‘After that it was plain going, though I was very cold. I knew that I would be sought on the northern roads, as I had told my friends, for no one could dream of an ignorant Dutchman going south away from his kinsfolk. But I had learned enough from the map to know that our road lay south-east, and I had marked this big river.’
‘Did you hope to pick me up?’ I asked.
‘No, Cornelis. I thought you would be travelling in first-class carriages while I should be plodding on foot. But I was set on getting to the place you spoke of (how do you call it? Constant Nople?), where our big business lay. I thought I might be in time for that.’
‘You’re an old Trojan, Peter,’ I said; ‘but go on. How did you get to that landing-stage where I found you?’
‘It was a hard journey,’ he said meditatively. ‘It was not easy to get beyond the barbed-wire entanglements which surrounded Neuburg – yes, even across the river. But in time I reached the woods and was safe, for I did not think any German could equal me in wild country. The best of them, even their foresters, are but babes in veldcraft compared with such as me… My troubles came only from hunger and cold. Then I met a Peruvian smouse,* and sold him my clothes and bought from him these. I did not want to part with my own, which were better, but he gave me ten marks on the deal. After that I went into a village and ate heavily.’
‘Were you pursued?’ I asked.
‘I do not think so. They had gone north, as I expected, and were looking for me at the railway stations which my friends had marked for me. I walked happily and put a bold face on it. If I saw a man or woman look at me suspiciously I went up to them at once and talked. I told a sad tale, and all believed it. I was a poor Dutchman travelling home on foot to see a dying mother, and I had been told that by the Danube I should find the main railway to take me to Holland. There were kind people who gave me food, and one woman gave me half a mark, and wished me God speed… Then on the last day of the year I came to the river and found many drunkards.’
‘Was that when you resolved to get on one of the river-boats?’
‘Ja, Cornelis. As soon as I heard of the boats I saw where my chance lay. But you might have knocked me over with a straw when I saw you come on shore. That was good fortune, my friend… I have been thinking much about the Germans, and I will tell you the truth. It is only boldness that can baffle them. They are a most diligent people. They will think of all likely difficulties, but not of all possible ones. They have not much imagination. They are like steam engines which must keep to prepared tracks. There they will hunt any man down, but let him trek for open country and they will be at a loss. Therefore boldness, my friend; for ever boldness. Remember as a nation they wear spectacles, which means that they are always peering.’
Peter broke off to gloat over the wedges of geese and the strings of wild swans that were always winging across those plains. His tale had bucked me up wonderfully. Our luck had held beyond all belief, and I had a kind of hope in the business now which had been wanting before. That afternoon, too, I got another fillip.
I came on deck for a breath of air and found it pretty cold after the heat of the engine-room. So I called to one of the deck hands to fetch me up my cloak from the cabin – the same I had bought that first morning in the Greif village.
‘Der grüne mantel?’ the man shouted up, and I cried, ‘Yes’. But the words seemed to echo in my ears, and long after he had given me the garment I stood staring abstractedly over the bulwarks.
His tone had awakened a chord of memory, or, to be accurate, they had given emphasis to what before had been only blurred and vague. For he had spoken the words which Stumm had uttered behind his hand to Gaudian. I had heard something like ‘Ühnmantl,’ and could make nothing of it. Now I was as certain of those words as of my own existence. They had been ‘Grüne mantel’ Grüne mantel, whatever it might be, was the name which Stumm had not meant me to hear, which was some talisman for the task I had proposed, and which was connected in some way with the mysterious von Einem.
This discovery put me in high fettle. I told myself that, considering the difficulties, I had managed to find out a wonderful amount in a very few days. It only shows what a man can do with the slenderest evidence if he keeps chewing and chewing on it…
Two mornings later we lay alongside the quays at Belgrade, and I took the opportunity of stretching my legs. Peter had come ashore for a smoke, and we wandered among the battered riverside streets, and looked at the broken arches of the great railway bridge which the Germans were working at like beavers. There was a big temporary pontoon affair to take the railway across, but I calculated that the main bridge would be ready inside a month. It was a clear, cold, blue day, and as one looked south one saw ridge after ridge of snowy hills. The upper streets of the city were still fairly whole, and there were shops open where food could be got. I remember hearing English spoken, and seeing some Red Cross nurses in the custody of Austrian soldiers coming from the railway station.
