The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (16 page)

Do not ask me to explain why it was that the next time I visited the straw-thatched hut in the ravine I should leave on the rickety little table the only book of poetry I ever carried during the war – a small, leather-bound edition of Omar Khayyám.
⁶
All that I know is that it seemed to me the only and natural thing to do; and I can still recall very vividly the excitement I felt when, a night or two later, I crept away from my patrol to see if the exchange had been accepted. Yes, the table was quite empty – quite empty except for the same innocent stump of candle. And then I suddenly noticed a certain peculiarity about that candle. Instead of standing erect, as I first saw it, it was now lying on its side, and trailing away from the wick was a long line of grease spots, stretching not only across the table, but half-way across the floor to where lay a large, flat boulder. In a flash the thought came to me that I was intended to lift that boulder; and two minutes later, hands quivering with excitement and heart throbbing against my ribs, I was eagerly deciphering, as a raw youth might read his first love-letter, the curiously stilted, Latin-looking hand of a man who told me that, although born a Bulgar, and now fighting as a Bulgar, he had spent the greater part of his life in America, where he had learned to understand and appreciate English art and literature beyond all other.

That letter still lies before me – one of the dozen, tattered,
carefully hoarded pages I have just revealed to Joan; but little purpose could be served, I am afraid, by quoting it in full. He makes great fun, I see, because, above all poets, I should choose as my grand consoler in the war an old Persian who died eight hundred years ago. ‘I think you must be very, very English,' he writes. ‘I do not wonder that the
Rubáiyát
so appeals to you. You English like to think yourselves stolid, unshakeable and imperturbable; but how much of this, I sometimes wonder, is due to some curious kink of Oriental fatalism about you?' And then there is the letter in which he reflects on the mutually futile, bloody butchery that went on all round us in those sublime spring evenings of that mournful year of 1917. Bitter, searing things he writes, as only a man can write who has recently returned from ghastly, naked realities. But I will not trouble you with these. Poor Dimitri! To quote them now would be to mock him.

I leave it entirely to the psychologists to explain the strange compelling attraction, the almost romantic glamour, that somehow pervaded this friendship of ours, right from the very beginning. Times there must have been, of course, when both of us must have reflected that what we were doing was utterly wrong and deceitful: that we were committing a crime for which, had they discovered it, the countries whose uniforms we wore would immediately have had us shot, and buried like so much loathsome carrion; and yet, speaking for myself, I can only say that always uppermost in my mind was a feeling of stupendous glamour about our association – heightened a hundredfold, I suppose, because only two people in the world knew of it. And the very fact that it was illicit, I think, only grew in time to be a still further attraction. I began to understand, I am afraid, something of the irresistible lure that men have felt in illicit dealing and illicit love, ever since the world began. I am persuaded to think, indeed, that there were many ways in which this association between Dimitri and myself resembled very much an illicit love affair. All that I seemed to live for, at that time, was the weekly letters, hidden under the large, flat boulder in the little straw-thatched hut; and at all sorts of odd moments during the day I would find myself staring across
that twenty-miles-wide valley picturing, somewhere on those opposite hills, the writer of them – wondering what he was doing and whether he ever similarly wondered about me.

And then, as time went on, it seemed that letters would no longer suffice; we began to make gifts to one another. I started by directing attention to a small box of cigarettes and a packet of chocolate that might be found hidden in the hollow of a certain fig-tree a dozen yards farther down the ravine; he responded by leaving me a bunch of grapes, of a small black variety I have never known surpassed for sweetness. Then the gifts no longer sufficed: Dimitri began to talk of photographs – ‘civilian preferred', as he expressed it. For a long time I hesitated about that. Either of us, I pointed out, might at any time be killed, and to be found with enemy photographs in our possession might lead to an infamy which certainly neither of us deserved. But in the end I yielded; and even now, as I write, there stares mutely, half-defiantly up at me from the midst of the tattered letters the picture of a tall, rather lanky sort of youth, with that peculiarly elusive kind of face we are inclined to call ‘temperamental', and with a mass of jet black hair brushed abruptly back from his forehead.

