Chapter Five. Further Adventures of the Same

Greenmantle

by John Buchan

Next morning there was a touch of frost and a nip in the air which
stirred my blood and put me in buoyant spirits. I forgot my
precarious position and the long road I had still to travel. I came
down to breakfast in great form, to find Peter's even temper badly
ruffled. He had remembered Stumm in the night and disliked the
memory; this he muttered to me as we rubbed shoulders at the
dining-room door. Peter and I got no opportunity for private talk.
The lieutenant was with us all the time, and at night we were locked
in our rooms. Peter discovered this through trying to get out to find
matches, for he had the bad habit of smoking in bed.

Our guide started on the telephone, and announced that we were
to be taken to see a prisoners' camp. In the afternoon I was to go
somewhere with Stumm, but the morning was for sight-seeing. 'You will
see,' he told us, 'how merciful is a great people. You will also see
some of the hated English in our power. That will delight you. They
are the forerunners of all their nation.'

We drove in a taxi through the suburbs and then over a stretch
of flat market-garden-like country to a low rise of wooded hills.
After an hour's ride we entered the gate of what looked like a big
reformatory or hospital. I believe it had been a home for destitute
children. There were sentries at the gate and massive concentric
circles of barbed wire through which we passed under an arch that was
let down like a portcullis at nightfall. The lieutenant showed his
permit, and we ran the car into a brick-paved yard and marched
through a lot more sentries to the office of the commandant.

He was away from home, and we were welcomed by his deputy, a
pale young man with a head nearly bald. There were introductions in
German which our guide translated into Dutch, and a lot of elegant
speeches about how Germany was foremost in humanity as well as
martial valour. Then they stood us sandwiches and beer, and we
formed a procession for a tour of inspection. There were two
doctors, both mild-looking men in spectacles, and a couple of warders
- under-officers of the good old burly, bullying sort I knew well.
That was the cement which kept the German Army together. Her men
were nothing to boast of on the average; no more were the officers,
even in crack corps like the Guards and the Brandenburgers; but they
seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of hard, competent N.C.O.s.

We marched round the wash-houses, the recreation-ground, the
kitchens, the hospital - with nobody in it save one chap with the
'flu.' It didn't seem to be badly done. This place was entirely for
officers, and I expect it was a show place where American visitors
were taken. If half the stories one heard were true there were some
pretty ghastly prisons away in South and East Germany.

I didn't half like the business. To be a prisoner has always
seemed to me about the worst thing that could happen to a man. The
sight of German prisoners used to give me a bad feeling inside,
whereas I looked at dead Boches with nothing but satisfaction.
Besides, there was the off-chance that I might be recognized. So I
kept very much in the shadow whenever we passed anybody in the
corridors. The few we met passed us incuriously. They saluted the
deputy-commandant, but scarcely wasted a glance on us. No doubt they
thought we were inquisitive Germans come to gloat over them. They
looked fairly fit, but a little puffy about the eyes, like men who
get too little exercise. They seemed thin, too. I expect the food,
for all the commandant's talk, was nothing to boast of. In one room
people were writing letters. It was a big place with only a tiny
stove to warm it, and the windows were shut so that the atmosphere
was a cold frowst. In another room a fellow was lecturing on
something to a dozen hearers and drawing figures on a blackboard.
Some were in ordinary khaki, others in any old thing they could pick
up, and most wore greatcoats. Your blood gets thin when you have
nothing to do but hope against hope and think of your pals and the
old days.

I was moving along, listening with half an ear to the
lieutenant's prattle and the loud explanations of the
deputy-commandant, when I pitchforked into what might have been the
end of my business. We were going through a sort of convalescent
room, where people were sitting who had been in hospital. It was a
big place, a little warmer than the rest of the building, but still
abominably fuggy. There were about half a dozen men in the room,
reading and playing games. They looked at us with lack-lustre eyes
for a moment, and then returned to their occupations. Being
convalescents I suppose they were not expected to get up and
salute.

All but one, who was playing Patience at a little table by which
we passed. I was feeling very bad about the thing, for I hated to
see these good fellows locked away in this infernal German hole when
they might have been giving the Boche his deserts at the front. The
commandant went first with Peter, who had developed a great interest
in prisons. Then came our lieutenant with one of the doctors; then a
couple of warders; and then the second doctor and myself. I was
absent-minded at the moment and was last in the queue.

