Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 567
Once it was necessary that he should cross the Dutch border by what was called in the slang of his underworld the “Allée Couverte.” He started his journey as an old mechanic with a permit to take up a plumber’s job at Turnhout. But long before he got to Turnhout he changed his appearance, and he had a week in the straw of barns and many anxious consultations with furtive people till early one dark autumn morning he swam a canal, crawled through a gap in the electrified wire (where oddly enough the sentry was for a moment absent) and two hours later breakfasted with a maker of chemical manures who seemed to be expecting him. His host spoke to him in English and lent him clothes which made him look like a young merchants’ clerk after he had shaved his beard. . . . Jules spent four days in Holland, and at an hotel in Amsterdam had a meeting, which lasted late into the night, with an English business man who was interested in oil — a business man whose back was very straight for one who spent his days in a counting-house. Jules called him “Sir” and stood at attention till he was bidden to sit down. This Englishman had much to tell him and much to hear, and what he heard he wrote down in a little black note-book. He addressed Jules as “More,” but once he slipped and called him “Melfort.” Then he seemed to recollect himself. “I think you knew Melfort,” he said. “Adam Melfort. You may be interested to hear that his D.S.O. has just been gazetted — he is a second-lieutenant on the Special List.”
Jules was absent that time for more than a month from the Raus farm. He returned at last from Brussels with a doctor’s certificate duly countersigned by the military, which testified that he had been ill with typhoid in the house of a second cousin. His beard had been shaved during his fever, and his lean cheeks and the sprouting growth on his chin were visible proof of his sickness. He returned to his old routine, except that the Widow for a little did not work him so hard on the farm. “That Jules!” she complained to the neighbours. “The good God is too hard on him. He has bereft him of sense, and now He has made him as feeble as a pullet.” Also his wanderings ceased for the space of more than a month.
Time passed and the Widow’s half-witted nephew grew into the life of the place, so that he was as familiar an object as the windmill on the rise above the Bois de Villers. Commandant succeeded Commandant, and the dossier of Jules was duly handed on. The tides of war ebbed and flowed. Sometimes the neighbourhood of Villers was black with troops moving westward, and then would come a drain to the south and only a few Landsturm companies were left in the cantonments. There was such a drain during the summer of ‘16 when the guns were loud on the Somme. But early in ‘17 the movement from the east began again, and Jules took to wandering more widely than ever. Great things seemed to be preparing on the Flanders front.
In two years he had acquired a routine and a technique. He had taken the advice of Macandrew and thought himself so comprehensively into his part that his instincts and half his thoughts had become those of a Flanders peasant. In a difficulty he could trust himself to behave naturally according to his type. Yet there remained one side of him which was not drugged. He had to keep his mind very bright and clear, quick to catch at gossamer threads of evidence, swift to weave them into the proper deductions, always alert and resourceful and wholly at his command.
It was this continual intellectual stimulus which made bearable a life as brutish as a farm animal’s. Now and then, to be sure, he had his moments of revolt which were resolutely suppressed. He had long ago conquered any repugnance to his physical environment, the smells, the coarse food, the bestial monotony, the long toil in mud and filth. But there would come times when he listened to the far-off grumbling guns in the west with a drawn face. His friends were there, fighting cleanly in the daylight, while he was ingloriously labouring in the shadows. He had moods when he longed desperately for companionship. British prisoners would pass on their way to Germany, heavy-eyed men, often wounded and always weary, who tried to keep their heads high. He would have given his soul for a word with them. And once he saw in such a batch some men of his own regiment, including an officer who had joined along with him. The mere sound of English speech was torture. In those moods he had no source of comfort save in the bare conviction that he must stick to his duty. At night on his bed he could recapture no healing memories of Eilean Bàn. He was so deep in a hideous rut that he could not see beyond it to his old world.
