In 1915 the Germans had followed much the same procedure. Although the way had been almost clear for a direct march on Paris, instead of wheeling down on to the French capital General von Kluck, who had commanded the right wing of the German Army, had suddenly turned west in an endeavour to seize the Channel ports before they could be reinforced from England.
In doing so he made the cardinal error of defying the first rule of strategy, which is that a commander should never march his troops across the front of an unbroken enemy. Von Kluck's mistake had been due to the fact that he believed that he had broken the British at Mons and Le Cateau, and shattered them so severely that it would be quite impossible for them to take the offensive for many weeks to come; but, as it turned out, the British were by no means beaten. Together with the French Army which General Gallieni had rushed by omnibus and taxi-cab from Paris, they had faced about and, flinging their whole weight against Von Kluck's exposed flank, achieved the victory of the Marne. That battle had robbed the Kaiser of both Paris and the Channel ports and, in the estimation of the most far-sighted strategists, deprived Germany once and for all of any hope of ever achieving complete victory, by giving time for the British Empire to mobilise its vast resources before France could be put out of the war.
It seemed to Gregory that a very similar situation was now developing, and that if Gamelin threw his reserves in at the right moment he ought to be able to take this new German thrust in the flank and perhaps roll the German Armies up in confusion right back out of Belgium, as swiftly as they had poured into it.
A small news item stated that Marshal Petain, the eighty-four-year-old hero of Verdun, had joined the French Government as its Vice-President the previous night, and that, too, seemed a good omen, as the leadership of this great veteran of the last World War was well calculated to strengthen the resistance of the French troops.
Gregory sat there drinking for the best part of an hour and a half before he saw a Colonel come in; immediately the Colonel sat down with some other officers he got up and strolled out of the lounge.
Crossing the hall to the cloakroom he produced a fifty-franc note from his pocket, handed it to the elderly woman who was checking-in the coats and said casually: 'All the pages seem to have run away, so I must trouble you to slip out and buy me a rubber sponge and a shaving-stick.'
The woman looked at him in surprise and murmured: 'It is not my business to run errands, Monsieur.'
'Do as you're told!' snapped Gregory, suddenly changing his mild manner for that of the brutal invader.
'But, Monsieur,' she protested, 'I am in charge of the coats and the things that people have left here.'
'Do as you're told!' he repeated harshly. 'You Belgians must learn to take orders from your betters without argument.'
'Oui, Monsieur, oui,' the poor woman exclaimed nervously, and as she hurried away Gregory called after her: 'When you get back you'll find me in the lounge.'
Immediately she had disappeared he left the counter over which the coats were thrust and, walking a few paces down a side-passage, entered the door of the cloakroom. Most of the coats there were the field-grey great-coats of German officers; each had been neatly folded and placed in a large pigeon-hole.
Gregory ran his eye swiftly over what appeared to be the most recent additions to the collection, as they were low down in the rack, and after pulling out two he discovered the Colonel's. Producing his pocket-knife he swiftly cut the rank badges from the shoulders.
Next he pulled out several other officers' coats one after the other, jabbed his penknife into them, making ugly slits, tore off buttons or badges and thrust them back into their pigeon-holes. The whole job was accomplished in less than five minutes, then he strolled back to his table in the lounge, where the old woman found him when she returned with the sponge and shaving-soap.
Thanking her with a haughty nod he tossed her five francs and sat on there for another few minutes; then he went upstairs and proceeded to affix the Colonel's rank-badges to the shoulders of his own tunic in place of those of the Uber-Lieutenant. There was no reason whatever why anyone should suspect him of the theft as he had camouflaged it so skilfully by mutilating a number of other coats as well as the Colonel's. The cloakroom woman would excuse herself to their infuriated owners by saying that she had been compelled to leave her post to run an errand for another officer and the damage would undoubtedly be attributed to some unknown Belgian who had chosen to express his hatred of the Germans by this petty malice. The great thing was that now that he had secured both a passably fitting uniform and the right rank-badges he was all set to resume his activities as Oberst-Baron von Lutz once more.
After eating his lunch in a nearby restaurant, to avoid any chance of being involved in the scene which was certain to ensue when his victims reclaimed their coats, he spent the afternoon in the main streets of Brussels and at the railway station, carefully noting the regimental, divisional and corps badges of the officers and men whom he saw so that he could get a good idea as to which units were apparently being quartered in Brussels and which were passing through to the front. The battle, he noted, seemed to have drifted further west since the previous night, although the British heavies were still spasmodically shelling the station and certain road junctions outside the town. By evening he felt that he was sufficiently well-informed to enter into conversation with some of the German officers, and for that purpose he made a round of such bars as had reopened.
During the six days that followed, Gregory slipped into an uninspired routine. The husk of the man was still there, as he stuck grimly to his determination to absorb himself in work, and every moment of his waking hours was conscientiously spent in restaurants, cafes and bars, wherever large numbers of German officers were gathered together; but it seemed that the shock of Erika's death had numbed his brain and temporarily robbed him of all initiative.
After a comparatively brief stupor Brussels had gradually come to life again. Owing to the petrol restrictions imposed by the Germans and the dislocation of Belgian industry the traffic in the capital was still far below normal, in spite of the many German Army vehicles that were constantly passing through the streets, and the bulk of the civil population had the subdued, anxious air of people who had suffered a great bereavement— as indeed many of them had; but nearly all the shops were open again and the whole centre of the town was thronged with the thousands of Germans who were passing through or now quartered in Brussels.
Gregory found no difficulty whatever in entering into casual conversation with scores of officers each day and despite standing orders that they should not mention troop movements or casualties, even among themselves, the great majority of them ignored these regulations to discuss all phases of the war with the pseudo Staff-Colonel without the least restraint.
In those six days he learnt enough about individual units, and how they had fared in Hitler's victory drive, to fill half a dozen dossiers; but the trouble was that none of the people he contacted were high enough up to be in a position to give away anything of major importance. He wanted to unearth something really useful before leaving Brussels in an attempt to get it through to British G.H.Q. or Sir Pellinore, and such items about contemplated operations as he did succeed in picking up were on each occasion ante-dated and rendered useless by the extraordinary swiftness of the German advance.