The Patience-player suddenly looked up and I saw his face. I'm
hanged if it wasn't Dolly Riddell, who was our brigade machine- gun
officer at Loos. I had heard that the Germans had got him when they
blew up a mine at the Quarries.

I had to act pretty quick, for his mouth was agape, and I saw he
was going to speak. The doctor was a yard ahead of me.

I stumbled and spilt his cards on the floor. Then I kneeled to
pick them up and gripped his knee. His head bent to help me and I
spoke low in his ear.

'I'm Hannay all right. For God's sake don't wink an eye. I'm
here on a secret job.' The doctor had turned to see what was the
matter. I got a few more words in. 'Cheer up, old man. We're
winning hands down.'

Then I began to talk excited Dutch and finished the collection
of the cards. Dolly was playing his part well, smiling as if he was
amused by the antics of a monkey. The others were coming back, the
deputy-commandant with an angry light in his dull eye. 'Speaking to
the prisoners is forbidden,' he shouted.

I looked blankly at him till the lieutenant translated.

'What kind of fellow is he?' said Dolly in English to the
doctor. 'He spoils my game and then jabbers High-Dutch at me.'

Officially I knew English, and that speech of Dolly's gave me my
cue. I pretended to be very angry with the very damned Englishman,
and went out of the room close by the deputy-commandant, grumbling
like a sick jackal. After that I had to act a bit. The last place
we visited was the close-confinement part where prisoners were kept
as a punishment for some breach of the rules. They looked cheerless
enough, but I pretended to gloat over the sight, and said so to the
lieutenant, who passed it on to the others. I have rarely in my life
felt such a cad.

On the way home the lieutenant discoursed a lot about prisoners
and detention-camps, for at one time he had been on duty at Ruhleben.
Peter, who had been in quod more than once in his life, was deeply
interested and kept on questioning him. Among other things he told
us was that they often put bogus prisoners among the rest, who acted
as spies. If any plot to escape was hatched these fellows got into
it and encouraged it. They never interfered till the attempt was
actually made and then they had them on toast. There was nothing the
Boche liked so much as an excuse for sending a poor devil to
'solitary'.

That afternoon Peter and I separated. He was left behind with
the lieutenant and I was sent off to the station with my bag in the
company of a Landsturm sergeant. Peter was very cross, and I didn't
care for the look of things; but I brightened up when I heard I was
going somewhere with Stumm. If he wanted to see me again he must
think me of some use, and if he was going to use me he was bound to
let me into his game. I liked Stumm about as much as a dog likes a
scorpion, but I hankered for his society.

At the station platform, where the ornament of the Landsturm
saved me all the trouble about tickets, I could not see my companion.
I stood waiting, while a great crowd, mostly of soldiers, swayed past
me and filled all the front carriages. An officer spoke to me
gruffly and told me to stand aside behind a wooden rail. I obeyed,
and suddenly found Stumm's eyes looking down at me.

'You know German?' he asked sharply.

'A dozen words,' I said carelessly. 'I've been to Windhuk and
learned enough to ask for my dinner. Peter - my friend - speaks it a
bit.'

'So,' said Stumm. 'Well, get into the carriage. Not that one!
There, thickhead!'

I did as I was bid, he followed, and the door was locked behind
us. The precaution was needless, for the sight of Stumm's profile at
the platform end would have kept out the most brazen. I wondered if
I had woken up his suspicions. I must be on my guard to show no
signs of intelligence if he suddenly tried me in German, and that
wouldn't be easy, for I knew it as well as I knew Dutch.

We moved into the country, but the windows were blurred with
frost, and I saw nothing of the landscape. Stumm was busy with
papers and let me alone. I read on a notice that one was forbidden
to smoke, so to show my ignorance of German I pulled out my pipe.
Stumm raised his head, saw what I was doing, and gruffly bade me put
it away, as if he were an old lady that disliked the smell of
tobacco.

In half an hour I got very bored, for I had nothing to read and
my pipe was verboten. People passed now and then in the corridors,
but no one offered to enter. No doubt they saw the big figure in
uniform and thought he was the deuce of a staff swell who wanted
solitude. I thought of stretching my legs in the corridor, and was
just getting up to do it when somebody slid the door back and a big
figure blocked the light.

He was wearing a heavy ulster and a green felt hat. He saluted
Stumm, who looked up angrily, and smiled pleasantly on us both.

