I Double Back
“Good-bye, old chap,” called Davies.
“Good-bye,” the whistle blew and the ferry-steamer forged ahead,
leaving Davies on the quay, bareheaded and wearing his old Norfolk
jacket and stained grey flannels, as at our first meeting in Flensburg
station. There was no bandaged hand this time, but he looked pinched
and depressed; his eyes had black circles round them; and again I felt
that same indefinable pathos in him.
“Your friend is in low spirits,” said Böhme, who was installed on a
seat beside me, voluminously caped and rugged against the biting air.
It was a still, sunless day.
“So am I,” I grunted, and it was the literal truth. I was only half
awake, felt unwashed and dissipated, heavy in head and limbs. But for
Davies I should never have been where I was. It was he who had
patiently coaxed me out of my bunk, packed my bag, fed me with tea and
an omelette (to which I believe he had devoted peculiarly tender care),
and generally mothered me for departure. While I swallowed my second
cup he was brushing the mould and smoothing the dents from my felt hat,
which had been entombed for a month in the sail-locker; working at it
with a remorseful concern in his face. The only initiative I am
conscious of having shown was in the matter of my bag. “Put in my sea
clothes, oils, and all,” I had said; “I may want them again.” There was
mortal need of a thorough consultation, but this was out of the
question. Davies did not badger or complain, but only timidly asked me
how we were to meet and communicate, a question on which my mind was an
absolute blank.
“Look out for me about the 26th,” I suggested feebly.
Before we left the cabin he gave me a scrap of pencilled paper and saw
that it went safely into my pocket-book. “Look at it in the train,” he
said.
Unable to cope with Böhme, I paced the deck aimlessly as we swung round
the See Gat into the Buse Tief, trying to identify the point where we
crossed it yesterday blindfold. But the tide was full, and the waters
blank for miles round till they merged in haze. Soon I drifted down
into the saloon, and crouching over a stove pulled out that scrap of
paper. In a crabbed, boyish hand, and much besmudged with
tobacco-ashes, I found the following notes:
(1) _Your journey_. [See Maps A and B.] Norddeich 8.58, Emden 10.32,
Leer 11.16 (Böhme changes for Bremen), Rheine 1.8 (change), Amsterdam
7.17 p.m. Leave again _via_ Hook 8.52, London 9 am.
(2) The coast-station—_their_ rondezvous—querry is it _Norden_? (You
pass it 9.13)—there is a tidal creek up to it. High-water there on
25th, say 10.30 to 11 p.m. It cannot be Norddeich, which I find has a
dredged-out low-water channel for the steamer, so tide “serves” would
not apply.
(3) _Your other clews_ (tugs, pilots, depths, railway, Esens, seven of
something). Querry: Scheme of defence by land and sea for North Sea
Coast?
_Sea_—7 islands, 7 channels between (counting West Ems), very small
depths (what you said) in most of them. Tugs and pilots for patrol work
behind islands, as I always said. Querry: Rondezvous is for inspecting
channels?
_Land_—Look at railway (map in ulster pocket) running in a loop all
round Friesland, a few miles from coast. Querry: To be used as line of
communication for army corps. Troops could be quickly sent to any
threatened point. _Esens_ the base? It is in top centre of loop. Von
Brooning dished us fairly over that at Bensersiel.
_Chatham_—D. was spying after our naval plans for war with Germany.
Von Brooning runs naval part over here.
Where does Burmer come in? Querry—you go to Bremen and find out about
him?
I nodded stupidly over this document—so stupidly that I found myself
wondering whether Burmer was a place or a person. Then I dozed, to wake
with a violent start and find the paper on the floor. Panic-stricken, I
hid it away, and went on deck, when I found we were close to Norddeich,
running up to the bleakest of bleak jetties thrown out from the
dyke-bound polders of the mainland. Böhme and I landed together, and he
was at my elbow as I asked for a ticket for Amsterdam, and was given
one as far as Rheine, a junction near the Dutch frontier. He was
ensconced in an opposite corner to me in the railway carriage, looking
like an Indian idol. “Where do you come in?” I pondered, dreamily. Too
sleepy to talk, I could only blink at him, sitting bolt upright with my
arms folded over my precious pocket-book. Finally, I gave up the
struggle, buttoned my ulster tightly up, and turning my back upon him
with an apology, lay down to sleep, the precious pocket nethermost. He
was at liberty to rifle my bag if he chose, and I dare say he did. I
cannot say, for from this point till Rheine, for the best part of four
hours, that is, I had only two lucid intervals.
