laid flat against his silken head, in token of strong contempt,
he turned his back on the Sergeant and walked away.

Which was Bruce's method of showing what he thought of a human
fool who would give him a command and who would then hold so
tightly to him that the dog could hardly carry out the order.



CHAPTER V The Double Cross

In the background lay a landscape that had once been beautiful.
In the middle distance rotted a village that had once been alive.
In the foreground stood an edifice that had once been a church.
The once-beautiful landscape had the look of a gigantic
pockmarked face, so scored was it by shell-scar and crater. Its
vegetation was swept away. Its trees were shattered stumps. Its
farmsteads were charred piles of rubble.

The village was unlike the general landscape, in that it had
never been beautiful. In spite of globe-trotters' sentimental
gush, not all villages of northern France were beautiful. Many
were built for thrift and for comfort and for expediency; not for
architectural or natural loveliness.

But this village of Meran-en-Laye was not merely deprived of what
beauty it once might or might not have possessed. Except by
courtesy it was no longer a village at all. It was a double row
of squalid ruins, zig-zagging along the two sides of what was
left of its main street. Here and there a cottage or tiny shop or