Traitors' Gate Read Free

again been reasonably fit, as he had just said to Erika, he felt no urge as yet to get back into the war.
    Standing up, he walked over to the sideboard to pour himself a second cup of coffee. As he did so, Erika surveyed him critically. He was lean and loose-limbed; of medium height but actually somewhat taller than he looked from his habit of walking with his head thrust forward, which made him appear to have a permanent stoop. His lantern-jawed face had two deep laughter lines etched like brackets on either side of his thin-lipped, resolute mouth. His eyes were brown and his eyebrows slightly bushy. From the outer end of the left one a white scar ran up towards the dark smooth hair that made a ‘widow’s peak’ in the centre of his forehead. On occasions such as the present, when something had occurred to worry him, he always reminded Erika of a very dangerous caged animal plotting to break free. After a moment she said:
    ‘Each time you go abroad means months of agony for me, and the risks you have already run are far greater than most men have to take in a war. You would have nothing with which to reproach yourself if you decided against ever going again on a secret mission. Why not accept this as a kindly decree by Fate that, for the rest of the war, your chances of coming through should be no worse than those of any other Army Officer?’
    ‘Officer, eh!’ Gregory gave a cynical laugh. ‘My sweet, you don’t understand. This is not like the old war in which chaps such as myself could volunteer at the age of seventeen and were commissioned straight from our Public Schools. Now, people are called up in batches as required—the gallant, the cowards, the intelligent and the morons—and pushed through the military machine like so many sausages. Under this crazy system it takes a year at least for even the most promising young man to become a Second Lieutenant.’
    Erica was descended from a long line of Generals and in Germany the ‘officer caste’ was still more sharply divided from the rank and file than it had ever been in Britain. Her big blue eyes wide, she stared at Gregory and exclaimed:
    ‘You don’t … you can’t mean that they would put a man like you in the ranks?’
    ‘They certainly would. Having held a commission in the last war counts for nothing in this one. And, as I am over forty, I’d probably find myself employed as a grave digger, or as an orderly in the Sanitary Corps. But I won’t have it! I’m damned if I will! I don’t mind danger but I’ve always loathed drudgery and discomfort.’
    For a moment he glowered down at the small buff form, then he tapped it angrily with his forefinger. ‘Still, I can’t ignore this. Old Pellinore must get me out of it somehow. I’d better pack a bag and take the first train to London.’

2
Dark Days for Britain
    Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust was one of those remarkable products which seem peculiar to Britain. In his youth he had been a subaltern in a crack cavalry regiment and during the Boer War he had won a well-deserved V.C. A few years later, his ill-luck at some of the little baccarat parties that friends of his gave for King Edward VII, and his generosity towards certain ladies of the Gaiety chorus, made it necessary for him to leave the Army and he accepted a seat on the Board of a small private Bank which operated mainly in the Near East.
    His acquaintances thought of him as a handsome fellow with an eye for a horse or a pretty woman, and an infinite capacity for vintage port, but very little brain—an illusion which he still did his utmost to maintain—so the Directorship had been offered to him solely on account of his social connexions. To the surprise of those concerned he took to business like a duck to water.
    Under his bluff, jovial manner there lurked a most subtlemind, and his transparent honesty seemed to have such an hypnotic effect on Orientals and Levantines that they usually failed to realise that he had got the best of the