor heard any signal, a dozen Sikhs under a British officer came down the street from the other direction at the double and formed up in line on our lefthand. A moment later, our men were battering the door down with their baulk of timber, working all together as if they had practised the stunt thoroughly.
It was a stout door, three inches thick, of ancient olivewood and reinforced with forged iron bands. The hinges, too, had been made by hand in the days when, if a man’s house was not his fortress, he might just as well own nothing; they were cemented deep into the wall, and fastened to the door itself with half-inch iron rivets. The door had to be smashed to pieces, and the noise we made would have warned the devils in the middle of the world.
“We shouldn’t have let them get in with any TNT at all,” said Goodenough. “They’ll touch it off before we can prevent them.”
“Uh-uh! They’re not that kind,” Grim answered. “They’ll fight for their skins. Have your gun ready, sir. They’ve laid their plans for a time-fuse and a quick getaway. They’ll figure the going may be good still if they can once get past us. Look out for a rush!”
But when the door went down at last in a mess of splinters there was no rush—nothing but silence—a dark, square, stone room containing two cots and a table, and fruit scattered all over the floor amid gray dust and fragments of cement. Grim laughed curtly.
“Look, sir!”
The fruit-baskets were on the floor by one of the cots, and the TNT containers were still in them. They had tipped out the fruit, and then run at the sound of the battering ram.
Goodenough stepped into the room, and we followed him. Beyond the table, half-hidden by a great stone slab, was a dark hole in the floor. Evidently the last man through had tried to cover up the hole, but had found the stone too heavy. The Sikhs dragged it clear and disclosed the mouth of a tunnel, rather less than a man’s height, sloping sharply downward.
“What we need now is mustard gas. Smoke ’em out,” said Goodenough.
“Might kill ’em,” Grim objected.
“That’d be too bad, wouldn’t it!”
“We could starve ’em out, for that matter,” said Grim. “But they’ve probably got water down there, and perhaps food. Every hour of delay adds to the risk of rioting. We’ve got to get this hole sealed up permanently, and deny that it was ever opened.”
“We could do that at once! But I won’t be a party to sealing ’em up alive.”
“Besides, sir, they’ve certainly got firearms, and they might just possible have one can of TNT down there.”
“All right,” said Goodenough. “I’ll lead the way down.”
“I’ve a plan,” said Grim.
He took one of the fruit-baskets and began breaking it up.
“Who has a white shirt?” he asked.
I was the haberdasher. The others, Sikhs included, were all clothed in khaki from coat to skin. Grim’s Bedouin array was dark-brown. I peeled the shirt off, and Grim rigged it on a frame of basket-work, with a clumsy pitch-forked arrangement of withes at the bottom. The idea was not obvious until he twisted the withes about his waist; then, when he bent down, the shirt stood up erect above him.
“If you don’t mind, sir, we’ll have two or three Sikhs go first. Have them take their boots off and crawl quietly as flat down as they can keep. I’ll follow ’em with this contraption. They’ll be able to see the white shirt dimly against the tunnel, and if they do any shooting they’ll aim at that. Then if the rest of you keep low behind me we’ve a good chance to rush them before they can do any damage.”
I never met a commanding officer more free from personal conceit than Goodenough, and as I came to know more of him later on that characteristic stood out increasingly. He was not so much a man of ideas as one who could recognize them. That done, he made use of his authority to back up his subordinates, claiming no credit for himself but always seeing to it that they got theirs.
The result was that he was simultaneously despised and loved— despised by the self-advertising school, of which there are plenty in every army, and loved—with something like fanaticism by his junior officers and men.
“I agree to that,” he said simply, screwing in his monocle. Then he turned and instructed the Sikhs in their own language.
“You follow last,” he said to me. “Now—all ready?”
He had a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other, but had to stow them both away again in order to crawl in the tunnel. Grim had no weapon in sight. The two Sikhs who were to lead had stripped themselves of everything that might make a noise, but the others kept both boots and rifles, with bayonets fixed, for it did not much matter what racket they made. In fact, the more noise we, who followed, made, the better, since that would draw attention from the Sikhs in front. All we had to do was to keep our bodies below Grim’s kite affair, out of the probable line of fire.
Nevertheless, that dark hole was untempting. A dank smell came out of it, like the breath of those old Egyptian tombs in which the bones of horses, buried with their masters, lie all about on shelves. You couldn’t see into it more than a yard or two, for the only light came through the doorway of the windowless room, and the tunnel led into the womb of rock where, perhaps, no light had been since Solomon’s day.
But the leading Sikhs went in without hesitation and got down on their bellies. They might have been swallowed whole for all that I heard or saw of them from that minute. You could guess why the Turks and Germans had not really craved to meet those fellows out in No-man’s-land.
Grim went in on all-fours like a weird animal, with my shirt dancing on its frame above his back. Goodenough went next, peering through that window-pane monocle like a deep-sea fish. All the rest of the Sikhs went after him in Indian file, dragging their rifle-butts along the tunnel floor and making noise enough to remind you of the New York subway.
I went in at the tail end, trying at intervals to peer around a khaki-covered Punjaub rump, alternately getting my head and fingers bruised by heels I could not see and a rifle-butt that only moved in jerks when you didn’t expect it to. My nose was bleeding at the end of ten yards.
But you couldn’t keep your distance. Whenever the men in front checked at some obstruction or paused to listen, all those behind closed up; and by the time those behind had run their noses against iron-shod heels the men in front were on their way again.
