Mr. Standfast

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That night at dinner we talked solid business - Blenkiron and I
and a young French Colonel from the IIIeme Section at G.Q.G.
Blenkiron, I remember, got very hurt about being called a business
man by the Frenchman, who thought he was paying him a compliment.

'Cut it out,' he said. 'It is a word that's gone bad with me.
There's just two kind of men, those who've gotten sense and those
who haven't. A big percentage of us Americans make our living by
trading, but we don't think because a man's in business or even
because he's made big money that he's any natural good at every
job. We've made a college professor our President, and do what he
tells us like little boys, though he don't earn more than some of us
pay our works' manager. You English have gotten business on the
brain, and think a fellow's a dandy at handling your Government if
he happens to have made a pile by some flat-catching ramp on your
Stock Exchange. It makes me tired. You're about the best business
nation on earth, but for God's sake don't begin to talk about it or
you'll lose your power. And don't go confusing real business with
the ordinary gift of raking in the dollars. Any man with sense could
make money if he wanted to, but he mayn't want. He may prefer
the fun of the job and let other people do the looting. I reckon the
biggest business on the globe today is the work behind your lines
and the way you feed and supply and transport your army. It beats
the Steel Corporation and the Standard Oil to a frazzle. But the
man at the head of it all don't earn more than a thousand dollars a
month ... Your nation's getting to worship Mammon, Dick. Cut it
out. There's just the one difference in humanity - sense or no
sense, and most likely you won't find any more sense in the man
that makes a billion selling bonds than in his brother Tim that lives
in a shack and sells corn-cobs. I'm not speaking out of sinful
jealousy, for there was a day when I was reckoned a railroad king,
and I quit with a bigger pile than kings usually retire on. But I
haven't the sense of old Peter, who never even had a bank account
... And it's sense that wins in this war.'

The Colonel, who spoke good English, asked a question about a
speech which some politician had made.

'There isn't all the sense I'd like to see at the top,' said Blenkiron.
'They're fine at smooth words. That wouldn't matter, but they're
thinking smooth thoughts. What d'you make of the situation,
Dick?'
'I think it's the worst since First Ypres,' I said. 'Everybody's
cock-a-whoop, but God knows why.'

'God knows why,' Blenkiron repeated. 'I reckon it's a simple
calculation, and you can't deny it any more than a mathematical
law. Russia is counted out. The Boche won't get food from her for
a good many months, but he can get more men, and he's got them.
He's fighting only on one foot, and he's been able to bring troops
and guns west so he's as strong as the Allies now on paper. And
he's stronger in reality. He's got better railways behind him, and
he's fighting on inside lines and can concentrate fast against any bit
of our front. I'm no soldier, but that's so, Dick?'

The Frenchman smiled and shook his head. 'All the same they
will not pass. They could not when they were two to one in 1914,
and they will not now. If we Allies could not break through in the
last year when we had many more men, how will the Germans
succeed now with only equal numbers?'

Blenkiron did not look convinced. 'That's what they all say. I
talked to a general last week about the coming offensive, and he
said he was praying for it to hurry up, for he reckoned Fritz would
get the fright of his life. It's a good spirit, maybe, but I don't think
it's sound on the facts. We've got two mighty great armies of fine
fighting-men, but, because we've two commands, we're bound to
move ragged like a peal of bells. The Hun's got one army and forty
years of stiff tradition, and, what's more, he's going all out this
time. He's going to smash our front before America lines up, or
perish in the attempt ... Why do you suppose all the peace racket
in Germany has died down, and the very men that were talking
democracy in the summer are now hot for fighting to a finish? I'll
tell you. It's because old Ludendorff has promised them complete
victory this spring if they spend enough men, and the Boche is a
good gambler and is out to risk it. We're not up against a local
attack this time. We're standing up to a great nation going bald-
headed for victory or destruction. If we're broken, then America's
got to fight a new campaign by herself when she's ready, and the
Boche has time to make Russia his feeding-ground and diddle our
blockade. That puts another five years on to the war, maybe another
ten. Are we free and independent peoples going to endure that
much? ... I tell you we're tossing to quit before Easter.'

He turned towards me, and I nodded assent.

