story came back with a rush. What man who has ever knocked about in
small boats, tramped roads and poked about generally in places where he
had no business to poke could forget it? The East Friesland peninsula,
with its "seven little rivers" and "seven channels" and "seven islands,"
was the "take off" for the German army which was to cross the North
Sea in barges to land on the sands of "The Wash" for the invasion of
England. And this very line over which our rickety two-car special
was clinkety-clanking--I wished that "Carruthers" could have seen what
a pitiful little old single-track it had become--was the "strategic
trunk" over which the invading cohorts were to be shunted in their
thousands to the waiting deep-sea-going barges in the canalized _siels_.
There was Essen, which was to have been the "nodal centre" of the
great embarkation, and scarcely had I located it on the map before its
tall spire was stabbing the north-western skyline as we drew in to the
station.
A raw-boned, red-faced girl, her astonishingly powerful frame clad in a
man's greasy overall, lowered the barrier at the high-road crossing, the
same barrier, I reflected, which had held up "Carruthers," Von Brunning,
and the two "cloaked gentlemen" on the night of the great adventure.
Four "land girls," in close-fitting brown corduroys, with great baskets
of red cabbages on their shoulders, were just trudging off down the road
to Dornum, the very "cobbled causeway flanked with ditches and willows,
and running cheek by jowl with the railway track" which "Carruthers" had
followed by midnight, with "fleecy clouds and a half moon overhead,"
in search of the Benser Tief. There was even a string of mighty barges
towing down the narrow canal of the "Tief" when we crossed its rattling
bridge a few minutes later. And just as "Carruthers" described, the road
and railway clung closely together all the way to Dornum, and about
halfway were joined by a third companion in the shape of a puny stream,
the Neues Tief. "Wriggling and doubling like an eel, choked with sedges
and reeds," it had no more pretensions to being navigable now than then.
It still "looped away into the fens out of sight, to reappear again
close to Dornum in a more dignified guise," and it still skirted the
town to the east, where there was a towpath and a piled wharf. The only
change I was able to note in the momentary halt of the train was that
the "red-brick building with the look of a warehouse, roofless as yet
and with workmen on the scaffolds," had now been covered with red tile
and filled with red cabbages.
It was at Dornum that "Carruthers" (who was masquerading as a German
sailor on his way to visit a sister living on Baltrum) fell in at a
primitive _Gasthaus_ with an ex-crimp, drunken with much _schnappsen_,
who insisted on accompanying him on a detour to Dornumersiel, where he
had planned to do a hasty bit of spying. From the right-hand window I
caught a brief glimpse of the ribbon of the coastward road, down the
length of which the oddly-assorted pair--the Foreign Office _précis_
writer and the one-time "shanghai" artist--had stumbled arm-in-arm,
treating each other in every gin-shop on the way.
"Carruthers'" detour to the coast carried him out of sight of the
railway, so that he missed the little red-brick schoolhouse, close up by
the track, where the buxom mistress had her whole brood of young Fritzes
and Gretchens lined up along the fence of the right-of-way to wave and
cheer our train as it passed. How she received word of the coming of the
"Allied Special" we could only conjecture, but it was probably through
some Workmen's and Soldiers' Council friend in the railway service. But
even so, as the schoolhouse was three miles from the nearest station
and had nothing suggestive of a telephone line running to it, she must
have had her _banzai_ party standing by in readiness a good part of
the forenoon session. Hurriedly dropping a window (they work rather
hard on account of the stiffness of the thick paper strap), I was just
able to gather that the burden of the greeting was "Good morning, good
morning, sir!" repeated many times in guttural chorus. If any of them
were shouting "Welcome!" as one or two of our party thought they heard,
it escaped my ears. They did the thing so well one was sure it had been
rehearsed, and wondered how long it had been since those same throaty
trebles had been raised in the "Hymn of Hate." If "Carruthers" spying
visit to Dornumersiel resulted in anything more "revealing" than the dig
in the ribs one of the youngsters got from the mistress for (apparently)
not cheering lustily enough, he neglected to set it down in his story.
