The Riddle of the Sands
“channel theory” reconciled at the eleventh hour, with new data
touching the neglected “land”.
The result was certainly interesting, but it left me cold. That there
existed in the German archives some such scheme of defence for the
North Sea coast was very likely indeed. The seven islands, with their
seven shallow channels (though, by the way, two of them, the twin
branches of the Ems, are by no means so shallow), were a very fair
conjecture, and fitted in admirably with the channel theory, whose
intrinsic merits I had always recognised; my constant objection having
been that it did not go nearly far enough to account for our treatment.
The ring of railway round the peninsula, with Esens at the apex, was
suggestive, too; but the same objection applied. Every country with a
maritime frontier has, I suppose, secret plans of mobilisation for its
defence, but they are not such as could be discovered by passing
travellers, not such as would warrant stealthy searches, or require for
their elaboration so recondite a meeting-place as Memmert. Dollmann was
another weak point; Dollmann in England, spying. All countries, Germany
included, have spies in their service, dirty though necessary tools;
but Dollmann in such intimate association with the principal plotters
on this side; Dollmann rich, influential, a power in local affairs—it
was clear he was no ordinary spy.
And here I detected a hesitation in Davies’s rough sketch, a
reluctance, as it were, to pursue a clue to its logical end. He spoke
of a German scheme of coast defence, and in the next breath of Dollmann
spying for English plans in the event of war with Germany, and there he
left the matter; but what sort of plans? Obviously (if he was on the
right track) plans of attack on the German coast as opposed to those of
strategy on the high seas. But what sort of an attack? Obviously again,
if his railway-ring meant anything, an attack by invasion on that
remote and desolate littoral which he had so often himself declared to
be impregnably secure behind its web of sands and shallows. My mind
went back to my question at Bensersiel, “Can this coast be invaded?” to
his denial and our fruitless survey of the dykes and polders. Was he
now reverting to a fancy we had both rejected, while shrinking from
giving it explicit utterance? The doubt was tantalising.
A brief digression here about the phases of my journey. At Rheine I
changed trains, turned due north and became a German seaman. There was
little risk in a defective accent—sailors are so polyglot; while an
English sailor straying about Esens might excite curiosity. Yesterday I
had paid no heed to the landscape; to-day I neglected nothing that
could conceivably supply a hint.
From Rheine to Emden we descended the valley of the Ems; at first
through a land of thriving towns and fat pastures, degenerating farther
north to spaces of heathery bog and moorland—a sad country, but looking
at its best, such as that was, for I should mention here that the
weather, which in the early morning had been as cold and misty as ever,
grew steadily milder and brighter as the day advanced; while my
newspaper stated that the glass was falling and the anticyclone giving
way to pressure from the Atlantic.
At Emden, where we entered Friesland proper, the train crossed a big
canal, and for the twentieth time that day (for we had passed numbers
of them in Holland, and not a few in Germany), I said to myself,
“Canals, canals. Where does Böhme come in?” It was dusk, but light
enough to see an unfamiliar craft, a torpedo-boat in fact, moored to
stakes at one side. In a moment I remembered that page in the _North
Sea Pilot_ where the Ems-Jade Canal is referred to as deep enough to
carry gun-boats, and as used for that strategic purpose between
Wilhelmshaven and Emden, along the base, that is, of the Frisian
peninsula. I asked a peasant opposite; yes, that was the Ems-Jade
Canal. Had Davies forgotten it? It would have greatly strengthened his
halting sketch.
At the bookstall at Emden I bought a pocket ordnance map [There is, of
course, no space to reproduce this, but here and henceforward the
reader is referred to Map B.] of Friesland, on a much larger scale than
anything I had used before, and when I was unobserved studied the
course of the canal, with an impatience which, alas! quickly cooled.
From Emden northwards I used the same map to aid my eyesight, and with
its help saw in the gathering gloom more heaths and bogs, once a great
glimmering lake, and at intervals cultivated tracts; a watery land as
ever; pools, streams and countless drains and ditches. Extensive woods
were marked also, but farther inland. We passed Norden at seven, just
dark. I looked out for the creek, and sure enough, we crossed it just
before entering the station. Its bed was nearly dry, and I
distinguished barges lying aground in it. This being the junction for
Esens, I had to wait three-quarters of an hour, and then turned east
through the uttermost northern wilds, stopping at occasional village
stations and keeping five or six miles from the sea. It was during this
stage, in a wretchedly lit compartment, and alone for the most part,
that I finally assembled all my threads and tried to weave them into a
cable whose core should be Esens; “a town”, so Baedeker said, “of 3,500
inhabitants, the centre of a rich agricultural district. Fine spire.”
Esens is four miles inland from Bensersiel. I reviewed every
circumstance of that day at Bensersiel, and boiled to think how von
Brüning had tricked me. He had driven to Esens himself, and read me so
well that he actually offered to take me with him, and I had refused
from excess of cleverness. Stay, though; if I had happened to accept he
would have taken very good care that I saw nothing important. The
secret, therefore, was not writ large on the walls of Esens. Was it
connected with Bensersiel too, or the country between? I searched the
ordnance map again, standing up to get a better light and less jolting.
