The adventures of Heine
Understand that my chief thought was of Germany. I had no fear for
myself. I was merely a cog in the wheel of the great machine and stood
ready at all hours and all days to sacrifice myself for our dear
Deutschland.
Fortunately, there was a fallen tree in my neighbourhood, and under
this I crept, looking out from time to time to see what had happened
to the strange thing in the air. Then I heard a thud, a rustle, and an
oath, and I jumped up, bruising the back of my head against the
tree-trunk, and ran toward the sound, for that oath was in good
German.
“Whars dar?” called a sharp voice.
“It is I, Heine,” I replied.
“Oh, good,” said the voice in German. “You are on the spot, I see.
Help free me from this doubly rotten parachute.”
I made my way to him and helped unbuckle some of the straps that
fastened him, and presently he was free.
“Have you got a pocket lamp?” he asked. “No, perhaps you had better
not use it. Where can I put the parachute?”
I suggested the tree under which I had been--I won’t say hiding, let
me rather say taking cover.
“Have you a car?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“You are an ass,” said he; “why haven’t you a car?”
I knew by the imperiousness of his tone that he was a true German
gentleman, probably highly born and connected by many social ties with
an old family of Prussia.
“I am the Baron von Treutzer,” he said, as though answering my
thoughts, “and I have been sent here to survey the damage that was
done in the last raid.”
“Your Excellency will discover that I have spoken nothing but the
truth,” I said humbly.
The sound of the Zeppelin’s engines, which had diminished, was now
increasing in volume.
“Is the airship returning?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” he said testily.
He took from his pocket a small electric lamp and flashed it three
times in the air and immediately after three tiny sparks of light
showed in the sky.
“They won’t be dropping any more bombs, Herr Baron?” I asked
carelessly.
“Good heavens! What does it matter if they do?” he boomed--he was a
booming kind of man, born to command, typical of our virile
aristocracy which has placed Germany in the forefront of
world-nations.
“I only asked,” I said. “I am a mere observer.”
“We only dropped a few bombs,” he said, “just to explain our presence.
The real business of our visit is here.” I heard him slap his chest in
the darkness.
“I did not know where the raid was intended,” I said, “or I would have
arranged for a leader.”
“A leader?” he asked. “What the devil do you mean?”
“Evidently Herr Baron is not a member of the Zeppelin crew,” I said
humbly, “or he would know that the Zeppelins are ‘led’ to their
destination by motor-cars with strong head-lamps.”
“Of course I am not a member of the Zeppelin crew,” he said in deep
disgust, “I am a Royal Lieutenant of the 31st Regiment of the Prussian
Guard.”
“Does your Excellency intend staying here very long?” I asked, as we
trudged along the country road.
“For a week,” he replied, “after that I return----”
“By----?”
“That is my business,” he replied, “if a Zeppelin can bring me here, a
Zeppelin can take me away.”
Though I had never heard of parachutes that go up, I know all things
are possible owing to the inventive genius of our nation, so I
questioned him no further. Outside Saffron Walden we stopped whilst I
went to the hotel to collect the handbag which I had left there.
Needless to say the people in the hotel were in that condition of
cowardly funk which our Zeppelin always inspires. The children were
crying because they had not seen the airship, and again I heard in the
common bar of the hotel those terrible words which my modesty would
only allow me to designate by using certain letters of the alphabet.
I rejoined the Baron and we made our way to the railway station, which
was in darkness. Fortunately the train which came in was also darkened
and remained that way until we reached London and I was able to bring
the Baron to my flat without observation.
He was a tall, handsome gentleman, dressed in civilian clothes of a
noble cut and rich texture, and over a glass of whisky he graciously
unbent and told me that he had come to England by this curious method
to discover the extent of the damage, not only of the first raid, but
of a raid which was projected and by which it was hoped to lay London
entirely in ruins.
“On what day will that occur?” I asked.
“You will be notified in due time. It may be to-morrow, and it may be
the next day,” he replied.
“I only asked,” I said carelessly, “because it is necessary for me to
see one of my agents in North Devon one day this week, and I should
not like to miss the raid.”
“You will stay here until I go. That is an order. Why are you looking
so pale?”
“It is the pressure of work, your Excellency,” I replied. “I am afraid
I have rather taxed my strength. My doctor suggested that I ought to
go away at once to Cornwall or perhaps Scotland.”
“We hope to bomb Scotland,” said the Baron thoughtfully. “It would not
be a bad idea if you were there.”
“When I said Scotland,” I said hastily, “I should have said that my
doctor suggested I should go to Scotland in the spring. This of course
is the very worst weather. Are you likely to bomb Wales?”
“We cannot reach there. It is beyond our reach,” said the Baron.
“I only ask,” I said, “because he also suggested that I should go
there.”
“When the raids are over you can go to the devil. I only want your
assistance while they are on.”
“Did you say raids or raid?” I asked.
“There may be two,” he replied callously.
The next morning he expressed his intention of going through the City
and the East End to photograph the worst of the damage. I did not
offer to accompany him, and indeed, had he suggested that I should do
so, I should have firmly declined. Fortunately, he knew London very
well, for he had been an attaché at the German Embassy a few years
before the war broke out, so he had no need of my assistance or
guidance.