This little incident prepared us for much we were to see later in the
way of German "conciliation" methods.
"Carruthers," when he returned to the railway again and took train at
Hage, made the journey from the latter station to Norden in ten minutes.
The fact that our special took twenty is sufficient commentary on the
deterioration of German road-beds and rolling stock. Norden, which
is the junction point for Emden, to the south, and Norddeich, to the
north, is a good-sized town, and we noticed here that the streets were
beflagged and arched with evergreen as at Wilhelmshaven, doubtless in
expectation of returning troops. While our engines were being changed,
a couple of workmen, standing back in the depths of a tool-house, kept
waving their hands ingratiatingly every time the armed guard (who always
paced up and down the platform while the train was at a station) turned
his back. What they were driving at--unless co-operating with the
children in the general "conciliation" program--we were not able to make
out.
From Norden to Norddeich was a run of but three or four miles, but a bad
road-bed and a worse engine made the journey a tedious if fitting finale
to our painful progress across the East Frisian peninsula. Halting but a
few moments at the main station, the train was shunted to a spur which
took it right out to the quay where the great dyke bent inward to form a
narrow artificial harbour. A few steps across the slippery moss-covered
stones, where the falling tide had bared the sloping landing, took us to
where a small but powerfully engined steam launch was waiting to convey
the party to Norderney. Manned by naval ratings, it had the same aspect
of neglect which characterized all of the warships we had visited. The
men saluted smartly, however, and on our expressing a wish to remain in
the open air in preference to the stuffy cabin, they tumbled below and
brought up cushions and ranged them along the deck-house to sit upon.
The Allied officers dangled their legs to port, the German officers to
starboard, while the ex-sailor and the "plain clothes" detective from
the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council disposed themselves authoritatively
in the wheel-house.
A few minutes' run between heavy stone jetties brought us to the
open sea, where the launch began threading a channel which seemed to
be marked mostly by buoys, but here and there by close-set rows of
saplings, now just beginning to show their scraggly tops above the
falling water. It was the sight of these latter marks--so characteristic
of these waters--that reminded me that we had at last come out into the
real hunting ground of the _Dulcibella_, where "Davies" and "Carruthers"
had puzzled out the solution of "The Riddle of the Sands." Norderney
and Juist and Borkum and the other of the "seven islands" strung their
attenuated lengths in a broken barrier to seaward, and between them
and the mainland we were leaving astern stretched the amazing mazes of
the sands, alternately bared and covered by the ebb and flow of the
tides. Two-thirds of the area, according to "Carruthers," were dry at
low water, when the "remaining third becomes a system of lagoons whose
distribution is controlled by the natural drift of the North Sea as it
forces its way through the intervals between the islands. Each of these
intervals resembles the bar of a river, and is obstructed by dangerous
banks over which the sea pours at every tide, scooping out a deep pool.
This fans out and ramifies to east and west as the pent-up current
frees itself, encircles the islands, and spreads over the intervening
flats. But the further it penetrates the less scouring force it has,
and as a result no island is girt completely by a low-water channel.
About midway at the back of each of them is a 'watershed,' only covered
for five or six hours out of the twelve. A boat, even of the lightest
draught, navigating behind the islands must choose its moment for
passing these."
"I trust we have 'chosen _our_ moment' carefully," I said to myself
after reading those lines and reflecting what a large part of their time
the _Dulcibella_, _Kormoran_, and all the other craft in the "Riddle"
had spent careened upon sand-spits. To reassure myself, I leaned back
and asked one of the German officers if boats didn't run aground pretty
often on that run. "Oh, yes, most often," was the reply, "but only at
low water or when the fog is very thick. With this much water, and when
we can see as far as we can now"--there was about a quarter of a mile of
visibility--"there is no danger. Our difficulty will come when we try to
return this evening on the low water."
It may have been my imagination, but I thought he put a shade more
accent on that _try_ than a real optimist would have done under similar
circumstances. But then, I told myself, it was hardly a time when one
could expect a German officer to be optimistic about anything.