He had two experiences which shook his foundations. Once at a midnight rendezvous with an English aeroplane there was a hitch in taking-off, an alarm was given, and soldiers from a German post appeared at the edge of the meadow. Jules knew that with his help the machine could get away, but it would mean a grave risk of discovery. As it was, he obeyed the airman’s hoarse injunction, “For God’s sake clear out — never mind me,” and, crawling down a little brook, found safe hiding in the forest. He saw the airman badly wounded and carried off into captivity, but not before he had reduced the ‘plane to ashes; and he realised that he could have saved him. That was a bitter draught of which the taste long remained. It was no good reminding himself that he had done his duty, when that duty seemed a defiance of every honest human inclination. . . .
The other experience was worse. There was a girl who had been a prostitute in Lille, and who served in an estaminet on the Brussels road. She was one of his helpers — M 23 on the register of his underworld. Now a certain Bavarian sergeant, who desired to be her lover, but whom she had repulsed, discovered her in some small act of treachery to the authorities which was no part of Jules’s own affair. He exacted his revenge to the full, and Jules happened to enter the estaminet when the sergeant and another soldier were in the act of arresting her. They made a brutal business of it, the sergeant had her arms twisted behind her back, and her face was grey with fear and pain. For an instant Jules forgot his part, the simper left his mouth, his jaw set, and he ran to her aid. But the girl was wiser than he. She flung at him a string of foul names, and the black eyes under the tinted lids blazed a warning. He had to submit to be soundly cuffed by the soldiers, and to see the woman dragged screaming into a covered waggon. After that it took him a long time to recover his peace of mind. The words of the old man in the Northamptonshire village were his chief comfort. “You must be prepared to sacrifice much that you think honourable and of good report if you would fulfil the whole Law.”
On a certain day in March ‘17 an urchin from the village brought Jules a message which had been left for him by a farmer from the Sambre side — that he had better bestir himself about the summering of the young beasts. It was an agreed password, and it made Jules knit his brows, for it meant that the long chain of intelligence which he supervised was in danger. That night he went on his travels and presently his fears were confirmed. The enemy had discovered one link and might discover the whole, for the interconnection was close, unless his suspicions could be switched on to a different track.
Three nights later Jules found a British aeroplane at a place agreed on for emergency meetings, meetings appointed by a very delicate and bold method which was only to be used in an hour of crisis. There was a passenger beside the pilot, an officer in a great blanket coat, who sat hunched on the ground and listened with a grim face to Jules’s story.
“What devil’s own luck!” he said. “At this time of all others! The Arras affair as you know is due in three weeks — and there are others to follow. We simply cannot do without your crowd. Have you anything to suggest?”
“Yes,” was the answer. “I have thought it all out, and there is one way. The enemy is on the alert and must be soothed down. That can be done only by giving him good ground for his suspicions — but it must not be the right ground. We want a decoy. You follow me, sir?”
The other nodded. “But what — or rather who?” he asked.
“Myself. You see, sir, I think I have done my work here. The machine is working well, and I can safely hand over the direction of it to S. S. I have taught him all I know, and he’s a sound fellow. It’s the machine that matters, not me, so my proposal is that to save the machine I draw suspicion on myself. I know the Germans pretty well, and they like to hunt one hare at a time. I can so arrange it that every doubt and suspicion they entertain can be made to fasten on me. I will give them a run for their money, and after that S. S. and his lads will be allowed to function in peace.”
“Gad, that’s a sporting notion,” said the officer. “But what about yourself? Can you keep out of their hands long enough?”
“I think so. I know the countryside better than most people, and I have a good many possible lairs. I shall want a clear week to make arrangements, for they are bound to be rather complicated. For one thing I must get Mother Raus to a hole where she cannot be found. Then I press the button and become a fugitive. I think I can count on keeping the hounds in full cry for a week.”
“Won’t it be hard to pick you up if the pace is hot?”
“I don’t want to be picked up. I must draw the hunt as far east as possible — away from the front. That will make S. S. and his machine more secure.”