Only one thing remained for us now, of course, and that was to meet; but both of us, I think, shrank from mentioning this. For here, it seemed, we reached the one great forbidden sin: the pitch, once touched, that must inevitably defile. The wonder was, I often thought, that we did not meet by accident, and one night, I remember, we nearly did meet by accident. For some reason or other Dimitri seems to have been unusually indiscreet. When within twenty yards of the hut I could see the tiniest glimmer of light piercing through the door, which had evidently been closed with insufficient care. Then the light suddenly went out, and a minute later I heard footsteps moving towards the opposite end of the ravine, and a soft musical whistle mournfully mingling with the melancholy croaking of the frogs. The tune was Tschaikovsky's ‘Chanson Triste'. For fully a quarter of an hour I must have remained there and listened, a cold sweat breaking over me lest on his return journey he should run into my patrol, whose duty (as, indeed, it was mine) would
be either to take him prisoner or to kill him. But nothing happened.

Quietly I stole into the hut and sought for my usual letter under the large flat boulder. It amounted to nothing more than a note: ‘Shall be going from here end of this week,' he had scribbled; ‘hope we shall meet sometime.' What those words may convey to you – set out, as you will see them, in cold, matter-of-fact print – I do not know. I only know that as I stood there in that dull, flickering candle-light, and with the guns of the town ringing greedily, unappeasingly in my ears, there only seemed one course open to me.

‘We must meet now, Dimitri,' I wrote. ‘Wednesday, midnight. Come, I shall be here. I shall not fail.'

Sometimes I find myself believing that hidden away somewhere in this stricken, blighted world lies some grim, smirking God of War whose awful charge it is to keep inviolate the relentless, age-long tenets of his creed. The fact remains that I never did meet Dimitri – not, at least, in the manner I had suggested. A thousand times my mind must have rehearsed, and endured again, the crowded incident of that tragic Wednesday – the wild, poignant fluctuation of it all: the glorious elation at our imagined meeting, the unspeakably abysmal depths of its realization. And a thousand times still, I am afraid, my mind must rehearse and endure it again.

Almost with the fastidiousness of a woman preparing to meet her lover you see me that Wednesday afternoon pottering about my little dugout, and paying what little attention I could to my personal appearance, my heart throbbing the while its mad, unrestrainable song of secret exultation. Emperors, Prime Ministers, Commanders, not even the ‘Bloody Beast of War' itself, I sing to myself, can keep Dimitri and me – apostles of the new world that is to arise from all this crimson chaos – from meeting. Then, almost more quickly than I can write it down, the blow fell. Ryan suddenly came blundering into my dugout.

‘Heard?' he said.

‘Heard what?' I demanded.

‘Stunt on,' he answered. ‘Patrol's going out to-night with a definite job on. Going out to see if we can get hold of a “Johnny”,
⁷
or nobble him. Don't know whether you've ever seen it, old man, but in one of the ravines down there, there's a little straw-thatched hut. Somehow had my suspicions about that hut for a long time; thought I saw a light there once, but wasn't quite sure. But other night not only saw light but saw a “Johnny” too – passed within ten yards of me, other side of some trees, whistling away as cool as a cucumber. So surprised, didn't know what the 'ell to do. Frightened to say anything about it at first; and then I thought I'd miss out that bit about being only ten yards away and tell the OC that I'd observed a whole outpost of 'em concentrating on this hut. “What time was this?” says the Old Man, as keen as mustard. “Somewhere about midnight, sir,” I said. “Right-o,” says the Old Man, “we'll give 'em outpost to-night.”'

The glass by which I had been shaving threw back at me the ashen, livid impotence of my face. What happened in the next minute or two I cannot exactly say, but as soon as ever I decently could, I think, I forced my way out of the dugout, and stumbled half-blindly to where I could gaze, as I had gazed a hundred times before, across that twenty-miles-wide valley, over which Nicolas Dimitri, unless I could stop him, must shortly march to his death – and die thinking that I, the man whom he had hailed as an affinity of a nobler, cleaner world, had lured him to that death. Unless I could stop him! But how could I stop him? Even if it were possible for me to get to him I had not the slightest idea where to go. For that had always been an unwritten law of honour between us: we knew of no destination other than the little straw-thatched hut. All that I knew was that he was somewhere over there, somewhere spread over twenty miles, and unless I could stop him to-night he would be killed – thinking himself as surely killed by me as though mine were the hand that pierced a dagger through his heart.

I will not harass you with all the frenzied detail of that night. Only one agony seemed to be spared to me – and that was that, instead of being sent with the party actually attacking the hut, I was detailed to assist in cutting off any escape at the far end of the ravine. Of my reflections as we trailed down the hill into
the valley that night I am afraid I can tell you very little. I do not think I had any. Why, I don't know; but somehow I seem to have decided quite definitely that Dimitri would be killed, so that my mind became blank and numbed, as a man's mind becomes numbed on the funeral journey of a very dear relative. I do not seem to have been aware of anything until, after we had been waiting at the end of the ravine for about half an hour, a dozen rifle shots rang out. Then immediately the stupor left me and I raced up the ravine.