Heading out through the well-marked channel of the _Buse Tief_, between
the sands of the _Itzendorf Plate_ to port and _Hohe Riff_ to starboard,
twenty minutes found the launch in the opener waters off the west end of
Norderney where, with its light draught, it had no longer to thread the
winding of the buoyed fairway. Standing on northward until the red roofs
and white walls of the town sharpened into ghostly relief on the curtain
of the mist, course was altered five or six points to starboard, and we
skirted a broad stretch of sandy beach, from the upper end of which the
even slopes of concreted "runs" were visible, leading back to where,
dimly outlined in their darker opacity, a long row of great hangars
loomed fantastically beyond the dunes. Doubling a sharp spit, the launch
nosed in and brought up alongside the landing of a slip notched out of
the side of the little natural harbour.
The Commander of the station--a small man, but wiry and exceedingly
well set up--met us as we stepped off the launch. Then, and throughout
the visit, his quiet dignity of manner and ready (but not too ready)
courtesy struck a welcome mean between the incongruous blends of
sullenness and subserviency we had encountered in meeting the officers
in the German warships. He saluted each member of the party as he
landed, but tactfully refrained from offering his hand to any but
the attached German officers. It was this attitude on the part of
the Commander, together with the uniformly courteous but uneffusive
demeanour of the other officers with whom we were thrown in contact,
that made the visit to Norderney perhaps the pleasantest of all the many
inspections carried out in Germany.
Walking inland along a brick-paved road, we passed a large canteen or
recreation club (with a crowd of curious but quite respectful men lined
up along the verandah railings to watch us go by) before turning in to
a fine new brick-and-tile building which appeared to be the officers'
Casino. Leaving our overcoats in the reception room, we joined the dozen
or more officers awaiting us at the entrance and fared on by what had
once been flower-bordered walks to the hangars. As we came out upon
the "tarmac"--here, as with all German seaplane and airship stations,
the runs for the machines in front of the hangars are paved with
concrete instead of the tarred macadam which is used so extensively in
England and France--the men of the station were seen to be drawn up by
companies, as for a review. Each company stood smartly to attention at
the order of its officers as the party came abreast of it, and we--both
Allied and German officers--saluted in return. As we passed on, each
company in turn broke rank and quietly dispersed to barracks, their
officers following on to join the party in the furtherest hangar, where
the inspection was to begin. The discipline appeared to be faultless,
and it was soon evident that the men and their officers had arrived at
some sort of a "working understanding" to tide them over the period of
inspection, if not longer.
The two representatives of the Workmen and Soldiers who had accompanied
our party from Wilhelmshaven were allowed to be present during the
inspection, and with them two other "white-banders" who appeared to have
been elected to represent the men of the station. All other men had been
cleared out of the sheds in conformity with the stipulations of the
armistice. Some unauthorized individual--apparently a mechanic--who,
halfway through the inspection, was noticed following the party, was
summarily ordered out by the Commander. He obeyed somewhat sullenly, but
though we subsequently saw him in gesticulative confab with some of his
mates on the outside, he did not venture again into any of the hangars.
That was the nearest approach to insubordination we saw in Norderney.
The officers of the station--now that we saw them, a score or more in
number, all together--were a fine, business-like looking lot. All of
them wore some kind of a decoration, most of them several, and among
these were two or three of the highly-prized Orders "_Pour le Mérite_."
As Norderney was the "star" seaplane station, that body of keen-eyed,
square-jawed young flying officers undoubtedly included the cleverest
naval pilots at Germany's disposal. What their many decorations had been
given for there was, of course, no way of learning; nor did we find out
whether the presence of so many of them at the inspection was voluntary
or by order. Though, like their Commander, quiet and reserved, they were
invariably courteous and willing in doing anything to facilitate the
tedious progress of inspection.
