It was a favourite word of his, and he used it in all sorts of ways with
all sorts of expressions. Forbes, who, like me, had a kind of interest
in Wundt that almost amounted to friendship, asked him if women played
the war game, and he said he didn't know what they played except the
piano. All women were worms, in his opinion. Of course, he gassed about
everything German, and said that, from science and art and music to
matchboxes and sausages, his country was first and the rest nowhere. He
joined our school cadet corps eagerly, and became an officer of some
sort in a month; but he was fearfully pitying about it, and said that
English ways of drilling were enough to make a cat laugh, or words to
that effect. After he became an officer, he put on fearful side, though
as just one of the rank and file he'd been quite humble; and then, when
he ordered Saunders, who wasn't an officer, to do something out of drill
hours, and Saunders told him to do it himself, he turned white and
dashed at Saunders, who, of course, licked him on the spot and made his
nose bleed. He was properly mad about that, and said that if it had
happened in Germany, Saunders would have been shot; but as it happened
in England, of course Saunders wasn't. Travers major tried to explain
to Wundt that we weren't real soldiers, and that, when not with the
cadet corps, he was no better than anybody else, but he couldn't see
this. He said that in his country if you were once an officer, you were
always an officer, and that there was a gulf fixed between the men and
their officers; and he called Saunders "cannon fodder" to Batson; and
when Batson told Saunders, Saunders made Wundt carry him on his back up
to the gym., and there licked him again and made his nose bleed once
more, much to his wrath.
On the whole, owing to his ideas, which he wouldn't keep to himself,
Wundt didn't have too good a time at Merivale. He couldn't understand
us, and said we were slackers and rotters, and that our mercenary army
was no good, and that Germany was the greatest country in the world, and
we'd live to know it--perhaps sooner than we thought. Travers major
tried hard to explain to him how it was, but he couldn't or wouldn't
understand.
Travers said: "It's like this. Germany takes herself too seriously and
other countries not seriously enough. An Englishman is always saying
his own country is going to the dogs, and his Army's rotten, and his
Navy only a lot of old sardine tins that ought to be scrapped, and all
that sort of thing. That's his way, and when you bally Germans hear us
talk like that, you go and believe it, and don't understand it's our
national character to run ourselves down. And you chaps always go to
the other extreme and brag about your army, and your guns, and your
discipline, and your genius, and all the rest of it; and, of course, we
don't believe you in the least, because gas like that carries its own
reward, and nobody in the world could be so much better than all the
rest of the world as you think you are. And if you imagine, because we
run ourselves down, we would let anybody else dare to run us down,
you're wrong. And if you think our free army is frightened of your
slave army, and would mind taking you on, ten to one, on land or sea,
you're also wrong."
It was a prophecy in a way, though Travers little knew it, for the war
broke out next holidays, and when we went back to school, it was in full
swing. And so, naturally, was Wundt. He wasn't going home for the vac.
in any case, but stopping at Merivale, and he had done so. He told me
the Doctor had talked some piffle to him about the duties of
non-combatants; but, as Wundt truly said, every German in the world is a
combatant in time of war, and if you can't do one thing, you must try
and do another. In fact, old Dunston little knew the German character,
and when he found it out, he was a good bit astonished, not to say hurt.
He, however, discovered it jolly quickly, and I did first of all,
because, owing to being rather interested in human nature, I encouraged
Wundt in a sort of way, and let him talk to me, and tried to see things
from his point of view, as far as I could--that is, without doing
anything unsporting to England. The great point was to keep your temper
with Wundt; and, of course, most chaps couldn't, because he was so
beastly sure he was right--at least, his nation was. But I didn't mind
all that humbug, and found, by being patient with him, that, under all
this flare-up, he was what you might call deadly keen on his blessed
Fatherland. He fairly panted with patriotism, and in these moments,
quite ignored my feelings.
"Now you know why I wanted to grow up," he said to me. "I hoped this
wouldn't have happened till I could be in it. But it will be all over
and your country a thing of the past before I'm sixteen--worse luck!"
As he was going to be sixteen in October, that was a bit hopeful of
Wundt. His father or somebody had stuffed him up that Germany was being
sat on by the world, and couldn't stand it much longer; and after the
war began, he honestly believed that it was the end of England, and, in
a way, he was more decent than ever he'd been before. When we came back
at the end of the holidays, Wundt welcomed me in a very queer sort of
manner. Somebody had treated me just the same in the past, and, after
trying for a week to think who it was, I remembered it was my Uncle
Samuel, after I'd lost my mother. Wundt evidently felt sorry for all of
us in general and for me in particular as his special friend.
"Of course," he said, "I can't pretend I didn't want it to happen; but
you won't see it is for the good of the world that your country's got to
go down. And so I'm sorry for you, if anything."
"Do you really think it has got to go down?" I asked Wundt, and he said
it wasn't so much what he thought as what was bound to take place.
"Either England's got to go, or else Germany," he said, "and as the
Teuton is the world-power for religion and culture and everything that
really matters, and also miles strongest, England's naturally got to go.
You've had your turn; now it's ours. The Kaiser speaks, Germany listens
and obeys."
Booth asked him what day the Germans would be at Merivale, and if he'd
got a plan of campaign marked out; and he said about the half-term
holiday, or earlier, they would come. And Booth said that would mean a
short term, anyway, which had its bright side.
