with a scared face. "Uhlans!" said he. "The rest of the Bosches
will follow. Our troops must have fallen back. They always do fall
back."
"If you ducks had accepted my offer to go to England," Captain Kettle
told them, "instead of wearing yourselves out with oratory, we might
have been well on the way out of this by now. As it is, the best
thing to do for the moment is to shut that door and sit tight. Those
parties on horse-back are out to murder somebody, and with them it's
first come first killed. I don't want you to be too pushing. You
can be useful."
The men listened and shivered. They were mechanics, not fighters,
and this truculent little Islander evidently knew what he was talking
about. He looked a fighter, every inch of him, and if he advised
caution there was evidently some reason for it.
"But you," said Kettle, turning to Joseph, "you had better slip out
and look after your wife."
Joseph shivered. The drug had died out in him and he was no longer
the hero. He had a headache, he was shaken, he was unashamedly
afraid.
"Oh, well, just as you like," said the sailor with contempt. "I'd go
myself if I was free. But I'm under orders now, and my owner comes
first. I've got to get these mechanics shipped across to a town in
the Midlands, and with the beastly Germans buzzing about one's ears
it's going to be a tougher job than I reckoned on. Your friends here
have the nerves of sheep."
The mechanics, with the horrors of the neighbouring Belgian towns
fresh upon them, were hard to move. Their country had been crushed
with Satanic efficiency. Terror stalked through it raw-headed. They
had not read the details in the columns of a censored newspaper. The
full beastly story had been chattered out to them by wild-eyed,
shivering survivors. Small wonder they were cowed.
Most had others besides themselves to think about--wives, mothers,
daughters--and the Huns were raging through the town and carrying out
their full programme of frightfulness whilst they, able-bodied men
though they were, cowered in the wine merchant's cellar, impotent to
help or resist.
"To hear you ducks talk," said Captain Kettle disgustedly, "one would
believe you don't want to do anything, or say anything, or think
anything that'll hurt the Emperor of Germany's feelings. Now, I'd
cheerfully give my wooden leg just for the luxury of having him here
in this room for two minutes so that I might pull his nose. And it
is an American limb that cost, with spares, £30. Great James! Have
none of you got a tail to wag? The Germans are playing Hell's
delight with your women and kids this minute, and the most you can
say is 'So mote it be.' Can't some of you do a bit of killing in
your turn? Get out of here. Be dangerous. Go for every German you
see with your finger-nails and your teeth if you've nothing better,
and you'll find the German will run. Then gather your women and come
back here. I'll do the rest."
"What, you'll take our wives too? You never said that before."
"Then, by James! I say it now. Now then, out with you! All that
are back here with their women in two hours' time I will take out of
this filthy Belgium to a place where the Huns can't get."
The mechanics sullenly shouldered their way out through the cellar
door with Kettle's tongue lashing them from behind, and then from the
darkness of a distant corner came the frightened moan of M. Joseph
Mumm.
The little mariner stalked across, put fingers on the humpback's
collar, and shook him. "If you think a kicking will do you good,
just mention it."
"Give me a little money. I must have money. It is to buy film with.
You said you wanted cinematograph pictures and I cannot take them
without film, negative film, you understand, and that will cost
money. Please----"
"Shut up! You're after drugs again, and you've a skinful of those
already. Now clear out of this one-time, and go and hunt up your
wife. I'll come with you till you find her, in case you forget
between now and then what your errand is--you miserable bag of
shivers!"
Out into the street they went, lit now by burning houses, and horrid
with the noises of a sack.
"My God! we shall be seen in all this glare," said poor Joseph.
"Then put back your shoulders and walk as if you owned the town.
These devils won't touch a man with a stiff upper lip if they can
find another with his knees twittering."
"_Dieu de Dieu!_ but hear the screams!"
"There are too many screams for my taste," said the sailor acidly.
"Your friends are dying like sheep, Joseph, when if they'd the sense
they might die like dogs, and pull some of these other dogs down with
them. If you'll take the tip from me, you'll get your teeth picked
clean and ready for biting. Where did you say Mrs. Joseph was?"
"At the _café_ where we dined."
"Then go along and collect her, and bring her to the Lodge. I'd
better not come with you as I expect I look a bit English, and might
bring down attention. But I will hang about, board and board, in the
offing, and bear a hand if you look like needing one. Mind your
head!"