There was an amusing little incident which occurred during the course
of inspection in connection with a very smart young German officer,
who, from the moment I first saw him at the door of the Casino, I kept
telling myself I had encountered somewhere before. For half an hour
or more--while checking the names and numbers of the machines in my
notebook as inspection was completed--my mind was running back through
one German colony or foreign settlement after another, trying to find
the scene into which that florid face (with its warm, wide-set eyes and
its full, sensual mouth) fitted. Dar-es-Salaam, Windhoek, Tsingtau, Yap,
Apia, Herbertshöhe--I scurried back through them all without uncovering
a clue. Where else had I met Germans? The southern "panhandle" of
Brazil, the south of Chile, Bagdad-- That was the first name to awaken a
sense of "nearness." "Bagdad, Bagdad Railway, Assur, Mosul," I rambled
on, and just as I began to recall that I had encountered Germans
scattered all along the caravan route from the Tigris to Syria, the
object of my interest turned up those soulful eyes of his to look at
one of the American officers clambering into the "house" of the "Giant"
monoplane seaboat under inspection at the moment--and I had him.
"Aleppo! 'Du Bist Wie Eine Blume!'" I chortled exultantly, my mind going
back to a night in June, 1912, when, the day after my arrival from the
desert, the American Consul had taken me to a party at the Austrian
Consulate in honour of some one or other who was about to depart for
home--wherever that was. Young Herr X---- (I even recalled the name now)
and his brother, both on the engineering staff of the Bagdad Railway,
were among the guests, the former very smitten with a sloe-eyed sylph
of a Greek Levantine, whose mother (so a friendly gossip told me)
had been a dancer in a café chantant in Beirut before she married the
Smyrna hairdresser who afterwards made a fortune buying licorice root
from the Arabs. The girl (there was no denying the lissome grace of
her serpentine slenderness) was sipping her pink rose-leaf sherbet in
a balcony above the open court when Herr X---- had been asked to sing
along towards midnight, and the fervid passion of his upturned glances
as he sung "Du Bist Wie Eine Blume" as an encore to "Ich Liebe Dich"
had made enough of an impression on my mind to need no more than the
reminder vouchsafed me to recall it.
Evidently (perhaps because I had not furnished him with a similar
reason) Herr Romeo did not trace any connection between my present
well-rounded, "sea-faring" figure and the sun-dried, fever-wrecked
anatomy I had dragged into Aleppo in 1912, for I noted that his eyes
had passed over me impersonally twice or thrice without a flicker of
recognition. The explosiveness of my exultant chortle, however, must
have assailed the ear of the German officer standing a couple of paces
in front of me, for he turned round quickly and asked if I had spoken to
him.
"No--er--not exactly," I stammered, adding, at the promptings of a
sudden reckless impulse, "but I would like to ask if you knew when
Lieutenant X---- over there left the Bagdad Railway for the flying
service?"
"He was at the head office in Frankfurt when the war began, and joined
shortly afterwards," the young officer replied promptly, stepping back
beside me. Then, as the somewhat surprising nature of the query burst
upon him, a look of astonishment flushed his face and a pucker of
suspicion drew his bushy brows together in a perturbed frown. "But may I
ask--" he began.
"And his brother who was with him in Aleppo--the one with the scar on
his cheek and the top of one ear sliced off," I pressed; "where is he?"
"Died of fever in Nishbin," again came the prompt answer. "But"
(blurting it out quickly) "how do you know about them?"
Being human, and therefore weak, it was not in me to enlighten him with
the truth, and to add that I was merely a second-class Yankee hack
writer, temporarily togged out in an R.N.V.R. uniform to regularize
my position of "Keeper of the Records" of the Allied Naval Armistice
Commission. No, I couldn't do that. Indeed, everything considered, I am
inclined to think that I rendered a better service to the Allied cause
when I squared my shoulders importantly and delivered myself oracularly
of, "It is our business to know" (impressive pause) "all."
My reward was worthy of the effort. "Ach, it is but true," sighed the
young officer resignedly. "The English Intelligence is wonderful, as we
have too often found out."
"It is not bad," I admitted modestly, as I strolled over to make a note
of the fact that the machine-gun mounting of one of the _Frederichafens_
had not been removed.
