Summary
A grizzled veteran of Cuba’s fevered battlefields, Phil Kelly returns to a homeland that greets him with side-glances instead of parades. While mothers pin flowers on other boys, he lingers in shadows, conscripted by a fledgling intelligence bureau that trades uniforms for secrets. Overnight the neighborhood’s golden son becomes the ‘slacker’ who will not enlist, breaking Rose Lockely’s heart under a barrage of whispered contempt. Yet beneath the blackness of taverns and dockfront warehouses, Kelly infiltrates a Teutonic cell run by the suave, monocled Karl Shamme and his American turncoat shadow John Harris. In a candle-lit backroom that smells of brass polish and damp coal, he learns of torpedoes aimed at packed troopships. One coded telegram later, an entire convoy steams past the wolf-pack untouched, and Berlin’s strategists howl for the unknown traitor in their midst. To unmask him, they dangle the ultimate lure: a pilot’s badge in the Kaiser’s Luftstreitkräfte. Kelly crosses the Atlantic inside a crate marked ‘aircraft spares,’ lands in the Rhineland under the name ‘Feldmann,’ and takes to the clouds in a Fokker the color of pewter. On a dawn reconnaissance he buzzes over No-Man’s-Land, drops a canister that maps the hour and weight of an impending German push, then vanishes into the fog of flak. Shamme, scenting duplicity, drags him back to a fortress courtyard where the firing squad’s greatcoats gleam like wet beetles. Shells from an American long-range gun interrupt the ritual; masonry erupts, the world tilts, and Kelly wakes to Rose’s hands—no longer delicate but battlefield-steady—pressing bandages to his chest. Love, presumed murdered by gossip, has outrun artillery to claim him.
Synopsis
Phil Kelly, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, serves as an American spy during World War I unknown to his mother, fiancée Rose Lockely and friends, who sadly question his loyalty when he fails to enlist. German agents Karl Shamme and John Harris invite Phil to a secret meeting, where he learns of German plans to sink several Allied transports. Phil saves the transports and then is sent to Germany posing as a German aviator. After flying over American lines to warn the Allies of an impending large-scale German offensive, Phil is discovered by Shamme and sentenced to death. Shortly before he is to be shot, Americans bombard the area where he is imprisoned. Although injured in the battle, he is rescued and nursed back to health by Rose.
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