'Say, gentlemen,' he said, 'have you room in here for a little
one? I guess I'm about smoked out of my car by your brave soldiers.
I've gotten a delicate stomach ...'

Stumm had risen with a brow of wrath, and looked as if he were
going to pitch the intruder off the train. Then he seemed to halt
and collect himself, and the other's face broke into a friendly
grin.

'Why, it's Colonel Stumm,'he cried. (He pronounced it like the
first syllable in 'stomach'.) 'Very pleased to meet you again,
Colonel. I had the honour of making your acquaintance at our
Embassy. I reckon Ambassador Gerard didn't cotton to our
conversation that night.' And the new-comer plumped himself down in
the corner opposite me.

I had been pretty certain I would run across Blenkiron somewhere
in Germany, but I didn't think it would be so soon. There he sat
staring at me with his full, unseeing eyes, rolling out platitudes to
Stumm, who was nearly bursting in his effort to keep civil. I looked
moody and suspicious, which I took to be the right line.

'Things are getting a bit dead at Salonika,' said Mr Blenkiron,
by way of a conversational opening. Stumm pointed to a notice which
warned officers to refrain from discussing military operations with
mixed company in a railway carriage.

'Sorry,' said Blenkiron, 'I can't read that tombstone language
of yours. But I reckon that that notice to trespassers, whatever it
signifies, don't apply to you and me. I take it this gentleman is in
your party.'

I sat and scowled, fixing the American with suspicious eyes.

'He is a Dutchman,' said Stumm; 'South African Dutch, and he is
not happy, for he doesn't like to hear English spoken.'

'We'll shake on that,' said Blenkiron cordially. 'But who said
I spoke English? It's good American. Cheer up, friend, for it isn't
the call that makes the big wapiti, as they say out west in my
country. I hate John Bull worse than a poison rattle. The Colonel
can tell you that.'

I dare say he could, but at that moment, we slowed down at a
station and Stumm got up to leave. 'Good day to you, Herr
Blenkiron,' he cried over his shoulder. 'If you consider your
comfort, don't talk English to strange travellers. They don't
distinguish between the different brands.'

I followed him in a hurry, but was recalled by Blenkiron's
voice.

'Say, friend,' he shouted, 'you've left your grip,' and he
handed me my bag from the luggage rack. But he showed no sign of
recognition, and the last I saw of him was sitting sunk in a corner
with his head on his chest as if he were going to sleep. He was a
man who kept up his parts well.

There was a motor-car waiting - one of the grey military kind -
and we started at a terrific pace over bad forest roads. Stumm had
put away his papers in a portfolio, and flung me a few sentences on
the journey.

'I haven't made up my mind about you, Brandt,' he announced.
'You may be a fool or a knave or a good man. If you are a knave, we
will shoot you.'

'And if I am a fool?' I asked.

'Send you to the Yser or the Dvina. You will be respectable
cannon-fodder.'

'You cannot do that unless I consent,' I said.

'Can't we?' he said, smiling wickedly. 'Remember you are a
citizen of nowhere. Technically, you are a rebel, and the British,
if you go to them, will hang you, supposing they have any sense. You
are in our power, my friend, to do precisely what we like with
you.'

He was silent for a second, and then he said, meditatively:

'But I don't think you are a fool. You may be a scoundrel.
Some kinds of scoundrel are useful enough. Other kinds are strung up
with a rope. Of that we shall know more soon.'

'And if I am a good man?'

'You will be given a chance to serve Germany, the proudest
privilege a mortal man can have.' The strange man said this with a
ringing sincerity in his voice that impressed me.

The car swung out from the trees into a park lined with
saplings, and in the twilight I saw before me a biggish house like an
overgrown Swiss chalet. There was a kind of archway, with a sham
portcullis, and a terrace with battlements which looked as if they
were made of stucco. We drew up at a Gothic front door, where a thin
middle-aged man in a shooting-jacket was waiting.

As we moved into the lighted hall I got a good look at our host.
He was very lean and brown, with the stoop in the shoulder that one
gets from being constantly on horseback. He had untidy grizzled hair
and a ragged beard, and a pair of pleasant, short-sighted brown
eyes.

'Welcome, my Colonel,' he said. 'Is this the friend you spoke
of ?'

'This is the Dutchman,' said Stumm. 'His name is Brandt.
Brandt, you see before you Herr Gaudian.'

