Mr. Standfast
attention as a tobacconist’s sign, his ugly face hewn out of brown oak,
his honest, sullen mouth, and his blue eyes staring into vacancy, I
knew I had got the man I wanted.
“Hamilton,” I said, “you and I have met before.”
“Sirr?” came the mystified answer.
“Look at me, man, and tell me if you don’t recognise me.”
He moved his eyes a fraction, in a respectful glance.
“Sirr, I don’t mind of you.”
“Well, I’ll refresh your memory. Do you remember the hall in Newmilns
Street and the meeting there? You had a fight with a man outside, and
got knocked down.”
He made no answer, but his colour deepened.
“And a fortnight later in a public-house in Muirtown you saw the same
man, and gave him the chase of his life.”
I could see his mouth set, for visions of the penalties laid down by
the King’s Regulations for striking an officer must have crossed his
mind. But he never budged.
“Look me in the face, man,” I said. “Do you remember me now?”
He did as he was bid.
“Sirr, I mind of you.”
“Have you nothing more to say?”
He cleared his throat. “Sirr, I did not ken I was hittin’ an officer.”
“Of course you didn’t. You did perfectly right, and if the war was over
and we were both free men, I would give you a chance of knocking me
down here and now. That’s got to wait. When you saw me last I was
serving my country, though you didn’t know it. We’re serving together
now, and you must get your revenge out of the Boche. I’m going to make
you my servant, for you and I have a pretty close bond between us. What
do you say to that?”
This time he looked me full in the face. His troubled eye appraised me
and was satisfied. “I’m proud to be servant to ye, sirr,” he said. Then
out of his chest came a strangled chuckle, and he forgot his
discipline. “Losh, but ye’re the great lad!” He recovered himself
promptly, saluted, and marched off.
The second episode befell during our brief rest after the Polygon Wood,
when I had ridden down the line one afternoon to see a friend in the
Heavy Artillery. I was returning in the drizzle of evening, clanking
along the greasy _pavé_ between the sad poplars, when I struck a Labour
company repairing the ravages of a Boche _strafe_ that morning. I
wasn’t very certain of my road and asked one of the workers. He
straightened himself and saluted, and I saw beneath a disreputable cap
the features of the man who had been with me in the Coolin crevice.
I spoke a word to his sergeant, who fell him out, and he walked a bit
of the way with me.
“Great Scot, Wake, what brought you here?” I asked.
“Same thing as brought you. This rotten war.”
I had dismounted and was walking beside him, and I noticed that his
lean face had lost its pallor and that his eyes were less hot than they
used to be.
“You seem to thrive on it,” I said, for I did not know what to say. A
sudden shyness possessed me. Wake must have gone through some violent
cyclones of feeling before it came to this. He saw what I was thinking
and laughed in his sharp, ironical way.
“Don’t flatter yourself you’ve made a convert. I think as I always
thought. But I came to the conclusion that since the fates had made me
a Government servant I might as well do my work somewhere less
cushioned than a chair in the Home Office.... Oh, no, it wasn’t a
matter of principle. One kind of work’s as good as another, and I’m a
better clerk than a navvy. With me it was self-indulgence: I wanted
fresh air and exercise.”
I looked at him—mud to the waist, and his hands all blistered and cut
with unaccustomed labour. I could realise what his associates must mean
to him, and how he would relish the rough tonguing of non-coms.
“You’re a confounded humbug,” I said. “Why on earth didn’t you go into
an O.T.C. and come out with a commission? They’re easy enough to get.”
“You mistake my case,” he said bitterly. “I experienced no sudden
conviction about the justice of the war. I stand where I always stood.
I’m a non-combatant, and I wanted a change of civilian work.... No, it
wasn’t any idiotic tribunal sent me here. I came of my own free will,
and I’m really rather enjoying myself.”
“It’s a rough job for a man like you,” I said.
“Not so rough as the fellows get in the trenches. I watched a battalion
marching back today and they looked like ghosts who had been years in
muddy graves. White faces and dazed eyes and leaden feet. Mine’s a
cushy job. I like it best when the weather’s foul. It cheats me into
thinking I’m doing my duty.”
I nodded towards a recent shell-hole. “Much of that sort of thing?”
“Now and then. We had a good dusting this morning. I can’t say I liked
it at the time, but I like to look back on it. A sort of moral
anodyne.”
“I wonder what on earth the rest of your lot make of you?”
“They don’t make anything. I’m not remarkable for my _bonhomie_. They
think I’m a prig—which I am. It doesn’t amuse me to talk about beer and
women or listen to a gramophone or grouse about my last meal. But I’m
quite content, thank you. Sometimes I get a seat in a corner of a
Y.M.C.A. hut, and I’ve a book or two. My chief affliction is the padre.
He was up at Keble in my time, and, as one of my colleagues puts it,
wants to be ‘too bloody helpful’.... What are you doing, Hannay? I see
you’re some kind of general. They’re pretty thick on the ground here.”
“I’m a sort of general. Soldiering in the Salient isn’t the softest of
jobs, but I don’t believe it’s as tough as yours is for you. D’you
know, Wake, I wish I had you in my brigade. Trained or untrained,
you’re a dashed stout-hearted fellow.”