It would have done me a lot of good to have had a word with them. I thought of the gallant people whose capital this had been, how three times they had flung the Austrians back over the Danube, and then had only been beaten by the black treachery of their so-called allies. Somehow that morning in Belgrade gave both Peter and me a new purpose in our task. It was our business to put a spoke in the wheel of this monstrous bloody Juggernaut that was crushing the life out of the little heroic nations.
We were just getting ready to cast off when a distinguished party arrived at the quay. There were all kinds of uniforms – German, Austrian, and Bulgarian, and amid them one stout gentleman in a fur coat and a black felt hat. They watched the barges up-anchor, and before we began to jerk into line I could hear their conversation. The fur coat was talking English.
‘I reckon that’s pretty good noos, General,’ it said; ‘if the English have run away from Gally-poly we can use these noo consignments for the bigger game. I guess it won’t be long before we see the British lion moving out of Egypt with sore paws.’
They all laughed. ‘The privilege of that spectacle may soon be ours,’ was the reply.
I did not pay much attention to the talk; indeed I did not realize till weeks later that that was the first tidings of the great evacuation of Cape Helles. What rejoiced me was the sight of Blenkiron, as bland as a barber among those swells. Here were two of the missionaries within reasonable distance of their goal.
CHAPTER TEN
The Garden-House of Suliman the Red
We reached Rustchuk on January 10th, but by no means landed on that day. Something had gone wrong with the unloading arrangements, or more likely with the railway behind them, and we were kept swinging all day well out in the turbid river. On the top of this Captain Schenk got an ague, and by that evening was a blue and shivering wreck. He had done me well, and I reckoned I would stand by him. So I got his ship’s papers, and the manifests of cargo, and undertook to see to the trans-shipment. It wasn’t the first time I had tackled that kind of business, and I hadn’t much to learn about steam cranes. I told him I was going on to Constantinople and would take Peter with me, and he was agreeable. He would have to wait at Rustchuk to get his return cargo, and could easily inspan a fresh engineer.
I worked about the hardest twenty-four hours of my life getting the stuff ashore. The landing officer was a Bulgarian, quite a competent man if he could have made the railways give him the trucks he needed. There was a collection of hungry German transport officers always putting in their oars, and being infernally insolent to everybody. I took the high and mighty line with them; and, as I had the Bulgarian commandant on my side, after about two hours’ blasphemy got them quieted.
But the big trouble came the next morning when I had got nearly all the stuff aboard the trucks.
A young officer in what I took to be a Turkish uniform rode up with an aide-de-camp. I noticed the German guards saluting him, so I judged he was rather a swell. He came up to me and asked me very civilly in German for th
e way-bills. I gave him them and he looked carefully through them, marking certain items with a blue pencil. Then he coolly handed them to his aide-de-camp and spoke to him in Turkish.
‘Look here, I want these back,’ I said. ‘I can’t do without them, and we’ve no time to waste.’
‘Presently,’ he said, smiling, and went off.
I said nothing, reflecting that the stuff was for the Turks and they naturally had to have some say in its handling. The loading was practically finished when my gentleman returned. He handed me a neatly typed new set of way-bills. One glance at them showed that some of the big items had been left out.
‘Here, this won’t do,’ I cried. ‘Give me back the right set. This thing’s no good to me.’
For answer he winked gently, smiled like a dusky seraph, and held out his hand. In it I saw a roll of money.
‘For yourself,’ he said. ‘It is the usual custom.’
It was the first time anyone had ever tried to bribe me, and it made me boil up like a geyser. I saw his game clearly enough. Turkey would pay for the lot to Germany: probably had already paid the bill: but she would pay double for the things not on the way-bills, and pay to this fellow and his friends. This struck me as rather steep even for Oriental methods of doing business.