I could see that my young friend was bursting to impart to Lieutenant
X---- the fact that he was a "marked man," but it was just as well that
no opportunity offered in the course of the inspection. That the ominous
news had been broken at luncheon, however, I felt certain from the fact
that when, missing X---- from the group of officers who saluted us from
the doorway of the Casino on our departure, I cast a furtive glance at
the upper windows, it surprised him in the act of withdrawing behind
one of the lace curtains. I only hope he has nothing on his conscience
in the way of hospital bombings and the like. If he has, it can hardly
have failed to occur to him that his name is inscribed on the Allies'
"black-list," and that he will have to stand trial in due course.
It's a strange thing, this cropping up of half-remembered faces in new
surroundings. The very next day, in the course of the visit to the
Zeppelin station at Nordholz--but I will not anticipate.
Under the terms of the armistice the Germans agreed to render all naval
seaplanes unfit for use by removing their propellers, machine-guns, and
bomb-dropping equipment, and dismantling their wireless and ignition
systems. To see that this was carried out on a single machine was not
much of a task, but multiplied by the several scores in such a station
as Norderney, it became a formidable labour. To equalize the physical
work, the sub-commission for seaplane stations arranged that the British
and American officers included in it should take turn-and-turn about in
active inspection and checking the result of the latter with the lists
furnished in advance by the Germans. At Norderney the "active service"
side of the program fell to the lot of the two American officers to
carry out. The swift pace they set at the outset slowed down materially
toward the finish, and it was a pair of very weary officers that dropped
limply from the last two _Albatrosses_ and sat down upon a pontoon to
recover their breath. It was, I believe, Lieut.-Commander L---- who,
ruefully rubbing down a cramp which persisted in knotting his left
calf, declared that he had just computed that his combined clamberings
in the course of the inspection were equal to ascending and descending a
mountain half a mile high.
Practically all of the machines at Norderney were of the tried and
proven types--_Brandenburgs_, _Albatrosses_, _Frederichafens_, _Gothas_,
etc.--already well-known to the Allies. (It was not until the great
experimental station at Warnemünde, in the Baltic, was visited a
fortnight later that specimens of the latest types were revealed.) The
Allied experts of the party were greatly impressed with the excellence
of construction of all of the machines, none of them appearing to have
suffered in the least as a consequence of a shortage of materials. The
steel pontoons in particular--a branch of construction to which the
Germans had given much attention, and with notable success--came in for
especially favourable comment. (The Commander of the station, by the
way, showed us one of these pontoons which he had had fitted with an
engine and propeller and used in duck-shooting.) The general verdict
seemed to be that the Germans had little to learn from any one in the
building of seaplanes, and that this was principally due to the fact
that they had concentrated upon it for oversea work, where the British
had been going in more and more for swift "carrier" ships launching
aeroplanes. It was by aeroplanes launched from the "carrier" _Furious_
that the great Zeppelin station at Tondern was practically destroyed
last summer, and there is no doubt that this kind of a combination can
accomplish far more effective work--providing, of course, that the power
using it has command of the sea--than anything that can be done by
seaplanes. It was the fact that Germany did _not_ have control of the
sea, rather than any lack of ingenuity or initiative, that pinned her to
the seaplane, and, under the circumstances, it has to be admitted that
she made very creditable use of the latter.
The one new type of machine at Norderney (although the existence of it
had been known to the Allies for some time) was the "giant" monoplane
seaboat, quite the most remarkable machine of the kind in the world at
the present time. Though its span of something like 120 feet is less
than that of a number of great aeroplanes already in use, its huge
breadth of wing gave it a plane area of enormous size. The boat itself
was as large--and apparently as seaworthy--as a good-sized steam launch,
and so roomy that one could almost stand erect inside of it. It quite
dwarfed anything of the kind I had ever seen before. Nor was the boat,
spacious as it was, the only closed-in space. Twenty feet or more above
the deck of it, between the wings, was a large "box" containing, among
other things, a very elaborately equipped _sound-proof_ wireless room.
The technical instruments of control and navigation--especially the very
compact "Gyro" compasses--stirred the Allied experts to an admiration
they found difficult to restrain.