The Case of the Hidden Germans
Lewis gasped for a moment, silent in contemplation of the magnificence
of rumor. The Germans already landed, hiding underground, striking by
night, secretly, terribly, at the power of England! Here was a
conception which made the myth of “The Russians” a paltry fable; before
which the Legend of Mons was an ineffectual thing.
It was monstrous. And yet—
He looked steadily at Merritt; a square-headed, black-haired, solid
sort of man. He had symptoms of nerves about him for the moment,
certainly, but one could not wonder at that, whether the tales he told
were true, or whether he merely believed them to be true. Lewis had
known his brother-in-law for twenty years or more, and had always found
him a sure man in his own small world. “But then,” said the doctor to
himself, “those men, if they once get out of the ring of that little
world of theirs, they are lost. Those are the men that believed in
Madame Blavatsky.”
“Well,” he said, “what do you think yourself? The Germans landed and
hiding somewhere about the country: there’s something extravagant in
the notion, isn’t there?”
“I don’t know what to think. You can’t get over the facts. There are
the soldiers with their rifles and their guns at the works all over
Stratfordshire, and those guns go off. I told you I’d heard them. Then
who are the soldiers shooting at? That’s what we ask ourselves at
Midlingham.”
“Quite so; I quite understand. It’s an extraordinary state of things.”
“It’s more than extraordinary; it’s an awful state of things. It’s
terror in the dark, and there’s nothing worse than that. As that young
fellow I was telling you about said, ‘At the front you do know what
you’re up against.’”
“And people really believe that a number of Germans have somehow got
over to England and have hid themselves underground?”
“People say they’ve got a new kind of poison-gas. Some think that they
dig underground places and make the gas there, and lead it by secret
pipes into the shops; others say that they throw gas bombs into the
factories. It must be worse than anything they’ve used in France, from
what the authorities say.”
“The authorities? Do _they_ admit that there are Germans in hiding
about Midlingham?”
“No. They call it ‘explosions.’ But we know it isn’t explosions. We
know in the Midlands what an explosion sounds like and looks like. And
we know that the people killed in these ‘explosions’ are put into their
coffins in the works. Their own relations are not allowed to see them.”
“And so you believe in the German theory?”
“If I do, it’s because one must believe in something. Some say they’ve
seen the gas. I heard that a man living in Dunwich saw it one night
like a black cloud with sparks of fire in it floating over the tops of
the trees by Dunwich Common.”
The light of an ineffable amazement came into Lewis’s eyes. The night
of Remnant’s visit, the trembling vibration of the air, the dark tree
that had grown in his garden since the setting of the sun, the strange
leafage that was starred with burning, with emerald and ruby fires, and
all vanished away when he returned from his visit to the Garth; and
such a leafage had appeared as a burning cloud far in the heart of
England: what intolerable mystery, what tremendous doom was signified
in this? But one thing was clear and certain: that the terror of
Meirion was also the terror of the Midlands.
Lewis made up his mind most firmly that if possible all this should be
kept from his brother-in-law. Merritt had come to Porth as to a city of
refuge from the horrors of Midlingham; if it could be managed he should
be spared the knowledge that the cloud of terror had gone before him
and hung black over the western land. Lewis passed the port and said in
an even voice:
“Very strange, indeed; a black cloud with sparks of fire?”
“I can’t answer for it, you know; it’s only a rumor.”
“Just so; and you think or you’re inclined to think that this and all
the rest you’ve told me is to be put down to the hidden Germans?”
“As I say; because one must think something.”
“I quite see your point. No doubt, if it’s true, it’s the most awful
blow that has ever been dealt at any nation in the whole history of
man. The enemy established in our vitals! But is it possible, after
all? How could it have been worked?”
Merritt told Lewis how it had been worked, or rather, how people said
it had been worked. The idea, he said, was that this was a part, and a
most important part, of the great German plot to destroy England and
the British Empire.
The scheme had been prepared years ago, some thought soon after the
Franco-Prussian War. Moltke had seen that the invasion of England (in
the ordinary sense of the term invasion) presented very great
difficulties. The matter was constantly in discussion in the inner
military and high political circles, and the general trend of opinion
in these quarters was that at the best, the invasion of England would
involve Germany in the gravest difficulties, and leave France in the
position of the _tertius gaudens_. This was the state of affairs when a
very high Prussian personage was approached by the Swedish professor,
Huvelius.
Thus Merritt, and here I would say in parenthesis that this Huvelius
was by all accounts an extraordinary man. Considered personally and
apart from his writings he would appear to have been a most amiable
individual. He was richer than the generality of Swedes, certainly far
richer than the average university professor in Sweden. But his shabby,
green frock-coat, and his battered, furry hat were notorious in the
university town where he lived. No one laughed, because it was well
known that Professor Huvelius spent every penny of his private means
and a large portion of his official stipend on works of kindness and
charity. He hid his head in a garret, some one said, in order that
others might be able to swell on the first floor. It was told of him
that he restricted himself to a diet of dry bread and coffee for a
month in order that a poor woman of the streets, dying of consumption,
might enjoy luxuries in hospital.
And this was the man who wrote the treatise “De Facinore Humano”; to
prove the infinite corruption of the human race.