The other did not reply for a little. “You realise that if you’re caught it’s all up with you?” he said at length.
“Of course. But that has been true every moment during the past two years. I’m only slightly speeding up the risks. Besides, I don’t think I shall be caught.”
“You’ll try for Holland?”
“Holland or Germany. It will probably take some time.”
The officer stood up and glanced at his luminous wrist-watch. “We should be safe here for the next hour. I want all the details of the new lay-out — S. S. I mean.”
When this conference was finished he turned to Jules and offered his hand.
“You are right. It’s the only way, and a big part of the fate of the war hangs on it. I won’t wish you good luck, for that’s too feeble for such an occasion. But I’d like to say this to you, More. I’ve seen many gallant things done in my time, and I’ve met many brave men, but by God! for sheer cold-blooded pluck I never knew the like of you. If you win out, I shall have a good deal to say about that.”
Two days later the Widow Raus set off for Brussels to visit her relations. She took with her a great basket of eggs and butter, and she got a lift in a German transport waggon to save the railway fare. Thereafter she disappeared, and though her whereabouts were sought by many they were never discovered. She did not emerge into the light again till a certain day in December 1918, when she was one of many women thanked by her King, and was given a red ribbon to wear on her ample bosom.
Left alone at the farm, Jules went on his travels for two days, during which he had interviews with many people in retired places. Then he returned and showed himself in the Three Parrots. But that night he left the farm, which was occupied next morning by soldiers who were in a hurry. They ransacked every room, slit the mattresses, pulled up the floors, probed in straw heaps in the outhouses. There were wild rumours in the village. Jules the simpleton had, it appeared, been a spy — some said an Englishman — and a confederate had betrayed him. A damning message from him had been found, for it seemed he could write, and he had been drawn into rash talk by a woman in the German pay. Much of the leakage to the Allies of vital secrets had been traced to him. He would be taken soon, of course, and set up against a wall — there was no hope of escape from the fine-meshed net which enveloped the land. But the bravery of it! Many a villager wished he had been kinder to the angel they had entertained unawares, and dolefully awaited the news of his end.
It did not come, for Jules seemed to have slipped out of the world. “He has been taken,” said one rumour. “He will be taken,” said all. But the best-informed knew nothing for certain. Only the discipline was uncomfortably tightened in the countryside, and the German officers looked darkly on every peasant they met. “Curse that Jules!” some began to say. “He has only made our bondage more burdensome.”
Meantime Jules was far away. He had made his plans with care, and began by drawing the hunt northward as if he were making for Brussels. The first day he took pains to show himself at places from which the news could be carried. Then he doubled back to the Meuse valley, and in the dark, in a miller’s cellar, shaved his beard, and was transformed into a young woodcutter who spoke the patois of the hills and was tramping to Liège, with papers all complete, to a job in a timber yard. His plan was to change his appearance again in Liège, and, having muddied the trail, to get to Antwerp, where certain preparations had been made in advance.
But on one point he had miscalculated. The chase became far closer than he had foreseen, for Belgium was suddenly stirred to a fury of spy-hunting. The real Jules had been lost sight of somewhere in the beet-fields of Gembloux, but every stranger was a possible Jules, and a man had to be well-accredited indeed before he could move a step without suspicion. He realised that he simply could not afford to be arrested, or even detained, so he was compelled to run desperate risks.
The story of his month’s wanderings was never fully told, but these are the main points in it.
In Liège the woodcutter only escaped arrest on suspicion by slipping into a little civilian hospital where he knew the matron, and being in bed with the blankets up to his chin and bandages round his forehead when the military police arrived in quest of him. . . . He travelled by rail to Malines as a young doctor who had taken a Berlin degree, and was ready to discourse in excellent German on the superior medical science of the exalted country where he had had his training. At Malines there was danger, for his permit was not strictly in order, and he realised that five minutes’ cross-examination by a genuine doctor would expose the nakedness of the land. So he had to sink again into the gutter, and had a wretched week in a downpour of rain doing odd jobs among the market gardens, where there was a demand for labour. He was now a Dutch subject, speaking abominable French, and had been provided with papers by a little man who wore a skull-cap, was rarely sober, kept a disreputable pawnshop, and was known to certain people by a letter and a numeral. . . .