The first was at Emden, where we both had to change. Here, as we pushed
our way down the crowded platform, Böhme, after being greeted
respectfully by several persons, was at last buttonholed without means
of escape by an obsequious gentleman, whose description is of no
moment, but whose conversation is. It was about a canal; what canal I
did not gather, though, from a name dropped, I afterwards identified it
as one in course of construction as a feeder to the Ems. The point is
that the subject was canals. At the moment it was seed dropped in
unreceptive soil, but it germinated later. I passed on, mingling with
the crowd, and was soon asleep again in another carriage where Böhme
this time did not follow me.
The second occasion was at Leer, where I heard myself called by name,
and woke to find him at the window. He had to change trains, and had
come to say good-bye. “Don’t forget to go to Lloyd’s,” he grated in my
ear. I expect it was a wan smile that I returned, for I was at a very
low ebb, and my fortress looked sarcastically impregnable. But the
sapper was free; “free” was my last conscious thought.
Even after Rheine, where I changed for the last time, a brutish
drowsiness enchained me, and the afternoon was well advanced before my
faculties began to revive.
The train crept like a snail from station to station. I might, so a
fellow-passenger told me, have waited three hours at Rheine for an
express which would have brought me to Amsterdam at about the same
time; or, if I had chosen to break the journey farther back, two hours
at either Emden or Leer would still have enabled me to catch the said
express at Rheine. These alternatives had escaped Davies, and, I
surmised, had been suppressed by Böhme, who doubtless did not want me
behind him, free either to double back or to follow him to Bremen.
The pace, then, was execrable, and there were delays; we were behind
time at Hengelo, thirty minutes late at Apeldoorn; so that I might well
have grown nervous about my connexions at Amsterdam, which were in some
jeopardy. But as I battled out of my lethargy and began to take account
of our position and prospects, quite a different thought at the outset
affected me. Anxiety to reach London was swamped in reluctance to quit
Germany, so that I found myself grudging every mile that I placed
between me and the frontier. It was the old question of urgency. To-day
was the 23rd. The visit to London meant a minimum absence of
forty-eight hours, counting from Amsterdam; that is to say, that by
travelling for two nights and one day, and devoting the other day to
investigating Dollmann’s past, it was humanly possible for me to be
back on the Frisian coast on the evening of the 25th. Yes, I could be
at Norden, if that was the “rendezvous”, at 7 p.m. But what a scramble!
No margin for delays, no physical respite. Some pasts take a deal of
raking up—other persons may be affected; men are cautious, they trip
you up with red tape; or the man who knows is out at lunch—a protracted
lunch; or in the country—a protracted week-end. Will you see Mr
So-and-so, or leave a note? Oh! I know those public departments—from
the inside! And the Admiralty!... I saw myself baffled and racing back
the same night to Germany, with two days wasted, arriving, good for
nothing, at Norden, with no leisure to reconnoitre my ground; to be
baffled again there, probably, for you cannot always count on fogs (as
Davies said). Esens was another clue, and “to follow Burmer”—there was
something in that notion. But I wanted time, and had I time? How long
could Davies maintain himself at Norderney? Not so very long, from what
I remembered of last night. And was he even safe there? A feverish
dream recurred to me—a dream of Davies in a diving-dress; of a
regrettable hitch in the air-supply—Stop, that was nonsense!... Let us
be sane. What matter if he had to go? What matter if I took my time in
London? Then with a flood of shame I saw Davies’s wistful face on the
quay, heard his grim ejaculation: “He’s our game or no one’s”; and my
own sullen “Oh, I’ll keep the secret!” London was utterly impossible.
If I found my informant, what credentials had I, what claim to
confidences? None, unless I told the whole story. Why, my mere presence
in Whitehall would imperil the secret; for, once on my native heath, I
should be recognised—possibly haled to judgement; at the best should
escape in a cloud of rumour—“last heard of at Norderney”; “only this
morning was raising Cain at the Admiralty about a mythical lieutenant.”
No! Back to Friesland, was the word. One night’s rest—I must have
that—between sheets, on a feather bed; one long, luxurious night, and
then back refreshed to Friesland, to finish our work in our own way,
and with none but our own weapons.