I knew the name, of course; there weren't many in my profession
that didn't. He was one of the biggest railway engineers in the
world, the man who had built the Baghdad and Syrian railways, and the
new lines in German East. I suppose he was about the greatest living
authority on tropical construction. He knew the East and he knew
Africa; clearly I had been brought down for him to put me through my
paces.

A blonde maidservant took me to my room, which had a bare
polished floor, a stove, and windows that, unlike most of the German
kind I had sampled, seemed made to open. When I had washed I
descended to the hall, which was hung round with trophies of travel,
like Dervish jibbahs and Masai shields and one or two good buffalo
heads. Presently a bell was rung. Stumm appeared with his host, and
we went in to supper.

I was jolly hungry and would have made a good meal if I hadn't
constantly had to keep jogging my wits. The other two talked in
German, and when a question was put to me Stumm translated. The first
thing I had to do was to pretend I didn't know German and look
listlessly round the room while they were talking. The second was to
miss not a word, for there lay my chance. The third was to be ready
to answer questions at any moment, and to show in the answering that
I had not followed the previous conversation. Likewise, I must not
prove myself a fool in these answers, for I had to convince them that
I was useful. It took some doing, and I felt like a witness in the
box under a stiff cross-examination, or a man trying to play three
games of chess at once.

I heard Stumm telling Gaudian the gist of my plan. The engineer
shook his head.

'Too late,' he said. 'It should have been done at the
beginning. We neglected Africa. You know the reason why.'

Stumm laughed. 'The von Einem! Perhaps, but her charm works
well enough.'

Gaudian glanced towards me while I was busy with an orange
salad. 'I have much to tell you of that. But it can wait. Your
friend is right in one thing. Uganda is a vital spot for the
English, and a blow there will make their whole fabric shiver. But
how can we strike? They have still the coast, and our supplies grow
daily smaller.'

'We can send no reinforcements, but have we used all the local
resources? That is what I cannot satisfy myself about. Zimmerman
says we have, but Tressler thinks differently, and now we have this
fellow coming out of the void with a story which confirms my doubt.
He seems to know his job. You try him.'

Thereupon Gaudian set about questioning me, and his questions
were very thorough. I knew just enough and no more to get through,
but I think I came out with credit. You see I have a capacious
memory, and in my time I had met scores of hunters and pioneers and
listened to their yarns, so I could pretend to knowledge of a place
even when I hadn't been there. Besides, I had once been on the point
of undertaking a job up Tanganyika way, and I had got up that
country-side pretty accurately.

'You say that with our help you can make trouble for the British
on the three borders?' Gaudian asked at length.

'I can spread the fire if some one else will kindle it,' I
said.

'But there are thousands of tribes with no affinities.'

'They are all African. You can bear me out. All African
peoples are alike in one thing - they can go mad, and the madness of
one infects the others. The English know this well enough.'

'Where would you start the fire?' he asked.

'Where the fuel is dryest. Up in the North among the Mussulman
peoples. But there you must help me. I know nothing about Islam,
and I gather that you do.'

'Why?' he asked.

'Because of what you have done already,' I answered.

Stumm had translated all this time, and had given the sense of
my words very fairly. But with my last answer he took liberties.
What he gave was: 'Because the Dutchman thinks that we have some big
card in dealing with the Moslem world.' Then, lowering his voice
and raising his eyebrows, he said some word like 'uhnmantl'.

The other looked with a quick glance of apprehension at me. 'We
had better continue our talk in private, Herr Colonel,' he said. 'If
Herr Brandt will forgive us, we will leave him for a little to
entertain himself.' He pushed the cigar-box towards me and the two
got up and left the room.

I pulled my chair up to the stove, and would have liked to drop
off to sleep. The tension of the talk at supper had made me very
tired. I was accepted by these men for exactly what I professed to
be. Stumm might suspect me of being a rascal, but it was a Dutch
rascal. But all the same I was skating on thin ice. I could not
sink myself utterly in the part, for if I did I would get no good out
of being there. I had to keep my wits going all the time, and join
the appearance and manners of a backveld Boer with the mentality of a
British intelligence-officer. Any moment the two parts might clash
and I would be faced with the most alert and deadly suspicion.