He tramped his way to Antwerp, and there suffered so severe an interrogation that he did not return for his permission de séjour. Instead he found lodging in a street near the docks, where his appearance was considerably improved by the attentions of a lady of doubtful fame who had many friends. He was still a Dutchman, but of a higher class, for he had now a good black coat and a white collar, and his papers showed that he was a clerk in a Rotterdam office, who had come to Antwerp on his firm’s business. He had permission to return to Holland, a permission which expired two days ahead.
Then, as bad luck would have it, he fell ill — the first time in two years. The drenchings in the rain and the scanty food had reduced his vitality, and he caught some infection in his squalid lodgings. For twenty-four hours he was in a high fever, and when he rose he could scarcely stagger. He dared not delay. If he stayed he must go to hospital, and there he would suffer a stern inquisition. As it was, before he had the strength to move, he had outstayed by one day the limits of his permit. . . . There was nothing for it but to take the risk. With a blinding headache, and legs that gave at the knees, and a deadly oppression on his chest, he took the tramway which jolted him to the frontier. There he was examined by the German post.
“Back you go,” said the sergeant. “You have outstayed your permitted time. This permit must be corrected at the office of the Military Governor.”
“Let him pass,” said another, who seemed to have more authority. “The Dutchman is sick — mortally sick. We have no use for another bloody consumptive.”
The Dutch sentries did no more than glance at his papers. That afternoon he took the train for Rotterdam, drove to a good hotel, and sent a message to a man he knew. Then for the next month he descended into the pit of pneumonia and very slowly climbed up the farther side.
III
Adam took a long time to recover his strength. There were friends who came to sit with him when he was permitted to receive visitors, one especially who was of a family long settled in Java, and whose dark colouring and yellow-tinged eyeballs suggested a dash of native blood. He called himself Lassom, and seemed to be a man of influence, for he managed to procure little comforts which were hard to come by in that difficult time. On his watch-chain he wore a little amulet of ebony and silver. From him the convalescent got the first news of the progress of the war on all fronts, for hitherto he had been shut up in a narrow enclave. Lassom, whose name had been Macandrew in the office near Leadenhall Street, required an exact report of all that had happened during the past two years in the neighbourhood of Villers l’Evêque.
Once an Englishman came to see Adam as he sat in a corner of the hotel balcony in the sunshine of early summer. “In the Army List,” he told him, “you still figure as a second-lieutenant on the Special List. That, however, may not be for long. By the way, they have given you a bar to your D.S.O. for your last performance. I take it that for some time you have been shooting at your limit, as the gunners say. Well, you won’t have anything so arduous for a bit — anyhow, till you’re fit again. Lassom will give you your instructions when you are ready, and will make all arrangements.”
The Englishman was a friendly person, and showed himself ready to gossip, but the man whom he called John More seemed curiously uninterested. The news about the bar to his D.S.O. left him cold. The truth was that he was suffering from a heavy drop in mental vitality. He had been like a squirrel going steadily round a cage, and he found it hard to realise the world outside the bars, or to think of any other form of motion but the treadmill. The fact that so far he had succeeded gave him no satisfaction. Lassom divined his mood and took the best way of doctoring it. Having got the information he wanted, he strove to draw the convalescent out of the abyss of the immediate past and to wash from his memory the Raus farm and all it stood for. There were bigger duties before him, he said, and he tried to divert his thoughts, so to speak, from minor tactics to major strategy, thereby giving his mind new subjects to play with. But above all he looked after his body, and in the beginning of June carried him off to a village on the Texel coast.