A German soldier, red with recent murder, and with blood-lust glaring
from his eyes, ran at them from a doorway. Joseph Mumm covered his
face, moaned, and cowered up against the wall. Captain Kettle
attracted the man's charge with a yell, then dodged, and tripped him
as he passed. Thereafter he jumped upon the man's back, and dirked
him heartily with his own bayonet....
Joseph Mumm found himself shaken viciously by a fierce-faced man with
a red torpedo beard, in pickle-haube and long grey-green overcoat.
"By James! Do you dare to make me give an order twice? I told you
to be off and collect your wife. Go! D'ye hear me! Go, you swine!"
The humpback hobbled off, and Kettle with Mauser at the trail,
followed at a discreet distance. Around them the sack continued, and
horror abounded. Another soldier danced up drunk, with rifle slung
over his shoulder, and cigar boxes in his arms. All the boxes except
two he dropped to the cobbles, and then opening those he had left, he
solemnly emptied the tobacco rolls over Captain Kettle's helmet.
Now the little sailor, as has been shown in these memoirs, was the
last person in the world to take liberties with, and that German
soldier had a narrower escape from being smitten violently with a
Mauser butt than he probably suspects to this day. But it flashed
upon Captain Kettle that here was a certificate for his disguise; the
German had taken him for another German; and, in view of what was to
come, this perfect make-up was necessary. But at the same time, as
head of the Wharfedale Particular Methodists, he felt very keenly the
degradation of being an actor. He followed after M. Mumm, telling
himself that bundle of terror little knew what insults his protector
was forced to put up with.
Joseph Mumm tottered in between the gaily lit green-painted tubs of
shrubs which advertised the front of the _café_, at a point where two
streams of German officers made ingress and egress. Captain Sir Owen
Kettle, with a start, remembered that a German private should never
breathe the air hallowed by his officer, and (using his new-found
caution) cut into a side street, and worked his way round to the back
of the _café_, where he remembered a side window.
But when he put his face to the pane and peered round the side of the
blind, the scene dished up through that narrow slit staggered even
his steel nerve. The place was full of German officers, many of them
roaring with drink. One, in a chair, struck with spurred heels at a
piano's keyboard; two for a bet were shooting at the bottles in the
bar with other bottles; Belgian corpses lay on the floor, and the men
of Kultur kicked them as they passed; Belgian women were there being
vilely ill-treated; a stout, struggling priest, held between four
officers, was having his bare feet grilled at a stove.
At one side of the ruined _café_ lay Madame Mumm, dead.... There was
no doubt as to how she had died.... Facing a group of three of the
soberer officers, Joseph, who had loved her, with light laugh and
humorous gesture, was giving information about the little town. He
was making no attempt to avenge his wife. He was merely being a
traitor.
Captain Kettle was a man with a strong stomach, but he was nearly
sick then. "My Great James!" he muttered. "And they hate the
English a thousand times worse than they hate these poor ducks. I
suppose we've Josephs at home, too. What would the swine do if they
got to England? There's only one way of taming them now, and that's
by killing them off. Well, I have no time for frills like cleaning
up Germany just now. I must get back to my job."
Now, Kettle was under no illusions about the capabilities of the
members of the Mechanics' Lodge. Turners and fitters they might be;
fighting men they were not; and he had a shrewd idea that truth and
faith were not in them. When he made his offer to transport them and
their women to British soil, he had a plan already matured in his
mind, but did not tell it, because of a very reasonable fear of
informers.
There was a chemical works near the Lodge-room, and alongside in the
road, awaiting erection, was a large iron vat, made from a Lancashire
boiler with its flues and tubes removed. The vat was perched on a
broad-wheeled trolley, and had a manhole at its top, and another,
with door lying near, at its lower edge. Coupled to the fore-end of
the trolley was a lusty traction engine, deserted certainly, but
trickling steam. Here was a car in which, packed close, he reckoned
he could transport fifty people to the Belgian frontier.
The question of a driver worried him. Amongst the members of the
Mechanics' Lodge the odds were heavy on finding at least one man who
could handle a road locomotive. But would that man have nerve? This
was an essential qualification. The drive from the sacked town to
the Dutch frontier was not going to be, he plainly foresaw, a simple
trip to suit a nervous man. At a pinch he could drive himself, but
another man as guard would be desperately needed, and he had a
profound distrust for these Belgians. The lamentable example of
Joseph Mumm was still hot within him.