There would be no mercy from Stumm. That large man was
beginning to fascinate me, even though I hated him. Gaudian was
clearly a good fellow, a white man and a gentleman. I could have
worked with him for he belonged to my own totem. But the other was
an incarnation of all that makes Germany detested, and yet he wasn't
altogether the ordinary German, and I couldn't help admiring him. I
noticed he neither smoked nor drank. His grossness was apparently
not in the way of fleshly appetites. Cruelty, from all I had heard
of him in German South West, was his hobby; but there were other
things in him, some of them good, and he had that kind of crazy
patriotism which becomes a religion. I wondered why he had not some
high command in the field, for he had had the name of a good soldier.
But probably he was a big man in his own line, whatever it was, for
the Under-Secretary fellow had talked small in his presence, and so
great a man as Gaudian clearly respected him. There must be no lack
of brains inside that funny pyramidal head.

As I sat beside the stove I was casting back to think if I had
got the slightest clue to my real job. There seemed to be nothing so
far. Stumm had talked of a von Einem woman who was interested in his
department, perhaps the same woman as the Hilda he had mentioned the
day before to the Under-Secretary. There was not much in that. She
was probably some minister's or ambassador's wife who had a finger in
high politics. If I could have caught the word Stumm had whispered
to Gaudian which made him start and look askance at me! But I had
only heard a gurgle of something like 'uhnmantl', which wasn't any
German word that I knew.

The heat put me into a half-doze and I began dreamily to wonder
what other people were doing. Where had Blenkiron been posting to in
that train, and what was he up to at this moment? He had been
hobnobbing with ambassadors and swells - I wondered if he had found
out anything. What was Peter doing? I fervently hoped he was
behaving himself, for I doubted if Peter had really tumbled to the
delicacy of our job. Where was Sandy, too? As like as not bucketing
in the hold of some Greek coaster in the Aegean. Then I thought of
my battalion somewhere on the line between Hulluch and La Bassee,
hammering at the Boche, while I was five hundred miles or so inside
the Boche frontier.

It was a comic reflection, so comic that it woke me up. After
trying in vain to find a way of stoking that stove, for it was a cold
night, I got up and walked about the room. There were portraits of
two decent old fellows, probably Gaudian's parents. There were
enlarged photographs, too, of engineering works, and a good picture
of Bismarck. And close to the stove there was a case of maps mounted
on rollers.

I pulled out one at random. It was a geological map of Germany,
and with some trouble I found out where I was. I was an enormous
distance from my goal and moreover I was clean off the road to the
East. To go there I must first go to Bavaria and then into Austria.
I noticed the Danube flowing eastwards and remembered that that was
one way to Constantinople.

Then I tried another map. This one covered a big area, all
Europe from the Rhine and as far east as Persia. I guessed that it
was meant to show the Baghdad railway and the through routes from
Germany to Mesopotamia. There were markings on it; and, as I looked
closer, I saw that there were dates scribbled in blue pencil, as if
to denote the stages of a journey. The dates began in Europe, and
continued right on into Asia Minor and then south to Syria.

For a moment my heart jumped, for I thought I had fallen by
accident on the clue I wanted. But I never got that map examined. I
heard footsteps in the corridor, and very gently I let the map roll
up and turned away. When the door opened I was bending over the
stove trying to get a light for my pipe.

It was Gaudian, to bid me join him and Stumm in his study.

On our way there he put a kindly hand on my shoulder. I think
he thought I was bullied by Stumm and wanted to tell me that he was
my friend, and he had no other language than a pat on the back.

The soldier was in his old position with his elbows on the
mantelpiece and his formidable great jaw stuck out.

'Listen to me,' he said. 'Herr Gaudian and I are inclined to
make use of you. You may be a charlatan, in which case you will be
in the devil of a mess and have yourself to thank for it. If you are
a rogue you will have little scope for roguery. We will see to that.
If you are a fool, you will yourself suffer for it. But if you are
a good man, you will have a fair chance, and if you succeed we will
not forget it. Tomorrow I go home and you will come with me and get
your orders.'

I made shift to stand at attention and salute.

Gaudian spoke in a pleasant voice, as if he wanted to atone for
Stumm's imperiousness. 'We are men who love our Fatherland, Herr
Brandt,' he said. 'You are not of that Fatherland, but at least you
hate its enemies. Therefore we are allies, and trust each other like
allies. Our victory is ordained by God, and we are none of us more
than His instruments.'

Stumm translated in a sentence, and his voice was quite solemn.
He held up his right hand and so did Gaudian, like a man taking an
oath or a parson blessing his congregation.

Then I realized something of the might of Germany. She produced
good and bad, cads and gentlemen, but she could put a bit of the
fanatic into them all.