The Long Trick Part 26

The succeeding dawn came sullenly, with mist and drizzle shrouding the sh.o.r.es and outer sea. As the day wore on a cold wind sprang up and rolled the mist restlessly to and fro across the slopes of the hills.

On a little knoll of ground overlooking a wide expanse of level turf covered with coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and stunted heather stood a man with his hands clasped behind his back. In the courage, judgment and sober self-confidence of that solitary figure had rested the destiny of an Empire through one of the greatest crises in its history: even as he stood there, bare-headed, with kindly, tired eyes resting on the misty outlines of the vast Fleet under his command, responsibility such as no one man had ever known before lay upon his shoulders.

Behind him, in the sombre dignity of blue and gold, in a silent group stood the Admirals and Commodores of the Squadrons and Flotillas with their Staff Officers; further in the rear, in a large semicircle on slightly higher ground, were gathered the Captains and officers of the Fleet.

Where the turf sloped gradually towards the sea were ranged the seamen and marines chosen to represent the Fleet: rank upon rank of motionless men standing with their caps in their hands and their eyes on the centre of the great hollow square where, hidden beneath the folds of the Flag they had served so well, lay those of their comrades who had died of wounds since the battle. A Chaplain in ca.s.sock and white surplice moved across the open s.p.a.ce and halted in the centre, office in hand:

"I am the Resurrection and the Life..."

The wind that fluttered the folds of his surplice caught the words and carried them far out to sea over the heads of the living--the sea where the others lay who had fought their last fight in that grim battle of the mist. A curlew circled low down overhead, calling again and again as if striving to convey some insistent message that none would understand. From the rocky sh.o.r.e near-by came the low murmur of the sea, the sound that has in it all the sorrow and gladness in the world.

At length the inaudible office for the Burial of the Dead came to an end. The Chaplain closed his book and turned away; a little movement ran through the gathering of officers and men as they replaced their caps. A loud, sharp-cut order from the gaitered officer in command of the firing-party was followed by the clatter of rifle-bolts as the firing-party loaded and swung to the "Present!"

"Fire!" The first volley rang out sharply, and the Marine buglers sent the long, sweet notes of the "Last Post" echoing among the hills.

Twice more the volleys sounded, and twice more the bugles sang their heart-breaking, triumphant "_Ave atque Vale!_" to the fighting dead.

In the ensuing silence the cry of the curlew again became audible, this time out of the peace of the misty hills, gently persistent. Faint and far-off was the sound, but at the last the meaning came clear and strong to all who cared to listen.

"There is no Death!" ran the message, and again and again, "There is no Death, no Death... no Death...!"

The firing-party unloaded, and the empty cartridge cases fell to the earth with a little tinkling sound.

CHAPTER XII

"GOOD HUNTING"

Oberleutnant Otto von Sperrgebiet, of the Imperial German Navy, sat on the edge of a Submarine's conning-tower with a chart open on his knees, and smoked a cigarette. It was not a brand he cared about particularly, but it had been looted from the Captain's cabin of a neutral cargo steamer on the previous afternoon. A man who relies upon such methods to replenish his cigarette case cannot, of course, expect everybody's tastes to coincide with his own.

As he smoked, the German Lieutenant's eyes strayed restlessly round the circle of the horizon. They were small eyes of a pale blue, rather close together and reddened round the rims, with light eyelashes.

The Submarine lay motionless on the surface with the waves breaking over the hog-backed hull. Every now and again a few drops of spray splashed over the surface of the chart, and the Naval man wiped them off with a sc.r.a.p of lace and cambric that had once been a lady's handkerchief. He had a way with women, that German Oberleutnant.

Nothing was in sight: not a tendril of smoke showed above the arc of tumbling waves that ringed the limit of his vision; the sun was warm and pleasant, and the figure on the conning-tower crossed his legs, encased in heavy thigh boots, and gave himself over to retrospective thought.

There had been a time when Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet possessed the rudiments of a conscience. It could never have been described as acutely sensitive, and it never developed much beyond the rudimentary stage. Nevertheless, it had existed once: and in the early days of the war it was still sufficiently active to record certain protests and objections in his mind.

