starving condition at Steeple Bumpstead. How he got there nobody knows.
He said he had set out to walk to where the noise of the guns seemed to
be, and had gone on walking. Bennett Burleigh, that crafty old
campaigner, had the sagacity to go by Tube. This brought him to
Hampstead, the scene, it turned out later, of the fiercest operations,
and with any luck he might have had a story to tell. But the lift stuck
half-way up, owing to a German shell bursting in its neighbourhood, and
it was not till the following evening that a search-party heard and
rescued him.

The rest--A. G. Hales, Frederick Villiers, Charles Hands, and the
others--met, on a smaller scale, the same fate as Edgar Wallace. Hales,
starting for Tottenham, arrived in Croydon, very tired, with a nail in
his boot. Villiers, equally unlucky, fetched up at Richmond. The most
curious fate of all was reserved for Charles Hands. As far as can be
gathered, he got on all right till he reached Leicester Square. There
he lost his bearings, and seems to have walked round and round
Shakespeare's statue, under the impression that he was going straight
to Tottenham. After a day and a-half of this he sat down to rest, and
was there found, when the fog had cleared, by a passing policeman.

And all the while the unseen guns boomed and thundered, and strange,
thin shoutings came faintly through the darkness.




Chapter 10

THE TRIUMPH OF ENGLAND