‘Now look here, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t stir from this place till I get the correct way-bills. If you won’t give me them, I will have every item out of the trucks and make a new list. But a correct list I have, or the stuff stays here till Doomsday.’
He was a slim, foppish fellow, and he looked more puzzled than angry.
‘I offer you enough,’ he said, again stretching out his hand.
At that I fairly roared. ‘If you try to bribe me, you infernal little haberdasher, I’ll have you off that horse and chuck you in the river.’
He no longer misunderstood me. He began to curse and threaten, but I cut him short.
‘Come along to the commandant, my boy,’ I said, and I marched away, tearing up his typewritten sheets as I went and strewing them behind me like a paper chase.
We had a fine old racket in the commandant’s office. I said it was my business, as representing the German Government, to see the stuff delivered to the consignee at Constantinople ship-shape and Bristol-fashion. I told him it wasn’t my habit to proceed with cooked documents. He couldn’t but agree with me, but there was that wrathful Oriental with his face as fixed as a Buddha.
‘I am sorry, Rasta Bey,’ he said; ‘but this man is in the right.’
‘I have authority from the Committee to receive the stores,’ he said sullenly.
‘Those are not my instructions,’ was the answer. ‘They are consigned to the Artillery commandant at Chataldja, General von Oesterzee.’
The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Very well. I will have a word to say to General von Oesterzee, and many to this fellow who flouts the Committee.’ And he strode away like an impudent boy.
The harassed commandant grinned. ‘You’ve offended his Lordship, and he is a bad enemy. All those damned Comitadjis are. You would be well advised not to go on to Constantinople.’
‘And have that blighter in the red hat loot the trucks on the road? No, thank you. I am going to see them safe at Chataldja, or whatever they call the artillery depot.’
I said a good deal more, but that is an abbreviated translation of my remarks. My word for ‘blighter’ was trottel, but I used some other expressions which would have ravished my Young Turk friend to hear. Looking back, it seems pretty ridiculous to have made all this fuss about guns which were going to be used against my own people. But I didn’t see that at the time. My professional pride was up in arms, and I couldn’t bear to have a hand in a crooked deal.
‘Well, I advise you to go armed,’ said the commandant. ‘You will have a guard for the trucks, of course, and I will pick you good men. They may hold you up all the same. I can’t help you once you are past the frontier, but I’ll send a wire to Oesterzee and he’ll make trouble if anything goes wrong. I still think you would have been wiser to humour Rasta Bey.’
As I was leaving he gave me a telegram. ‘Here’s a wire for your Captain Schenk.’ I slipped the envelope in my pocket and went out.
Schenk was pretty sick, so I left a note for him. At one o’clock I got the train started, with a couple of German Landwehr in each truck and Peter and I in a horse-box. Presently I remembered Schenk’s telegram, which still reposed in my pocket. I took it out and opened it, meaning to wire it from the first station we stopped at. But I changed my mind when I read it. It was from some official at Regensburg, asking him to put under arrest and send back by the first boat a man called Brandt, who was believed to have come aboard at Absthafen on the 30th of December.
I whistled and showed it to Peter. The sooner we were at Constantinople the better, and I prayed we would get there before the fellow who sent this wire repeated it and got the commandant to send on the message and have us held up at Chataldja. For my back had fairly got stiffened about these munitions, and I was going to take any risk to see them safely delivered to their proper owner. Peter couldn’t understand me at all. He still hankered after a grand destruction of the lot somewhere down the railway. But then, this wasn’t the line of Peter’s profession, and his pride was not at stake.
We had a mortally slow journey. It was bad enough in Bulgaria, but when we crossed the frontier at a place called Mustafa Pasha we struck the real supineness of the East. Happily I found a German officer there who had some notion of hustling, and, after all, it was his interest to get the stuff moved. It was the morning of the 16th, after Peter and I had been living like pigs on black bread and condemned tin stuff, that we came in sight of a blue sea on our right hand and knew we couldn’t be very far from the end.