The mysterious forces that were at work in Germany, industriously remoulding, brutalising and distorting the mind of Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet, together with millions of others, had not been blind to the prejudicial effects of conscience to an evil cause. Imperial rodomontade and the inflammatory German Admiralty War Orders had deliberately rejected, one by one, the deep-seated principles of humanity and chivalry in war. It had been done gradually and systematically--scientifically, in fact, and in the majority of cases it succeeded in producing a state of atrophy of the moral sense that was altogether admirable--from a German point of view.

In the case of Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet, however, these early qualms had a trick of recurring. They p.r.i.c.ked his consciousness at unexpected moments, like a gra.s.s-seed in a walker's stocking.... And now, as he sat swinging his legs in the warm June sunlight, a whole procession of such reflections trooped through his mind.

For instance, there arose in his intelligence an obstinate doubt as to whether the torpedoing without warning of a liner carrying women and children at the commencement of the war had been quite within the pale of legitimate Naval warfare. He had met the man who boasted such an achievement, and for a long time he carried with him the recollection of that man's eyes as they met his above a beer mug. They had drunk uproariously together, and von Sperrgebiet heard all about it first hand, and even fingered enviously the Iron Cross upon the breast of the teller of the tale. But somehow those eyes had told quite a different story: and it was that which von Sperrgebiet remembered long after the wearer of the Iron Cross had gone out into the North Sea mists and returned no more.

Then there had been the rather unpleasant business of the boat....

It was in mid-winter a long way North during one of the few calm days to be expected at that period of the year. The Submarine was running on the surface when the Second-in-Command (of whom more anon) reported a boat on the starboard bow. They altered course a little and, slowing down, pa.s.sed within a few yards of it. It was a s.h.i.+p's life-boat, half full of water; lying in the water, rolling slowly from side to side as the boat rocked in their wash, were five dead men. A sixth sat huddled at the tiller, staring over the quarter with unseeing eyes, frozen stiff....

Von Sperrgebiet caught a glimpse of the s.h.i.+p's name on the bows of the boat: it happened to be that of a neutral s.h.i.+p he had torpedoed at the beginning of the previous week during a gale.

The German Admiralty Orders of that period contained a clause to the effect that s.h.i.+ps were not to be torpedoed without ensuring the adequate safety of the crew. Which meant that those who had not been killed by the explosion of the torpedo could be allowed to launch a boat (weather permitting) and get into it if they had time before the s.h.i.+p sank....

Von Sperrgebiet had given orders for the boat to be sunk by gunfire, but somehow the memory of that stark figure at the helm persisted. Try as he would, he failed to banish from his mind the staring, sightless eyes and grey, famished face....

Altogether it was an unpleasant business. Other memories of this nature came and went with the smoke from his cigarette. For some reason or other he found himself wondering whether, after all, a Belgian Relief Steamer could have been considered fair game. But he did so hate the word "Belgium," and there was always the theory of a mine to account for the incident.... He torpedoed her by moonlight: a very creditable shot, all things considered.

Another moonlight picture presented itself. A boat-load of terrorised Finns rising and falling on the swell alongside the Submarine, and, half a mile away, an abandoned sailing s.h.i.+p with every rope and spar standing out black against the moonlight. In the stern of the boat stood a mighty Norwegian with a red beard and a voice like a bull. One of his arms rested protectingly round a woman's shoulders, and he shook a knotted fist in von Sperrgebiet's face as his s.h.i.+p blew up and sank.

The woman seen thus in the pale moonlight was young and pretty, and the red-bearded man bellowed that she was his wife. The announcement was not an unfamiliar one to Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet: they usually were young and pretty when he heard that hot rage in a man's voice.

Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet made himself scarce forthwith, it might be almost said, from force of habit....

The gla.s.s was falling, and it was in mid-Atlantic that they left that boat. It blew a gale next day, and the Oberleutnant, who had an eye for a pretty woman, sometimes wondered if the boat was picked up.

His mind revolved for a moment round certain incidents in connection with that affair. A German sailor from the Submarine had been sent onboard to place the bombs; he returned with cigars, a ham, and a pretty silver clock. Also a box of sugar plums, half finished.

Von Sperrgebiet took the clock and the sugar plums. The cigars and the ham (the labourer being worthy of his hire) he allowed the sailor to keep.

But even Submarine warfare against unarmed s.h.i.+pping has its risks.

