CHAPTER XXIII

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      The Right Honourable Willoughby Johns, the very harassed Prime Minister of England, fitted on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and studied the atlas which lay before him.

      “Take a sharp pencil, Malcolm,” he invited his secretary, “and trace the frontier for me from the sea upwards.”

      The latter promptly obeyed. The map was one which had been compiled in sections and the particular one now spread out stretched from Nice to Bordighera.

      “You will find it a little irregular, sir,” he warned his chief. “The road from the sea here mounts to the official building on the main thoroughfare in a fairly straight line, but after that in the mountains it becomes very complicated. This will doubtless be the excuse the French authorities will offer in the matter of the subterranean passages.”

      “And the roads?”

      “There is a first-class road on the French side from a place called Sospel running in this direction, sir. The whole range of hills on the right-hand side is strongly fortified, but our military report, which I was studying this afternoon at the War Office with General Burns, still gives the situation here entirely in favour of an attacking force. Fawley’s latest information, however,” the secretary went on, dropping his voice, “changes the situation entirely. The new French defences, starting from this bulge here, and which comprise some of the finest subterranean work known, strike boldly across the frontier and now command all the slopes likely to be dangerous. If a copy of Fawley’s plan should reach Italy, I imagine that there would be war within twenty-four hours.”

      “Has Fawley reported any fresh movements of troops in the neighbourhood?”

      “Major Fawley himself, as you know, sir, has been in Berlin for some short time,” Malcolm replied. “So far as our ordinary sources of information are concerned, we gather that everything on the Italian side is extraordinarily quiet. The French, on the other hand, have been replacing a lot of their five-year-old guns with new Creuzots at the places marked, and trains with locked wagons have been passing through Cagnes, where we have had a man stationed, every hour through the night for very nearly a fortnight. So far as we know, however, there has been no large concentration of troops.”

      The Prime Minister studied the atlas for some minutes and then pushed it on one side.

      “Seems to me there is some mystery about all this,” he observed. “Bring me Grey’s textbook upon Monaco.”

      “I have it in my pocket, sir,” the young man confided, producing the small volume. “You will see that the French have practically blotted out Monaco as an independent State. There is no doubt that they will treat the territory in any way they wish. The old barracks at the top of Mont Agel, which used to contain quite a formidable number of men and a certain strength in field artillery, has been evacuated and everything has been pushed forward towards the frontier. It would seem that the whole military scheme of defence has been changed.”

      The Prime Minister leaned back in his chair a little wearily.

      “Telephone over to the War Office and see if General Burns is still there,” he directed. “Say I should like to see him.”

      “Very good, sir. Is there anything more I can do?”

      “Not at present. The call to Washington is through, I suppose?”

      “You should be connected in half an hour, sir.”

      “Very well. Send in General Burns the moment he arrives.”

      Henry Malcolm, the doyen of private secretaries, took his leave. For another twenty minutes the Prime Minister studied the atlas with its pencilled annotations and the pile of memoranda which had been left upon his desk. A queer, startling situation! No one could make out quite what it meant. Willoughby Johns, as he pored over the mass of miscellaneous detail which had been streaming in for the last forty-eight hours, was inclined to wonder whether after all there was anything in it. Another war at a moment’s notice! The idea seemed idiotic. He took a turn or two up and down the room, with its worn but comfortable furniture, its spacious, well-filled bookshelves. His familiar environment seemed in some way a tonic against these sinister portents…There was a tap at the door. Malcolm presented himself once more.

      “General Burns was at the Foreign Office, sir,” he announced. “He will be around in five minutes.”

      The Prime Minister nodded. He glanced at his watch. Still only seven o’clock. A telephone message from Washington to wait for and he had been up at six. He listened to the subdued roar of traffic in the Buckingham Palace Road and the honking of taxis in the park. Men going home after their day’s work, without a doubt, home to their wives and children. Or perhaps calling at the club for a cheerful rubber of bridge and a whisky and soda. What a life! What peace and rest for harassed nerves! Dash it all, he would have a whisky and soda himself! He rang the bell twice. A solemn but sympathetic-looking butler presented himself.

      “Philpott,” his master ordered, “a whisky and soda—some of the best whisky you have—and Schweppe’s soda water—no siphons.”

      “Very good, sir,” the man replied, rather startled. “Would you care for a biscuit as well, sir?”

      “Certainly. Two or three biscuits.”

      “Mr. Malcolm was saying that you had cancelled the dinner with the Cordonas Company to-night, sir.”

      “Quite right,” Willoughby Johns assented. “No time for public dinners just now. I will have something here later on after the call from Washington has been through.”

      The man took his departure only to make very prompt reappearance. The whisky and soda was excellent. The Prime Minister drank it slowly and appreciatively. He made up his mind that he would have one every night at this hour. He hated tea. It was many hours since lunch, at which he had drunk one glass of light hock. Of course he needed sustenance. All the doctors, too, just now were preaching alcohol, including his own. Nevertheless, he felt a little guilty when General Burns was ushered in.

      “Come in, General,” he welcomed him. “Glad I caught you. Take a chair.”

      Burns, the almost typical soldier, a man of quick movements and brusque speech, took the chair to which he was motioned.

      “My time is always at your disposal, sir,” he said. “I very seldom leave before nine, anyway.”

      The Prime Minister crumpled up his last piece of biscuit and swallowed it, finished his whisky and soda, and stretched himself out with the air of a man refreshed.

      “What is all this trouble down south, Burns?” he asked.

      The General smiled sardonically.

      “We leave it to you others to discover that, sir,” he replied. “We only pass on the externals to you. I don’t like the look of things myself but there may be nothing in it.”

      “You started the scare,” the Prime Minister reminded him reproachfully.

      “I beg your pardon, sir, I would not call it that,” the other protested. “What I did was to send in a report to the Foreign Office, as it was my duty to do, that there were at the present moment in Monte Carlo and Nice a larger number of Secret Service men of various nationalities than I have ever known drawn towards one spot since 1914.”

      “Who are they? Is there any report of their activities, further than these formal chits and despatches?” Willoughby Johns asked.

      “They scarcely exist by name, sir. There have been seven men from the eastern section of the newly established Italian Secret Service staying in Monte Carlo at once. They mingled freely with every one and gambled at the tables, but recently five of them are said to have disappeared completely. There