‘Too late, old man.' Ryan met me and laughed into my face. ‘Only one of 'em, but would persist in fighting. Fought like 'ell. Got it clean in the stomach – two places, poor beggar! Peg out any minute. Got a fag on you?'

Less than a dozen yards away, lying in the centre of the ravine, along which, less than five minutes ago, he had raced like a hunted beast, I could see him dying – not dying as the war artists so sinfully and successfully paint men dying, but in all the vulgar agony of a badly butchered animal.

He had just been feebly gulping at a bottle of water held to his lips by a stretcher-bearer when the moonlight fell on my face, and I could see that he knew me. A minute later and he was dead – but in that minute there came over his face such a look as I do not remember having seen on any human face before. The stretcher-bearer, I could see, accepted it as simply the dying spasm of a particularly painful death. But I knew differently. Physical pain was the least thing I saw there. I knew that Nicolas Dimitri died the most hopeless, the most despairing death that it is possible for any man to die – died thinking himself not only sacrificed to a world in madness, but taunted, in his last dying glimpse, by the irrefutable betrayal and degradation of all those finer, nobler impulses he had worshipped as a world's redemption. Not pain, not hatred, not longing was written on that face, but just a look of infinite, unutterable despair…

And to-night, rising hazily above the violins, as they throbbed out ‘Chanson Triste', gradually taking form and consolidating, until I could see every line and twinge of it, I saw that face again.

2 SPIES AND INTELLIGENCE

A remarkable man this Von Bork – a man who could hardly be matched among all the devoted agents of the Kaiser.
¹
It was his talents which had first recommended him for the English mission, the most important mission of all, but since he had taken it over those talents had become more and more manifest to the half-dozen people in the world who were really in touch with the truth. One of these was his present companion, Baron Von Herling, the Chief Secretary of the Legation, whose huge hundred-horse-power Benz car was blocking the country lane as it waited to carry its owner back to London.

‘Things are moving very fast now and quite in accordance with the time-table. So far as I can judge the trend of events, you will probably be back in Berlin within the week,' the secretary was saying. ‘When you get there, my dear Von Bork, I think you will be surprised at the warm welcome you will receive. I happen to know what is thought in the All-Highest quarters of your work in this country.' He was a huge man, the secretary, deep, broad, and tall, with a slow, heavy fashion of speech which had been his main asset in his political career.

Von Bork laughed in a deprecating way.

‘They are not very hard to deceive, these Englanders,' he remarked. ‘A more docile, simple folk could not be imagined.'

‘I don't know about that,' said the other, thoughtfully. ‘They have strange, unexpected limits, and one must learn to allow for them. It is that surface simplicity of theirs which makes a trap for the stranger. One's first impression is that they are entirely soft. Then you come suddenly upon something very hard, and you know that you have reached the limit and must adapt yourself to the fact. They have, for example, their insular conventions, which simply
must
be observed.'

‘Meaning “good form” and “playing the game” and that sort of thing?' Von Bork sighed as one who had suffered much.

‘Meaning British prejudice and convention, in all its queer manifestations. As an example I may quote one of my own worst blunders – I can afford to talk of my blunders, for you know my work well enough to be aware of my successes. It was on my first arrival. I was invited to a week-end gathering at the country-house of a Cabinet Minister. The conversation was amazingly indiscreet.'

Von Bork nodded. ‘I've been there,' said he, drily.

‘Exactly. Well, I naturally sent a
résumé
of the information to Berlin. Unfortunately, our good Chancellor
²
is a little heavy-handed in these matters, and he transmitted a remark which showed that he was aware of what had been said. This, of course, took the trail straight up to me. You've no idea the harm that it did me. There was nothing soft about our British hosts on that occasion, I can assure you. I was two years living it down. Now you, with this sporting pose of yours –'

‘No, no; don't call it a pose. A pose is an artificial thing. This is quite natural. I am a born sportsman. I enjoy it.'

‘Well, that makes it the more effective. You yacht against them, you hunt with them, you play polo, you match them in every game. Your four-in-hand
³
takes the prize at Olympia – I have even heard that you go the length of boxing with the young officers. What is the result? Nobody takes you seriously. You are “a good old sport”, “quite a decent fellow for a German”, a hard-drinking, night-club, knock-about-town, devil-may-care young fellow. And all the time this quiet country-house of yours is the centre of half the mischief in England, and the sporting squire – the most astute secret-service man in Europe. Genius, my dear Von Bork – genius!'