At this stage of doubt then he ran into another German soldier round
the corner of a block, who cursed him in a language which was not
German, and presented a prompt bayonet to hamper his further advance.
"If it wasn't for that spiked hat," said Kettle warily, "I should say
you were a gentleman I met not very long ago near a beer-mill."
"By Gad! It's my pal the pig-dealer! D'ye happen to have matches on
you? I found a feather to clean out my pipe, and now I haven't a
light. I say, worthy knight, do you know you are on the wrong side
of the fence, and are liable to be hung on sight if the Bosches clap
eyes on you? You really shouldn't do these sort of things at your
time of life."
"Can you drive a traction engine?"
"It's rather changing the subject, but I can. It happens I'm a
sapper, and that was part of my ABC. Nobody ever recognizes my true
worth. Even the girls I'm engaged to don't appreciate the treasure
they've snapped up. And nobody ever supplies me with matches. But
why a traction engine, noble stranger? You may want to pull a
travelling circus round this benighted country, with brass band
attachment, but my humble ambition is to sneak away to my nice wet
dug-out as quietly as possible."
Captain Kettle's fingers itched. He had a thousand wishes to catch
this big casual youngster by the collar and shake the foolishness out
of him. But by an effort he restrained himself, and spoke instead.
His tone was acidulated, but his explanations were clear.
The staff subaltern scratched his head. "Seems to me, Sir Owen, that
if I don't get scuppered over this little entertainment of yours,
it's likely to cost me my commission. My immediate boss is very keen
on his young men attending to their own particular jobs, and not
getting switched off on to side tracks. He broke a man only last
week for slipping off for a day's snipe-shooting. What he'd say if
he caught me philandering after the beauty and fashion of Belgium
doesn't bear even thinking about. Is Madame Joseph one of this
troupe, by any chance, that you're personally conducting?"
In ten words the sailor told of Madame Joseph's fate and Joseph's
treachery.
The tall subaltern blew through his bubbling pipe and put it in his
pocket. "That puts the hat on it. That decent little woman! I
always said those chaps weren't fit to have commissions. They aren't
gentlemen. They don't know how to behave like gentlemen, and will
never learn. Well, I'll come in. And is that your traction-engine?
She's number-one top-size. Well, the Lord grant there are plenty of
horse-troughs on the way. With that grate-area she'll hanker after
liquor like the Bishop of Sodor and Man."
The subaltern tried his water, peered into the firebox, raked and
coaled. Captain Kettle watched him with an approving eye.
"You seem to know your job."
"I can't help it. They turn us out so perfect from Woolwich we're
almost inhuman. H'm! This caravan compounds when she gets going,
but starts out on full steam for both cylinders. I wonder which
gadgett.... Yes, sir, I beg pardon?"
"I said how long before you will have enough head of steam to pull
out of here?"
"I must fill my water-tank first at the hydrant there. Call that
eight minutes. You can up-anchor and off in half-an-hour, if that
will do?"
"Right. Don't get killed whilst I'm away."
Now the members of the Mechanics' Lodge were desperate enough, and
had terror put into them, heart and soul, by the sack of their town,
as the invaders intended. But they nearly drove Captain Kettle
desperate before they could be brought to see the feasibleness of his
plan. They talked, and they screeched, and they supplicated; they
appealed to heaven, and they openly wept; and their women did all
these things, and more.
At last Kettle got to the far end of both his politeness and his
patience. If he could not quell their oratory with his tongue, he
must try more primitive means.
"Yes," he said, when at last he had got them quiet and had put his
crude argument back into his pocket, "the beginning of discipline is
learning to wait till your betters speak first. I'm sorry to have to
pull a gun before you ladies, but if you'd known my shooting, you
need not have been scared of being hit. I should have bagged a
husband every shot, and there's none of them would have been much
loss. Now then, stand fast where you are those that are coming to
Holland with me, and fall out there between those two casks those who
funk it."
Again there was the buzz of talk, and the whirl of gesticulation; but
the compelling voice once more brought silence: "I give you thirty
seconds to decide."