Having reached this resolve, I was nearly putting it into instant
execution, by alighting at Amersfoort, but thought better of it. I had
a transformation to effect before I returned north, and the more
populous centre I made it in the less it was likely to attract notice.
Besides, I had in my mind’s eye a perfect bed in a perfect hostelry
hard by the Amstel River. It was an economy in the end.
So, at half-past eight I was sipping my coffee in the aforesaid
hostelry, with a London newspaper before me, which was unusually
interesting, and some German journals, which, “in hate of a wrong not
theirs”, were one and all seething with rancorous Anglophobia. At nine
I was in the Jewish quarter, striking bargains in an infamous marine
slop-shop. At half-past nine I was despatching this unscrupulous
telegram to my chief—“Very sorry, could not call Norderney; hope
extension all right; please write to Hôtel du Louvre, Paris.” At ten I
was in the perfect bed, rapturously flinging my limbs abroad in its
glorious redundancies. And at 8.28 on the following morning, with a
novel chilliness about the upper lip, and a vast excess of strength and
spirits, I was sitting in a third-class carriage, bound for Germany,
and dressed as a young seaman, in a pea-jacket, peaked cap, and
comforter.
The transition had not been difficult. I had shaved off my moustache
and breakfasted hastily in my bedroom, ready equipped for a journey in
my ulster and cloth cap. I had dismissed the hotel porter at the
station, and left my bag at the cloak-room, after taking out of it an
umber bundle and substituting the ulster. The umber bundle, which
consisted of my oilskins, and within them my sea-boots and a few other
garments and necessaries, the whole tied up with a length of tarry
rope, was now in the rack above me, and (with a stout stick)
represented my luggage. Every article in it—I shudder at their
origin—was in strict keeping with my humble _métier,_ for I knew they
were liable to search at the frontier Custom-house; but there was a
Baedeker of Northern Germany in my jacket pocket.
For the nonce, if questions were asked, I was an English seaman, going
to Emden to join a ship, with a ticket as far as the frontier. Beyond
that a definite scheme of action had still to be thought out. One
thing, however, was sure. I was determined to be at Norden to-morrow
night, the 25th. A word about Norden, which is a small town seven miles
south of Norddeich. When hurriedly scanning the map for coast stations
in the cabin yesterday, I had not thought of Norden, because it did not
appear to be on the coast, but Davies had noticed it while I slept, and
I now saw that his pencilled hint was a shrewd one. The creek he spoke
of, though barely visible on the map, _[See Map B]_ flowed into the Ems
Estuary in a south-westerly direction. The “night train” tallied to
perfection, for high tide in the creek would be, as Davies estimated,
between 10.30 and 11 p.m. on the night of the 25th; and the time-table
showed that the only night train arriving at Norden was one from the
south at 10.46 p.m. This looked promising. Emden, which I had inclined
to on the spur of the moment, was out of court in comparison, for many
reasons; not the least being that it was served by three trains between
9 p.m. and 1 a.m., so that the phrase “night train” would be ambiguous
and not decisive as with Norden.
So far good; but how was I to spend the intervening time? Should I act
on Davies’s “querry” and go to Bremen after Böhme? I soon dismissed
that idea. It was one to act upon if others failed; for the present it
meant another scramble. Bremen is six hours from Norden by rail. I
should spend a disproportionate amount of my limited time in trains,
and I should want a different disguise. Besides, I had already learnt
something fresh about Böhme; for the seed dropped at Emden Station
yesterday had come to life. A submarine engineer I knew him to be
before; I now knew that canals were another branch of his labours—not a
very illuminating fact; but could I pick up more in a single day?
There remained Esens, and it was thither I resolved to go to-night—a
tedious journey, lasting till past eight in the evening; but there I
should only be an hour from Norden by rail.
And at Esens?
All day long I strove for light on the central mystery, collecting from
my diary, my memory, my imagination, from the map, the time-table, and
Davies’s grubby jottings, every elusive atom of material. Sometimes I
issued from a reverie with a start, to find a phlegmatic Dutch peasant
staring strangely at me over his china pipe. I was more careful over
the German border. Davies’s paper I soon knew by heart. I pictured him
writing it with his cramped fist in his corner by the stove, fighting
against sleep, absently striking salvos of matches, while I snored in
my bunk; absently diverging into dreams, I knew, of a rose-brown face
under dewy hair and a grey tam-o’-shanter; though not a word of her
came into the document. I smiled to see his undying faith in the
“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.