There was the ever-memorable incident of the British tug, and even now von Sperrgebiet winced at the recollection. They had sighted a sailing s.h.i.+p in tow of a tug at the entrance to the Channel; von Sperrgebiet was proud of his mastery of the English tongue, and it was this small vanity that led him to adopt tactics which differed somewhat from his normal caution. He submerged until within a couple of hundred yards of the approaching tow and then rose to the surface, dripping, like some uncouth sea-monster. Armed with a revolver and a megaphone, and with pleasurable antic.i.p.ation in his heart, the Oberleutnant emerged from the conning-tower with a view to a little preliminary banter with these detested and unarmed English before administering a coup de grace. He was just in time to see a stout, ungainly man tumbling aft along the deck from the wheel-house of the tug. Raising a booted leg with surprising agility, the stout man kicked off the shackle of the tow rope, and as he did so over went the helm; the blunt-nosed tug, released from her 3,000-ton burden, came straight for him like an angry buffalo.

They were not forty yards apart when the tug turned, and quick as the German c.o.xswain was, the Submarine failed to avoid the stunning impact of the bows. A revolver bullet crashed through the gla.s.s window of the wheel-house; von Sperrgebiet had an instant's vision of a round face, purple with rage, above the spokes of the wheel, and then the conning tower's automatic hatchway closed. The Submarine was in diving trim, and she submerged in the shortest time on record. They remained on the bottom four hours while the sweating mechanics repaired the damaged hydroplane gear and effected some temporary caulking round certain plates that bulged ominously.

But von Sperrgebiet's hatred of England was real enough before this incident. He had always hated the English, even in his youth when for a year he occupied an inconspicuous niche in one of the less fastidious Public Schools. He hated them for the qualities he despised and found so utterly inexplicable. He despised their lazy contempt for detail, their quixotic sense of fairness and justice in a losing game, their persistent refusal to be impressed by the seriousness of anything on earth. He despised their whole-hearted pa.s.sion for sports at an age when he was beginning to be interested in less wholesome and far more complex absorptions.... He despised their straight, clean affections and quarrels and their tortuous sense of humour; the affectation that led them to take cold baths instead of hot ones: their shy, rather knightly mental att.i.tude towards their sisters and one another's sisters....

All these things von Sperrgebiet despised in the English. But he also hated them for something he had never even admitted to himself.

Crudely put, it was because he knew that he could never beat an Englishman. There was nothing in his spirit that could outlast the terrible, emotionless determination in the English character to win.

Von Sperrgebiet's reflections came to an end with his cigarette. He tossed the stump overboard, and raising a pair of gla.s.ses he focused them intently on the horizon to the eastward.

For the s.p.a.ce of nearly a minute he sat thus staring. From the interior of the Submarine came the strains of a gramophone playing a German patriotic air, and with it the smell of coffee. The crew were at dinner, and a man's deep laugh floated up the shaft of the conning-tower as if coming from the bowels of the sea.

The Oberleutnant lowered the gla.s.ses abruptly. Rolling up the chart he hoisted himself on to his feet and bent over the tiny binnacle to take the bearing of a faint smudge of smoke barely visible on the horizon.

This obtained, he lowered himself through the narrow hatchway and climbed down the steel rungs into the interior of the compartment.

"Close down!" he said curtly. The gramophone stopped with a click, and instantly all was bustle and activity within the narrow confines of the steel sh.e.l.l.

The Second-in-Command, who was lying on his bunk reading a novel, sat up and lifted his legs over the edge. He was a spectacled youth with a cropped bullet-head and what had been in infancy a hare-lip. His beard of about ten days' maturity grew in patches about his lips and cheeks.

"A s.h.i.+p, Herr Kapitan?" he asked in a thin, reedy voice, and reached for a pair of long-toed, elastic-sided boots that he had kicked off, and which lay at the foot of his bunk.

His superior officer nodded and snapped out a string of guttural orders. The sing-song voices of men at their stations amid the levers and dials repeated the words mechanically, like men talking in their sleep. With a whizzing, purring sound the motors started, and the ballast tanks filled with a succession of sucking gurgles.

Von Sperrgebiet glanced at the compa.s.s and moved to the eye-piece of the periscope. For a while there was silence, broken only by the hum of the motors.

The Second-in-Command hung about the elbow of the motionless figure at the periscope like a morbid-minded urchin on the outskirts of a crowd that gathers round a street accident, but can see nothing. His stolid face was working and moist with excitement.

"Is it an English s.h.i.+p, Herr Kapitan?"