Oddly enough, Professor Huvelius wrote the most cynical book in the
world—Hobbes preaches rosy sentimentalism in comparison—with the very
highest motives. He held that a very large part of human misery,
misadventure, and sorrow was due to the false convention that the heart
of man was naturally and in the main well disposed and kindly, if not
exactly righteous. “Murderers, thieves, assassins, violators, and all
the host of the abominable,” he says in one passage, “are created by
the false pretense and foolish credence of human virtue. A lion in a
cage is a fierce beast, indeed; but what will he be if we declare him
to be a lamb and open the doors of his den? Who will be guilty of the
deaths of the men, women and children whom he will surely devour, save
those who unlocked the cage?” And he goes on to show that kings and the
rulers of the peoples could decrease the sum of human misery to a vast
extent by acting on the doctrine of human wickedness. “War,” he
declares, “which is one of the worst of evils, will always continue to
exist. But a wise king will desire a brief war rather than a lengthy
one, a short evil rather than a long evil. And this not from the
benignity of his heart towards his enemies, for we have seen that the
human heart is naturally malignant, but because he desires to conquer,
and to conquer easily, without a great expenditure of men or of
treasure, knowing that if he can accomplish this feat his people will
love him and his crown will be secure. So he will wage brief victorious
wars, and not only spare his own nation, but the nation of the enemy,
since in a short war the loss is less on both sides than in a long war.
And so from evil will come good.”
And how, asks Huvelius, are such wars to be waged? The wise prince, he
replies, will begin by assuming the enemy to be infinitely corruptible
and infinitely stupid, since stupidity and corruption are the chief
characteristics of man. So the prince will make himself friends in the
very councils of his enemy, and also amongst the populace, bribing the
wealthy by proffering to them the opportunity of still greater wealth,
and winning the poor by swelling words. “For, contrary to the common
opinion, it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the populace
are to be gained by talking to them about liberty, their unknown god.
And so much are they enchanted by the words liberty, freedom, and such
like, that the wise can go to the poor, rob them of what little they
have, dismiss them with a hearty kick, and win their hearts and their
votes for ever, if only they will assure them that the treatment which
they have received is called liberty.”
Guided by these principles, says Huvelius, the wise prince will
entrench himself in the country that he desires to conquer; “nay, with
but little trouble, he may actually and literally throw his garrisons
into the heart of the enemy country before war has begun.”
This is a long and tiresome parenthesis; but it is necessary as
explaining the long tale which Merritt told his brother-in-law, he
having received it from some magnate of the Midlands, who had traveled
in Germany. It is probable that the story was suggested in the first
place by the passage from Huvelius which I have just quoted.
Merritt knew nothing of the real Huvelius, who was all but a saint; he
thought of the Swedish professor as a monster of iniquity, “worse,” as
he said, “than Neech”—meaning, no doubt, Nietzsche.
So he told the story of how Huvelius had sold his plan to the Germans;
a plan for filling England with German soldiers. Land was to be bought
in certain suitable and well-considered places, Englishmen were to be
bought as the apparent owners of such land, and secret excavations were
to be made, till the country was literally undermined. A subterranean
Germany, in fact, was to be dug under selected districts of England;
there were to be great caverns, underground cities, well drained, well
ventilated, supplied with water, and in these places vast stores both
of food and of munitions were to be accumulated, year after year, till
“the Day” dawned. And then, warned in time, the secret garrison would
leave shops, hotels, offices, villas, and vanish underground, ready to
begin their work of bleeding England at the heart.
“That’s what Henson told me,” said Merritt at the end of his long
story. “Henson, head of the Buckley Iron and Steel Syndicate. He has
been a lot in Germany.”
“Well,” said Lewis, “of course, it may be so. If it is so, it is
terrible beyond words.”
Indeed, he found something horribly plausible in the story. It was an
extraordinary plan, of course; an unheard of scheme; but it did not
seem impossible. It was the Trojan Horse on a gigantic scale; indeed,
he reflected, the story of the horse with the warriors concealed within
it which was dragged into the heart of Troy by the deluded Trojans
themselves might be taken as a prophetic parable of what had happened
to England—if Henson’s theory were well founded. And this theory
certainly squared with what one had heard of German preparations in
Belgium and in France: emplacements for guns ready for the invader,
German manufactories which were really German forts on Belgian soil,
the caverns by the Aisne made ready for the cannon; indeed, Lewis
thought he remembered something about suspicious concrete tennis-courts
on the heights commanding London. But a German army hidden under
English ground! It was a thought to chill the stoutest heart.
And it seemed from that wonder of the burning tree, that the enemy
mysteriously and terribly present at Midlingham, was present also in
Meirion. Lewis, thinking of the country as he knew it, of its wild and
desolate hillsides, its deep woods, its wastes and solitary places,
could not but confess that no more fit region could be found for the
deadly enterprise of secret men. Yet, he thought again, there was but
little harm to be done in Meirion to the armies of England or to their
munitionment. They were working for panic terror? Possibly that might
be so; but the camp under the Highway? That should be their first
object, and no harm had been done there.
Lewis did not know that since the panic of the horses men had died
terribly in that camp; that it was now a fortified place, with a deep,
broad trench, a thick tangle of savage barbed wire about it, and a
machine-gun planted at each corner.