The False Faces

The False Faces

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Title: The False Faces
Author: Vance, Louis Joseph
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THE FALSE FACES
FURTHER ADVENTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LONE
WOLF
BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
1918

CONTENTS
I Out of No Man's Land
II From a British Port
III In the Barred Zone
IV In Deep Waters
V On the Banks
VI Under Suspicion
VII In Stateroom 29
VIII Off Nantucket
IX Sub Sea
X At Base
XI Under the Rose
XII Resurrection
XIII Reincarnation
XIV Defamation
XV Recognition
XVI Au Printemps
XVII Finesse
XVIII Danse Macabre
XIX Force Majeure
XX Riposte
XXI Question

XXII Chicane
XXIII Amnesty

I
OUT OF NO MAN'S LAND
On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still,
as still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him,
where they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those
grim contests which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few
charnel yards of that debatable ground.
Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached
with the misery of hunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was
unharmed.
Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable an
undetected escape through the German lines, he had been in the open,
alternately creeping toward the British trenches under cover of darkness
and resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while
pistol-lights and star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with
ghastly glare and disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard
ribbon of earth, littered with indescribable abominations, which set
apart the combatants. When this happened, the living had no other
choice than to ape the dead, lest the least movement, detected by eyes
that peered without rest through loopholes in the sandbag parapets,
invite a bullet's blow.
Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even as
rifle-fire had grown more intermittent ... as if many waters might
quench out hate in the heart of man!
For it was raining hard--a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a
heavy atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some
malign and inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the
mutter of a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the
stuttering of machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a
dull thunder of cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering
a vast and shimmering curtain of slender lances, steel-bright,
close-ranked, between the trenches and over all that weary land. Thus
had it rained since noon, and thus--for want of any hint of
slackening--it might rain for another twelve hours, or eighteen, or

twenty-four....
The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled
and winked out in mid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness
obtained while, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap
in the British barbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down
ere daylight waned, shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequent
detours to avoid the unspeakable. Only once was his progress
interrupted--when straining senses apprised him that a British patrol
was taking advantage of the false truce to reconnoitre toward the enemy
lines, its approach betrayed by a nearing squash of furtive feet in the
boggy earth, the rasp of constrained respiration, a muttered curse when
someone slipped and narrowly escaped a fall, the edged hiss of an
officer's whisper reprimanding the offender. Incontinently he who
crawled dropped flat to the greasy mud and lay moveless.
Almost at the same instant, warned by a trail of sparks rising