That seemed to crisp the argument. Four men--smallish, white-faced
men they were--and no women, separated themselves from the main
group, and stood between the casks.
"Ah!" said Kettle, "and as soon as we have got nicely under way
you'll go and try to curry favour by telling. That right, you
others?"
They sent up a yell of assent.
"Well, don't shout it. You're so boisterous. You must tone down
before you get to England, or people will stare at you. I commend to
you your four friends between the claret casks. Take them with you,
and keep them quiet. If they won't keep quiet, wring their necks.
If you fail in that, remember it is your necks that will pay. Now
then, move ahead to the chemical works, and if any one makes so much
as a whimper, recollect I will deal with him."
The loading took time. There was only the one manhole available as
entrance-way to the boiler's dismantled interior, and for some of the
ladies it was a tight fit. However, pressure, moral and physical,
helped things along, and when all were inboard, Captain Kettle and
the staff subaltern left them to sort themselves, and lifted the
heavy iron manhole door into place and nutted it home.
"That," said Kettle, "will keep the Bosches out and our beauties in."
"Lord! won't they be fruity inside? May I go ahead now? By the way
my boiler's blowing off, I'm afraid she's getting so full of steam
she may want to leave us for a home in the sky. The old bird's got a
whacking big grate-area."
The traction-engine tugged at its spring draw-bar, and, with the big
boiler on its broad-wheeled trolley rattling behind, roared out
northwards over the cobbles.
Uhlans galloped past them with questing lances; a burning house
dropped flakes of fire on them as they lumbered past; and cordon
after cordon of blood-lusting soldiery, driving the people of the
suburbs into the central slaughter-ground of the market-place, opened
out and let them pass.
A motor-car would have been stopped, a horsed vehicle would have had
no chance of passage, but who was going to interfere with a
traction-engine driven by two German soldiers, with a huge, empty
boiler clamouring behind its noisy heels at exorbitant speed?
There were no instructions for such an apparition as this, and,
anyway, it was making such an infernal din that no one could make its
custodians hear.
Captain Kettle reached over and bawled in his companion's ear:
"You'll have the whole concern tumbling to bits if you push on at
this pace."
"Probably. But Lord, man, can't I drive?"
The German Army is organized down to the last decimal. The German
troops they met solemnly goose-stepping towards France would have
known how to deal with foot, horse, or guns, with spies in every
shape, with an invasion of aeroplanes, howitzer shells, or
Senegambian sharpshooters. But Potsdam had not contemplated Belgian
civilians leaving their country in a boiler, and had made no
provision for the case. To the troops no Belgians showed through the
boiler's skin, and the traction engine drivers (in German uniform)
were evidently and unashamedly in a desperate hurry. Here, the
troops thought, was obviously a sudden order of the Most Highest.
Only one attempt was made to stop its triumphant retreat, and that
was on the Belgian side of the Dutch border. Men spread out, calling
and bellowing. A gate was slammed and shut. A trumpet squealed, and
a troop of horse answered it. But the car of Juggernaut was not a
thing to stop. Juggernaut splashed aside the horse, and sailed
through the gate, and chain, and men, and everything else that stood
in its clanking path, and from its head there gushed a sudden
efflorescence of gesticulating Belgian men and shrilling Belgian
dames, who called down curses on the invaders of the land they had
left behind.
"Well, I wish you joy of your pals," said the subaltern, slowing up
by the Dutch Customs House. "I bet I've burned out this boiler. The
old dear hasn't shown water in her gauge for a good half-hour....
Yes? Oh, no, Mr. Douanier, I am not the skipper, nor, thank the
Lord, am I German. My friend here is in command, and will pay your
import duty. He isn't a German either, although he looks it. He's a
Britisher, too, and he's a pig-dealer of high descent when he's at
home."
But here, of all ludicrous places, a hitch occurred. Certainly there
was a tariff for importing "one traction engine (damaged) and one
Lancashire boiler (dismantled)" into Holland, but the goods were so
unusual that the official in charge regretted that he would have to
apply to headquarters for instructions. Presumably, he did so apply,
but the Dutchman is not swift to move, especially if there is no
money to give him impetus. So Kettle by means of a shipping agent
got his Belgian mechanics and their womenkind started off _en route_
for Mr. Carnforth's Works in the Midlands, and smoked Dutch cigars to
the accompaniment of the subaltern's unclean pipe at a spruce little
tavern just inside the border. Between whiles they passed the time
of day with the Germans, who were mending the smashed Belgian gate on
the other side of the frontier line beside their white-walled Custom
House.