‘You flatter me, Baron. But certainly I may claim that my four years in this country have not been unproductive. I've never shown you my little store. Would you mind stepping in for a moment?'

The door of the study opened straight on to the terrace. Von Bork pushed it back, and, leading the way, he clicked the switch of the electric light. He then closed the door behind the bulky form which followed him, and carefully adjusted the heavy curtain over the latticed window. Only when all these precautions had been taken and tested did he turn his sunburned, aquiline face to his guest.

‘Some of my papers have gone,' said he. ‘When my wife and the household left yesterday for Flushing they took the less important with them. I must, of course, claim the protection of the Embassy for the others.'

‘Everything has been most carefully arranged. Your name has already been filed as one of the personal suite. There will be no difficulties for you or your baggage. Of course, it is just possible that we may not have to go. England may leave France to her fate. We are sure that there is no binding treaty between them.'

‘And Belgium?' He stood listening intently for the answer.

‘Yes, and Belgium too.'

Von Bork shook his head. ‘I don't see how that could be. There is a definite treaty there. It would be the end of her – and what an end! She could never recover from such a humiliation.'

‘She would at least have peace for the moment.'

‘But her honour?'

‘Tut, my dear sir, we live in a utilitarian age. Honour is a mediaeval conception. Besides, England is not ready. It is an inconceivable thing, but even our special war-tax of fifty millions, which one would think made our purpose as clear as if we had advertised it on the front page of
The Times
, has not roused these people from their slumbers. Here and there one hears a question. It is my business to find an answer. Here and there also there is irritation. It is my business to soothe it. But I can assure you that so far as the essentials go – the storage of munitions, the preparation for submarine attack, the arrangements for making high explosives – nothing is prepared. How then can England come in, especially when we have stirred her up such a devil's brew of Irish civil war, window-breaking furies,
⁴
and God knows what to keep her thoughts at home?'

‘She must think of her future.'

‘Ah, that is another matter. I fancy that in the future we have our own very definite plans about England, and that your information will be very vital to us. It is to-day or to-morrow with Mr John Bull. If he prefers to-day we are perfectly ready, and the readier, my dear Von Bork, for your labours. If it is to-morrow, I need not tell you that we shall be more ready still. I should think they would be wiser to fight with allies than without them, but that is their own affair. This week is their week of destiny. But let us get away from speculation and back to
real-politik
. You were speaking of your papers.'

He sat in the armchair with the light shining upon his broad, bald head, while he puffed sedately at his cigar and watched the movements of his companion.

The large oak-panelled, book-lined room had a curtain hung in the farther corner. When this was drawn it disclosed a large brass-bound safe. Von Bork detached a small key from his watch-chain, and after some considerable manipulation of the lock he swung open the heavy door.

‘Look!' said he, standing clear, with a wave of his hand.

The light shone vividly into the opened safe, and the secretary of the Embassy gazed with an absorbed interest at the rows of
stuffed pigeon-holes with which it was furnished. Each pigeonhole had its label, and his eyes, as he glanced along them, read a long series of such titles as ‘Fords', ‘Harbour-Defences', ‘Aeroplanes', ‘Ireland', ‘Egypt', ‘Portsmouth Forts', ‘The Channel', ‘Rosyth',
⁵
and a score of others. Each compartment was bristling with papers and plans.

‘Colossal!' said the secretary. Putting down his cigar he softly clapped his fat hands.

‘And all in four years, Baron. Not such a bad show for the hard-drinking, hard-riding country squire. But the gem of my collection is coming, and there is the setting all ready for it.' He pointed to a space over which ‘Naval Signals' was printed.

‘But you have a good dossier there already?'

‘Out of date and waste paper. The Admiralty in some way got the alarm and every code has been changed. It was a blow, Baron – the worst set-back in my whole campaign. But, thanks to my cheque-book and the good Altamont, all will be well to-night.'

The Baron looked at his watch, and gave a guttural exclamation of disappointment.

‘Well, I really can wait no longer. You can imagine that things are moving at present in Carlton House Terrace
⁶
and that we have all to be at our posts. I had hoped to be able to bring news of your great
coup
. Did Altamont name no hour?'

Von Bork pushed over a telegram.

‘Will come without fail to-night and bring new sparking-plugs. – A
LTAMONT
.'

