"I should be quite ready," was Jack's reply. "But will they believe me? They didn't believe poor Jerrold, remember--and he actually held proof positive of certain traitorous acts. The whole idea of the Intelligence Department is to pooh-pooh any report furnished by a civilian. Indeed, Jerrold showed me a signed statement by a British officer whom the authorities had actually threatened to cashier because he had assisted him to investigate some night-signalling in Surrey!" "Impossible!" cried Sir Houston. "It's the absolute truth. I've had the statement in my own hands. He was an officer stationed in a town in Surrey." "Well," remarked the great pathologist. "Let us allow the past bygones to be bygones. Let us work--not in resentment of the past, but for our protection in the future. What shall we do?" The two men were silent. On the one hand they saw the fortress-wall which the War Office placed between the civilian and the man in khaki. Reports of espionage were extremely unwelcome at Whitehall. And yet how could men in khaki and assistant-provost-marshals, with their crimson brassards of special-constable or veteran volunteer conspicuousness, ever hope to cope with the clever, subtle and wary spies of Germany? The whole thing was too farcical for words. The British public, trustful of this cult of khaki and of a Cabinet who daily bleated forth "All is well!" had no knowledge, for instance, of the cleverly-laid plan of the enemy in Russia--the plot to blow up Ochta, the Russian Woolwich. Later, the English, in their ignorance of German intrigue, asked each other why no forward move was being made-- the move promised us in the spring. They knew nothing of that great disaster, so cleverly accomplished by Germany's spies, the blowing up of Ochta, that disaster which entirely crippled Russia, and which resulted, later on, in her retreat from Warsaw. It was this--alas that I should pen these lines!--which prevented the British and French from advancing during the whole spring and summer of 1915. The Russians, our gallant allies, were producing, at the Putilof works, great siege guns, bigger than any turned out from Krupp's. Yet, after Ochta had been blown up by means of a cable laid by spies under the Neva before the war, so that hardly one brick stood upon another and Petrograd had been shaken as by an earthquake in consequence, what could Russia do? She had no munitions; therefore why make guns? That act of German spies in directly crippling Russia--an act plotted and prepared ten years previously--had checked the striking power of France, and quite defeated the splendid intentions of Lord Kitchener and our own good General French.