He laughed with a trifle less acidity than usual. “Almost thou
persuadest me to be combatant. No, thank you. I haven’t the courage,
and besides there’s my jolly old principles. All the same I’d like to
be near you. You’re a good chap, and I’ve had the honour to assist in
your education.... I must be getting back, or the sergeant will think
I’ve bolted.”
We shook hands, and the last I saw of him was a figure saluting stiffly
in the wet twilight.
The third incident was trivial enough, though momentous in its results.
Just before I got the division I had a bout of malaria. We were in
support in the Salient, in very uncomfortable trenches behind Wieltje,
and I spent three days on my back in a dug-out. Outside was a blizzard
of rain, and the water now and then came down the stairs through the
gas curtain and stood in pools at my bed foot. It wasn’t the merriest
place to convalesce in, but I was as hard as nails at the time and by
the third day I was beginning to sit up and be bored.
I read all my English papers twice and a big stack of German ones which
I used to have sent up by a friend in the G.H.Q. Intelligence, who knew
I liked to follow what the Boche was saying. As I dozed and ruminated
in the way a man does after fever, I was struck by the tremendous
display of one advertisement in the English press. It was a thing
called “Gussiter’s Deep-breathing System,” which, according to its
promoter, was a cure for every ill, mental, moral, or physical, that
man can suffer. Politicians, generals, admirals, and music-hall artists
all testified to the new life it had opened up for them. I remember
wondering what these sportsmen got for their testimonies, and thinking
I would write a spoof letter myself to old Gussiter.
Then I picked up the German papers, and suddenly my eye caught an
advertisement of the same kind in the _Frankfurter Zeitung_. It was not
Gussiter this time, but one Weissmann, but his game was identical—“deep
breathing”. The Hun style was different from the English—all about the
Goddess of Health, and the Nymphs of the Mountains, and two quotations
from Schiller. But the principle was the same.
That made me ponder a little, and I went carefully through the whole
batch. I found the advertisement in the _Frankfurter_ and in one or two
rather obscure _Volkstimmes_ and _Volkszeitungs_. I found it too in
_Der Grosse Krieg_, the official German propagandist picture-paper.
They were the same all but one, and that one had a bold variation, for
it contained four of the sentences used in the ordinary English
advertisement.
This struck me as fishy, and I started to write a letter to
Macgillivray pointing out what seemed to be a case of trading with the
enemy, and advising him to get on to Mr Gussiter’s financial backing. I
thought he might find a Hun syndicate behind him. And then I had
another notion, which made me rewrite my letter.
I went through the papers again. The English ones which contained the
advertisement were all good, solid, bellicose organs; the kind of thing
no censorship would object to leaving the country. I had before me a
small sheaf of pacifist prints, and they had not the advertisement.
That might be for reasons of circulation, or it might not. The German
papers were either Radical or Socialist publications, just the opposite
of the English lot, except the _Grosse Krieg_. Now we have a free
press, and Germany has, strictly speaking, none. All her journalistic
indiscretions are calculated. Therefore the Boche has no objection to
his rags getting to enemy countries. He wants it. He likes to see them
quoted in columns headed “Through German Glasses”, and made the text of
articles showing what a good democrat he is becoming.
As I puzzled over the subject, certain conclusions began to form in my
mind. The four identical sentences seemed to hint that “Deep Breathing’
had Boche affiliations. Here was a chance of communicating with the
enemy which would defy the argus-eyed gentlemen who examine the mails.
What was to hinder Mr A at one end writing an advertisement with a good
cipher in it, and the paper containing it getting into Germany by
Holland in three days? Herr B at the other end replied in the
_Frankfurter_, and a few days later shrewd editors and acute
Intelligence officers—and Mr A—were reading it in London, though only
Mr A knew what it really meant.
It struck me as a bright idea, the sort of simple thing that doesn’t
occur to clever people, and very rarely to the Boche. I wished I was
not in the middle of a battle, for I would have had a try at
investigating the cipher myself. I wrote a long letter to Macgillivray
putting my case, and then went to sleep. When I awoke I reflected that
it was a pretty thin argument, and would have stopped the letter, if it
hadn’t gone off early by a ration party.
After that things began very slowly to happen. The first was when
Hamilton, having gone to Boulogne to fetch some mess-stores, returned
with the startling news that he had seen Gresson. He had not heard his
name, but described him dramatically to me as “the wee red-headed devil
that kicked Ecky Brockie’s knee yon time in Glesca, sirr,” I recognised
the description.
Gresson, it appeared, was joy-riding. He was with a party of Labour
delegates who had been met by two officers and carried off in
_chars-à-bancs_. Hamilton reported from inquiries among his friends
that this kind of visitor came weekly. I thought it a very sensible
notion on the Government’s part, but I wondered how Gresson had been
selected. I had hoped that Macgillivray had weeks ago made a long arm
and quodded him. Perhaps they had too little evidence to hang him, but
he was the blackest sort of suspect and should have been interned.
A week later I had occasion to be at G.H.Q. on business connected with
my new division. My friends in the Intelligence allowed me to use the
direct line to London, and I called up Macgillivray. For ten minutes I
had an exciting talk, for I had had no news from that quarter since I
left England. I heard that the Portuguese Jew had escaped—had vanished
from his native heather when they went to get him. They had identified
him as a German professor of Celtic languages, who had held a chair in