'That's more or less my view,' I said. 'We ought to hold, but it'll
be by our teeth and nails. For the next six months we'll be fighting
without any margin.'

'But, my friends, you put it too gravely,' cried the Frenchman.
'We may lose a mile or two of ground - yes. But serious danger is
not possible. They had better chances at Verdun and they failed.
Why should they succeed now?'

'Because they are staking everything,' Blenkiron replied. 'It is the
last desperate struggle of a wounded beast, and in these struggles
sometimes the hunter perishes. Dick's right. We've got a wasting
margin and every extra ounce of weight's going to tell. The battle's
in the field, and it's also in every corner of every Allied land. That's
why within the next two months we've got to get even with the
Wild Birds.'

The French Colonel - his name was de Valliere - smiled at the
name, and Blenkiron answered my unspoken question.

'I'm going to satisfy some of your curiosity, Dick, for I've put
together considerable noos of the menagerie. Germany has a good
army of spies outside her borders. We shoot a batch now and then,
but the others go on working like beavers and they do a mighty
deal of harm. They're beautifully organized, but they don't draw on
such good human material as we, and I reckon they don't pay in
results more than ten cents on a dollar of trouble. But there they
are. They're the intelligence officers and their business is just to
forward noos. They're the birds in the cage, the - what is it your
friend called them?'

'_Die _Stubenvogel,' I said.

'Yes, but all the birds aren't caged. There's a few outside the bars
and they don't collect noos. They do things. If there's anything
desperate they're put on the job, and they've got power to act
without waiting on instructions from home. I've investigated till my
brain's tired and I haven't made out more than half a dozen whom I
can say for certain are in the business. There's your pal, the
Portuguese Jew, Dick. Another's a woman in Genoa, a princess of
some sort married to a Greek financier. One's the editor of a pro-Ally
up-country paper in the Argentine. One passes as a Baptist
minister in Colorado. One was a police spy in the Tzar's Government
and is now a red-hot revolutionary in the Caucasus. And the biggest,
of course, is Moxon Ivery, who in happier times was the Graf von
Schwabing. There aren't above a hundred people in the world know
of their existence, and these hundred call them the Wild Birds.'

'Do they work together?' I asked.

'Yes. They each get their own jobs to do, but they're apt to flock
together for a big piece of devilment. There were four of them in
France a year ago before the battle of the Aisne, and they pretty
near rotted the French Army. That's so, Colonel?'

The soldier nodded grimly. 'They seduced our weary troops and
they bought many politicians. Almost they succeeded, but not quite.
The nation is sane again, and is judging and shooting the
accomplices at its leisure. But the principals we have never caught.'

'You hear that, Dick,, said Blenkiron. 'You're satisfied this isn't
a whimsy of a melodramatic old Yank? I'll tell you more. You
know how Ivery worked the submarine business from England.
Also, it was the Wild Birds that wrecked Russia. It was Ivery that
paid the Bolshevists to sedooce the Army, and the Bolshevists took
his money for their own purpose, thinking they were playing a
deep game, when all the time he was grinning like Satan, for they
were playing his. It was Ivery or some other of the bunch that
doped the brigades that broke at Caporetto. If I started in to tell
you the history of their doings you wouldn't go to bed, and if you
did you wouldn't sleep ... There's just this to it. Every finished
subtle devilry that the Boche has wrought among the Allies since
August 1914 has been the work of the Wild Birds and more or less
organized by Ivery. They're worth half a dozen army corps to
Ludendorff. They're the mightiest poison merchants the world ever
saw, and they've the nerve of hell ...'

'I don't know,' I interrupted. 'Ivery's got his soft spot. I saw him
in the Tube station.'

'Maybe, but he's got the kind of nerve that's wanted. And now I
rather fancy he's whistling in his flock,'

Blenkiron consulted a notebook. 'Pavia - that's the Argentine
man - started last month for Europe. He transhipped from a coasting
steamer in the West Indies and we've temporarily lost track of
him, but he's left his hunting-ground. What do you reckon that means?'

'It means,' Blenkiron continued solemnly, 'that Ivery thinks the
game's nearly over. The play's working up for the big climax ...
And that climax is going to be damnation for the Allies, unless we
get a move on.'

'Right,' I said. 'That's what I'm here for. What's the move?'