Then Tracey, who is awful sarcastic, though it doesn't generally come
off, asked Wundt how he had arrived at this idea, and Wundt said from
reading papers that his father had sent him via Holland.
"Your papers are chockful of lies," he said. "If you want the truth,
those of you who can read German can see it in my papers."
Of course, some of the Sixth could read German, and they borrowed his
papers, and were much surprised that Wundt really believed such absolute
rot against the evidence of our papers. But he was simply blind, and
went so far as to say that he'd sooner believe the pettiest little
German rag than all our swaggerest papers, let alone the _Merivale
Weekly Trumpet_, which was fearfully warlike, because the editor had a
son who was training for the Front.
But most of all, Wundt hated _Punch_, and, finding this out, we used to
slip the cartoons into his desk, and put them under his pillow, and
arrange them elsewhere where he must find them. These made him fairly
foam at the mouth, and he said he hoped the first thing the Germans
would do, when they got to London, would be to go to _Punch_ and put the
men who drew the pictures and made the jokes to the sword.
No doubt it was because they were so jolly true.
The masters were very decent to Wundt, especially Fortescue, who saw how
trying it must be for him, living in an enemy's country; and when Wundt
told me in secret that he felt his position was becoming unbearable, and
that he had written and asked if he could be exchanged for a prisoner,
or something. He said in a gloomy sort of voice: "I may tell you I
haven't wasted my time here, and perhaps some day Doctor Dunston and you
chaps will know it to your cost."
Well, though friendly enough to Wundt, I didn't much like that, and told
my own special chum, Manwaring, what he'd said; and Manwaring told me
that in his opinion Wundt ought to be neutralised immediately. But I
knew enough of Wundt to feel certain he could never be properly
neutralised, because he had told me that once a German always a German,
and that he'd rather be a dead German than a living King of England, and
that if he had to stop in England for a million years, he'd still be as
German as ever, if not more so. And he'd also fairly shaken with pride
because he'd read somewhere that the Kaiser had said that he would give
any doctor a hundred thousand marks if he would draw every drop of
English blood out of his veins. And when he said it, Tracey had
answered that if the Kaiser came over to England, there were plenty of
doctors who would oblige him for half the money.
But now I thought, without any unkind feeling to Wundt, that I ought to
tell Travers major, as head of the school, of his dark threats; and I
did; and Travers thanked me and said I was quite right to tell him,
because war is war, and you never know.
Of course, if Wundt was going to turn out to be a spy, it wasn't
possible for me to be his friend, and I told him so. And he saw that.
He said he was sorry, if anything, to lose my friendship, but he should
always do all that he considered right in the service of his country,
and he couldn't let me stand between him and his duty. Which amounted
to admitting that he was a spy, or, at any rate, was trying to be one;
for, of course, at Merivale a spy was no more use than he would have
been at the North Pole. There was simply nothing to spy about, except
the photographs of new girls on Brown's mantelpiece.
Then Travers made a move, and he was sorry to do it; but he was going to
be a soldier, just as much as Wundt was, and though he never jawed about
Woolwich like Wundt did about Potsdam, yet he was quite as military at
heart; and though he didn't wear the English colours inside his
waistcoat lining, like Wundt wore the German colours, as he admitted to
me in a friendly moment, yet Travers felt just as keen about England as
Wundt did about Germany, and quite as cast down when we heard about Mons
as Wundt was when he heard about the retreat on the Marne. He
pretended, of course, it was only strategy, but he knew jolly well it
wasn't.
Then Travers major reluctantly decided that, with a spy, certain things
must be done. He didn't like doing them, but they had to be done. And
the first thing was to prove it.
"You can only prove a chap is a spy by spying yourself," Travers said,
and well knowing the peculiar skill of Norris and Booth, he told them to
keep a careful lookout on Wundt and report anything suspicious; which
they did do, because it was work to which they were well suited by their
natures, and they soon reported that Wundt went long walks out of
bounds, and evidently avoided people as much as possible. Once they
surprised him making notes, and when he saw Booth coming, he tore them
up.
Then Travers major did a strong thing, and ordered that the box of Wundt
should be searched. I happened to know that Wundt was very keen to get a
letter off by post, which he said was important, yet hesitated to send
for fear of accidents; and that decided Travers.
So it was done, quite openly and without subterfuge, as they say,
because we just took the key from Wundt by force and told him we were
going to do it, and then did it. He protested very violently, but the
protest, as Travers said, was not sustained.
And we found his box contained fearfully incriminating matter, for he
had a one-barrelled breech-loading pistol in it, with a box of
ammunition, of which we had never heard until that moment, and a
complete map on a huge scale of Merivale and the country round. It was
a wonderful map, and how he had made it, and nobody ever seen it, was
extraordinary. At least, so it seemed, till we remembered that he had
been here through the holidays on his own. There were numbers in red
ink all over the map, and remarks carefully written in German; and
though it is impossible to give you any idea of the map, which was
beautifully drawn and about three yards square, if not more, yet I can
reproduce the military remarks upon it, which Travers translated into
English.
They went like this, and showed in rather a painful way what Wundt
really was at heart. And it showed what Germany was, too; and no doubt
thousands of other Germans all over the United Kingdom had been doing
the same thing, and still are.
After the first shock of being discovered, I honestly believe he was
pleased to be seen in his true colours, and gloried in his crime.