Then came the film. It was handed in mysteriously, and Kettle often
wondered afterwards whether Joseph was not his own messenger. But
the little humpback never appeared. The subaltern with the unclean
pipe--whose name he never learned--was the man who found out its
points.
Captain Kettle, as became the founder of the Wharfedale Particular
Methodists, made a point of never entering a theatre, and included
picture halls under this ban. The subaltern was an expert in both.
The subaltern also, as became a British officer and a sapper, knew
how to procure a cinematograph projector, with narrow-angle lens for
a long throw, and how to secure light, and how to work it. He did
all these things that same night after dinner, setting up his machine
on the Dutch side of the border, wiring his arc-lamp from the tavern,
and using the white-plastered wall of the Belgian Customs House over
the frontier as screen. Dutchmen and Germans formed the audience.
The film sounds flat in scenario form after the real thing. You must
go and see it for yourself.
It starts with the exterior of the _café_ before and after the sack.
(Joseph must have cut out the first of these from an old negative
taken in happier days.) Then an interior (badly lit) showing German
officers prone in all directions. A title explains that they were
"_Drugged ready to receive punishment._"
Then there is a pretty forest glade into which Madame Mumm presently
"fades in." She is dead, and laid out reverently. Then by a simple
"stop-film" trick, German officers appear one by one against each of
the trees that surround the little clearing.
They are all free of their drug now, and very much alive, but their
feet are tied together and their hands are tied behind them. Then
nooses are placed round their necks and over boughs of the
overhanging trees, and one by one they are hauled up.
The film gives the fullest details, as you will agree when you see
it. There are twenty-three German officers, and they all hang and
kick their last on twenty-three trees, with the body of poor Madame
lying peacefully in the middle of them. Then by another simple
camera trick the woman's body fades out, and the men's are left
hanging. That is the end.
"My Great James!" said Kettle when the white wall of the Belgian
Customs House flicked back into darkness, "do you suppose Joseph did
all that?"
"I'm afraid he did. The camera can lie to a certain extent, but not
about all those essentials. How did he get those chaps unconscious?
Was he a bit of a chemist by any chance? Oh, of course, I remember.
He drugged himself, didn't he, poor little chap?"
"He did."
"Well, that film's too melodramatic for our taste, of course, but we
must carry in mind he was awfully fond of that pretty wife of his."
"Yes, sir, he was. And he was not the coward I thought him. I
apologize to Joseph. He was not a fighting man, and he had to take
the only course that was open. The beasts had got his girl, and he
had to get level, as any man that was worth calling a man would do.
I don't like his method--it's too Belgian for me--but he got level
all right, and that was the main thing so far as Joseph was
concerned."
X
THAT RHINE TOUR
"Dear sir," wrote Captain Kettle.
"Have managed to get hold of Zeppelin, the Germans who manned her
objecting. Am at present at that place where you said you shot a
right and left of woodcock, and didn't, the second bird being mine,
though I said nothing at the time. I mention the spot that way in
case this letter falls into wrong hands. Please join at once, and
bring with you (as quiet as possible) things as per enclosed list.
"The grub we can do without if needful, and if you can't arrange the
plant for making gas, we can help ourselves to that from a gasworks
somewhere. But as much petrol as your two big cars can stagger under
is an absolute necessity. And without the dynamite, or something
like it, we shall be a damp squib.
"You must be here on the job before daybreak, which will be at 6.30
at latest, or I must sail without you, and trust to picking up
supplies and a shipmate elsewhere.
"Yours truly,
"O. KETTLE (Master)."
"P.S.--She is going to be a beast to navigate."
"Um," said Mr. Martin Carnforth, M.P. "Who brought this?"
"Young person on a motor-cycle, sir." The butler's wooden features
relaxed into a moment's smile, and then froze again. "Said the name
was Brown, sir."
"Well, take the man to the kitchen and give him a drink."
"Beg pardon, sir, the young person insisted on the name of Doctor
Brown, and was a--er--young person, sir, not a man."