‘Sparking-plugs, eh?'

‘You see, he poses as a motor expert, and I keep a full garage. In our code everything likely to come up is named after some spare part. If he talks of a radiator it is a battleship, of an oil-pump a cruiser, and so on. Sparking-plugs are naval signals.'

‘From Portsmouth at midday,' said the secretary, examining the superscription. ‘By the way, what do you give him?'

‘Five hundred pounds for this particular job. Of course, he has a salary as well.'

‘The greedy rogue. They are useful, these traitors, but I grudge them their blood-money.'

‘I grudge Altamont nothing. He is a wonderful worker. If I pay him well, at least he delivers the goods, to use his own phrase. Besides, he is not a traitor. I assure you that our most Pan-Germanic Junker is a peaceful sucking-dove in his feelings towards England as compared with a real bitter Irish-American.'

‘Oh, an Irish-American?'

‘If you heard him talk you would not doubt it. Sometimes I assure you I can hardly understand him. He seems to have declared war on the King's English as well as on the English King. Must you really go? He may be here any moment.'

‘No; I'm sorry, but I have already overstayed my time. We shall expect you early to-morrow, and when you get that signal-book through the little door on the Duke of York's steps
⁷
you can put a triumphant
Finis
to your record in England. What! Tokay!' He indicated a heavily-sealed, dust-covered bottle which stood with two high glasses upon a salver.

‘May I offer you a glass before your journey?'

‘No, thanks. But it looks like revelry.'

‘Altamont has a nice taste in wines, and he took a fancy to my Tokay. He is a touchy fellow and needs humouring in small things. He is absolutely vital to my plans, and I have to study him, I assure you.' They had strolled out on to the terrace again, and along it to the farther end, where, at a touch from the Baron's chauffeur, the great car shivered and chuckled. ‘Those are the lights of Harwich, I suppose,' said the secretary, pulling on his dust-coat. ‘How still and peaceful it all seems! There may be other lights within the week, and the English coast a less tranquil place! The heavens, too, may not be quite so peaceful, if all that the good Zeppelin promises us comes true. By the way, who is that?'

Only one window showed a light behind them. In it there stood a lamp, and beside it, seated at a table, was a dear old ruddy-faced woman in a country cap. She was bending over her knitting and stopping occasionally to stroke a large black cat upon a stool beside her.

‘That is Martha, the only servant I have left.'

The secretary chuckled.

‘She might almost personify Britannia,' said he, ‘with her
complete self-absorption and general air of comfortable somnolence. Well,
au revoir
, Von Bork!' With a final wave of his hand he sprang into the car, and a moment later the two golden cones from the headlights shot forward through the darkness. The secretary lay back in the cushions of the luxurious limousine with his thoughts full of the impending European tragedy, and hardly observing that as his car swung round the village street it nearly passed over a little Ford coming in the opposite direction.

Von Bork walked slowly back to the study when the last gleams of the motor lamps had faded into the distance. As he passed he observed that his old housekeeper had put out her lamp and retired. It was a new experience to him, the silence and darkness of his widespread house, for his family and household had been a large one. It was a relief to him, however, to think that they were all in safety, and that, but for that one old woman who lingered in the kitchen, he had the whole place to himself. There was a good deal of tidying up to do inside his study, and he set himself to do it until his keen, handsome face was flushed with the heat of the burning papers. A leather valise stood beside his table, and into this he began to pack very neatly and systematically the precious contents of his safe. He had hardly got started with the work, however, when his quick ears caught the sound of a distant car. Instantly he gave an exclamation of satisfaction, strapped up the valise, shut the safe, locked it, and hurried out on to the terrace. He was just in time to see the lights of a small car come to a halt at the gate. A passenger sprang out of it and advanced swiftly towards him, while the chauffeur, a heavily-built, elderly man with a grey moustache, settled down like one who resigns himself to a long vigil.

‘Well?' asked Von Bork, eagerly, running forward to meet his visitor.

For answer the man waved a small brown-paper parcel triumphantly above his head.

‘You can give me the glad hand to-night, mister,' he cried. ‘I'm bringin' home the bacon at last.'

‘The signals?'

‘Same as I said in my cable. Every last one of them – semaphore,
⁸
lamp-code,
⁹
Marconi
¹⁰
– a copy, mind you, not the original. The sucker that sold it would have handed over the book itself. That was too dangerous. But it's the real goods, and you can lay to that.' He slapped the German upon the shoulder with a rough familiarity from which the other winced.