He left the flat at eleven o’clock and I arranged to meet him at a
restaurant in Piccadilly for lunch. I need hardly say that he was
armed with a passport; not only very completely filled in, but
endorsed with an exact imitation of the rubber stamps which were used
in those days by examining officers at Folkestone when passengers
landed.
I was waiting for him at one o’clock, but he did not arrive. Half-past
one came, a quarter to two, two o’clock, and I began to feel seriously
alarmed, and was thinking what an excellent text his arrest would
provide for a letter to Potsdam on the futility of sending amateurs,
when he came through the swing doors. He uttered no word till we were
sitting at the table, and the waiter had served the soup.
“These English people are very clever,” he said at last.
“In a way they are clever,” I said, “but by the side of the
German----”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Our German people are merely slavish imitators
of everybody else in the world. If Germany was not a nation of slaves
we should never have an army.”
This put an end to the easy flow of conversation, but presently I
ventured to ask:
“Why does your Excellency think the English are clever?”
“I am referring to the way they have cleared up the mess we made and
have run up new buildings.”
He looked up at me curiously as he spoke.
“Don’t you agree?”
“Naturally,” I said heartily, “I have reason to believe that hundreds
of thousands of workmen have been working day and night to restore the
damage.”
He laughed.
“In addition to being a fool, you are a liar,” he said, and I could
only smile at the good humour and buoyant frankness of this high-born
officer who was in all probability in the entourage of the All-Highest
himself and, at any rate, as I have since learnt, had frequently dined
with that exalted Prince whom we call the Hope of Germany.
“No,” Baron von Treutzer went on, “the Zeppelin did little or no
damage. It caused nothing of the smash that we expected it would. We
will see what to-night’s raid brings out.”
“To-night?” I said, half-rising from my seat.
“Did I say to-night?” he said in an off-hand way. “Well, whenever it
happens.”
But I knew that in a moment of incaution he had spoken the truth.
“By the way, I shall want you with me to-night,” he said.
“To-night?” I repeated. “I am very sorry but this is the one night I
cannot be with your Excellency. I have an important messenger coming
from Ireland with particulars of a rising, and the Foreign Office has
particularly asked me----”
“I shall want you to-night,” repeated the Herr Baron, “and you will
meet me at ten o’clock, let us say, in St. Paul’s Churchyard.”
“Himmel! Herr Baron!” I exploded, “that would be in the very centre of
the raid!”
“Did I ever say that it would not?” he asked coldly, “of course it
will be in the centre of the raid. You understand, at ten o’clock. The
War Office require a detailed account by eye-witnesses of the damage
which is done.”
“But my messenger arrives at Fishguard to-night,” I said with a tremor
in my voice. “Forgive me if I am agitated, Herr Baron, but I realize
the terrible importance, the absolute necessity, of meeting that
boat.”
“At ten o’clock you will be in St. Paul’s Churchyard,” said the Baron.
How I loathed and hated this tyrant. We Germans are naturally lovers
of freedom. We despise the sycophant and the toady. Tyranny to us is a
pestilential disease to be stamped out with an iron heel. Woe to those
who endeavour to enslave the German, for they are biting on granite!
I told the Baron that I would meet him at the appointed time.
“Don’t come before ten,” he said. “We will remain until the raid is
over.”
I lifted my hat and bowed as I parted from him in Piccadilly, and I
prayed, most fervently, that the earth would open and swallow this
pig, whose abominable manners and low attitude to men not so well born
as himself (though of that I am not sure, for there were many stories
about my mother’s friendship for the Graf von Maldesee, which I
sometimes reflect upon with a certain amount of satisfaction) aroused
in me the deepest scorn.
I could eat no dinner that night, I could do no work that afternoon. I
sat in my office until a quarter to ten, suffering, I think, from a
touch of malaria and ague which I contracted in America.
I arrived in St. Paul’s Churchyard, dark and gloomy and silent, on the
stroke of ten. I had arranged to meet the Baron at the corner of one
of the lanes which slope down to Upper Thames Street, and here I took
my station.
At quarter-past ten he had not arrived. At twenty minutes past ten a
hundred searchlights flashed into the sky and the first gun-shot woke
the sleeping city.
The Zeppelin was coming straight to the City, but was west of where I
stood. I heard the thud of its bombs and the devil’s chorus of the
guns. I saw the skies speckled with shrapnel bursts, but much of what
happened in that brief space of time between its appearance and its
disappearance is blotted from my memory.
I could only stand crouched in a friendly doorway, my hands before my
eyes, thinking of my dear friends, and particularly of a certain girl
in Chicago with whom I had exchanged photographs, of my dear home, my
little brothers, in fact all my life passed before me. I dare not go
out to look for the Herr Baron. How I envied him, that hardened man of
war to whom this terrible concatenation of sound was as the gentle
zephyrs; who could stand unmoved and watch with his stern military eye
the destruction that was going on about him, uncaring, unafraid,
contemptuous of danger, seeking only the information he required for
his superiors!
In that moment I almost loved the man, even though I hated to meet him