It was jolly near the end in another sense. We stopped at a station and were stretching our legs on the platform when I saw a familiar figure approaching. It was Rasta, with half a dozen Turkish gendarmes.
I called Peter, and we clambered into the truck next our horse-box. I had been half expecting some move like this and had made a plan.
The Turk swaggered up and addressed us. ‘You can get back to Rustchuk,’ he said. ‘I take over from you here. Hand me the papers.’
‘Is this Chataldja?’ I asked innocently.
‘It is the end of your affair,’ he said haughtily. ‘Quick, or it will be the worse for you.’
‘Now, look here, my son,’ I said; ‘you’re a kid and know nothing. I hand over to General von Oesterzee and to no one else.’
‘You are in Turkey,’ he cried, ‘and will obey the Turkish Government.’
‘I’ll obey the Government right enough,’ I said; ‘but if you’re the Government I could make a better one with a bib and a rattle.’
He said something to his men, who unslung their rifles.
‘Please don’t begin shooting,’ I said. ‘There are twelve armed guards in this train who will take their orders from me. Besides, I and my friend can shoot a bit.’
‘Fool!’ he cried, getting very angry. ‘I can order up a regiment in five minutes.’
‘Maybe you can,’ I said; ‘but observe the situation. I am sitting on enough toluol to blow up this countryside. If you dare to come aboard I will shoot you. If you call in your regiment I will tell you what I’ll do. I’ll fire this stuff, and I reckon they’ll be picking up the bits of you and your regiment off the Gallipoli Peninsula.’
He had put up a bluff – a poor one – and I had called it. He saw I meant what I said, and became silken.
‘Good-bye, sir,’ he said. ‘You have had a fair chance and rejected it. We shall meet again soon, and you will be sorry for your insolence.’
He strutted away and it was all I could do to keep from running after him. I wanted to lay him over my knee and spank him.
We got safely to Chataldja, and were received by von Oesterzee like long-lost brothers. He was the regular gunner-officer, not thinking about anything except his gu
ns and shells. I had to wait about three hours while he was checking the stuff with the invoices, and then he gave me a receipt which I still possess. I told him about Rasta, and he agreed that I had done right. It didn’t make him as mad as I expected, because, you see, he got his stuff safe in any case. It was only that the wretched Turks had to pay twice for the lot of it.
He gave Peter and me luncheon, and was altogether very civil and inclined to talk about the war. I would have liked to hear what he had to say, for it would have been something to get the inside view of Germany’s Eastern campaign, but I did not dare to wait. Any moment there might arrive an incriminating wire from Rustchuk. Finally he lent us a car to take us the few miles to the city.
So it came about that at five past three on the 16th day of January, with only the clothes we stood up in, Peter and I entered Constantinople.
I was in considerable spirits, for I had got the final lap successfully over, and I was looking forward madly to meeting my friends; but, all the same, the first sight was a mighty disappointment. I don’t quite know what I had expected – a sort of fairyland Eastern city, all white marble and blue water, and stately Turks in surplices, and veiled houris, and roses and nightingales, and some sort of string band discoursing sweet music. I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere. It was a drizzling day, with a south-east wind blowing, and the streets were long troughs of mud. The first part I struck looked like a dingy colonial suburb – wooden houses and corrugated iron roofs, and endless dirty, sallow children. There was a cemetery, I remember, with Turks’ caps stuck at the head of each grave. Then we got into narrow steep streets which descended to a kind of big canal. I saw what I took to be mosques and minarets, and they were about as impressive as factory chimneys. By and by we crossed a bridge, and paid a penny for the privilege. If I had known it was the famous Golden Horn I would have looked at it with more interest, but I saw nothing save a lot of moth-eaten barges and some queer little boats like gondolas. Then we came into busier streets, where ramshackle cabs drawn by lean horses spluttered through the mud. I saw one old fellow who looked like my notion of a Turk, but most of the population had the appearance of London old-clothes men. All but the soldiers, Turk and German, who seemed well-set-up fellows.