There was the road northwards from Esens to Bensersiel, passing through
dots and chess-board squares, the former meaning fen, the latter
fields, so the reference said. Something else, too, immediately caught
my eye, and that was a stream running to Bensersiel. I knew it at once
for the muddy stream or drain we had seen at the harbour, issuing
through the sluice or _siel_ from which Bensersiel took its name. But
it arrested my attention now because it looked more prominent than I
should have expected. Charts are apt to ignore the geography of the
mainland, except in so far as it offers sea-marks to mariners. On the
chart this stream had been shown as a rough little corkscrew, like a
sucking-pig’s tail. On the ordnance map it was marked with a dark blue
line, was labelled “Benser Tief”, and was given a more resolute course;
bends became angles, and there were what appeared to be artificial
straightnesses at certain points. One of the threads in my skein, the
canal thread, tingled sympathetically, like a wire charged with
current. Standing astraddle on both seats, with the map close to the
lamp, I greedily followed the course of the “tief” southward. It
inclined away from the road to Esens and passed the town about a mile
to the west, diving underneath the railway. Soon after it took angular
tacks to the eastward, and joined another blue line trending
south-east, and lettered “Esens—Wittmunder _Canal_.” This canal,
however, came to an abrupt end halfway to Wittmund, a neighbouring
town.
For the first time that day there came to me a sense of genuine
inspiration. Those shallow depths and short distances, fractions of
metres and kilometres, which I had overheard from Böhme’s lips at
Memmert, and which Davies had attributed to the outside channels—did
they refer to a canal? I remembered seeing barges in Bensersiel
harbour. I remembered conversations with the natives in the inn, scraps
of the post-master’s pompous loquacity, talks of growing trade, of
bricks and grain passing from the interior to the islands: from another
source—was it the grocer of Wangeroog?—of expansion of business in the
islands themselves as bathing resorts; from another source again—von
Brüning himself, surely—of Dollmann’s personal activity in the
development of the islands. In obscure connexion with these things, I
saw the torpedo-boat in the Ems-Jade Canal.
It was between Dornum and Esens that these ideas came, and I was still
absorbed in them when the train drew up, just upon nine o’clock, at my
destination, and after ten minutes’ walk, along with a handful of other
passengers, I found myself in the quiet cobbled streets of Esens, with
the great church steeple, that we had so often seen from the sea,
soaring above me in the moonlight.
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Seven Siels
Selecting the very humblest _Gasthaus_ I could discover, I laid down my
bundle and called for beer, bread, and _Wurst._ The landlord, as I had
expected, spoke the Frisian dialect, so that though he was rather
difficult to understand, he had no doubts about the purity of my own
German high accent. He was a worthy fellow, and hospitably interested:
“Did I want a bed?” “No; I was going on to Bensersiel,” I said, “to
sleep there, and take the morning _Postschiff_ to Langeoog Island.” (I
had not forgotten our friends the twin giants and their functions.) “I
was not an islander myself?” he asked. “No, but I had a married sister
there; had just returned from a year’s voyaging, and was going to visit
her.” “By the way,” I asked, “how are they getting on with the Benser
Tief?” My friend shrugged his shoulders; it was finished, he believed.
“And the connexion to Wittmund?” “Under construction still.” “Langeoog
would be going ahead then?” “Oh! he supposed so, but he did not believe
in these new-fangled schemes.” “But it was good for trade, I supposed?
Esens would benefit in sending goods by the ‘tief’—what was the
traffic, by the way?” “Oh, a few more barge-loads than before of
bricks, timber, coals, etc., but it would come to nothing _he_ knew:
_Aktiengesellschaften_ (companies) were an invention of the devil. A
few speculators got them up and made money themselves out of land and
contracts, while the shareholders they had hoodwinked starved.”
“There’s something in that,” I conceded to this bigoted old
conservative; “my sister at Langeoog rents her lodging-house from a man
named Dollmann; they say he owns a heap of land about. I saw his yacht
once—pink velvet and electric light inside, they say——”
“That’s the name,” said mine host, “that’s one of them—some sort of
foreigner, I’ve heard; runs a salvage concern, too, Juist way.”
“Well, he won’t get any of my savings!” I laughed, and soon after took
my leave, and inquired from a passer-by the road to Dornum. “Follow the
railway,” I was told.
With a warm wind in my face from the south-west, fleecy clouds and a
half-moon overhead, I set out, not for Bensersiel but for Benser Tief,
which I knew must cross the road to Dornum somewhere. A mile or so of
cobbled causeway flanked with ditches and willows, and running cheek by
jowl with the railway track; then a bridge, and below me the “Tief”;
which was, in fact, a small canal. A rutty track left the road, and
sloped down to it one side; a rough siding left the railway, and sloped
down to it on the other.
I lit a pipe and sat on the parapet for a little. No one was stirring,
so with great circumspection I began to reconnoitre the left bank to
the north. The siding entered a fenced enclosure by a locked gate—a
gate I could have easily climbed, but I judged it wiser to go round by
the bridge again and look across. The enclosure was a small coal-store,
nothing more; there were gaunt heaps of coal glittering in the