'The Wild Birds mustn't ever go home, and the man they call
Ivery or Bommaerts or Chelius has to decease. It's a cold-blooded
proposition, but it's him or the world that's got to break. But
before he quits this earth we're bound to get wise about some of
his plans, and that means that we can't just shoot a pistol at his face.
Also we've got to find him first. We reckon he's in Switzerland,
but that is a state with quite a lot of diversified scenery to lose a
man in ... Still I guess we'll find him. But it's the kind of business
to plan out as carefully as a battle. I'm going back to Berne on my
old stunt to boss the show, and I'm giving the orders. You're an
obedient child, Dick, so I don't reckon on any trouble that way.'

Then Blenkiron did an ominous thing. He pulled up a little table
and started to lay out Patience cards. Since his duodenum was
cured he seemed to have dropped that habit, and from his resuming
it I gathered that his mind was uneasy. I can see that scene as if it
were yesterday - the French colonel in an armchair smoking a
cigarette in a long amber holder, and Blenkiron sitting primly on
the edge of a yellow silk ottoman, dealing his cards and looking
guiltily towards me.

'You'll have Peter for company,' he said. 'Peter's a sad man, but
he has a great heart, and he's been mighty useful to me already.
They're going to move him to England very soon. The authorities
are afraid of him, for he's apt to talk wild, his health having made
him peevish about the British. But there's a deal of red-tape in the
world, and the orders for his repatriation are slow in coming.' The
speaker winked very slowly and deliberately with his left eye.

I asked if I was to be with Peter, much cheered at the prospect.

'Why, yes. You and Peter are the collateral in the deal. But the
big game's not with you.'

I had a presentiment of something coming, something anxious
and unpleasant.

'Is Mary in it?' I asked.

He nodded and seemed to pull himself together for an explanation.

'See here, Dick. Our main job is to get Ivery back to Allied soil
where we can handle him. And there's just the one magnet that can
fetch him back. You aren't going to deny that.'

I felt my face getting very red, and that ugly hammer began
beating in my forehead. Two grave, patient eyes met my glare.

'I'm damned if I'll allow it!' I cried. 'I've some right to a say in the
thing. I won't have Mary made a decoy. It's too infernally degrading.'

'It isn't pretty, but war isn't pretty, and nothing we do is pretty.
I'd have blushed like a rose when I was young and innocent to
imagine the things I've put my hand to in the last three years. But
have you any other way, Dick? I'm not proud, and I'll scrap the
plan if you can show me another ... Night after night I've
hammered the thing out, and I can't hit on a better ... Heigh-ho,
Dick, this isn't like you,' and he grinned ruefully. 'You're making
yourself a fine argument in favour of celibacy - in time of war,
anyhow What is it the poet sings? -

White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel -'

I was as angry as sin, but I felt all the time I had no case. Blenkiron
stopped his game of Patience, sending the cards flying over the
carpet, and straddled on the hearthrug.

'You're never going to be a piker. What's dooty, if you won't
carry it to the other side of Hell? What's the use of yapping about
your country if you're going to keep anything back when she calls
for it? What's the good of meaning to win the war if you don't put
every cent you've got on your stake? You'll make me think you're
like the jacks in your English novels that chuck in their hand and
say it's up to God, and call that "seeing it through" ... No, Dick,
that kind of dooty don't deserve a blessing. You dursn't keep back
anything if you want to save your soul.
'Besides,' he went on, 'what a girl it is! She can't scare and she
can't soil. She's white-hot youth and innocence, and she'd take no
more harm than clean steel from a muck-heap.'

I knew I was badly in the wrong, but my pride was all raw.

'I'm not going to agree till I've talked to Mary.'

'But Miss Mary has consented,' he said gently. 'She made the plan.'

Next day, in clear blue weather that might have been May, I drove
Mary down to Fontainebleau. We lunched in the inn by the bridge
and walked into the forest. I hadn't slept much, for I was tortured
by what I thought was anxiety for her, but which was in truth
jealousy of Ivery. I don't think that I would have minded her
risking her life, for that was part of the game we were both in, but
I jibbed at the notion of Ivery coming near her again. I told myself
it was honourable pride, but I knew deep down in me that it was jealousy.

I asked her if she had accepted Blenkiron's plan, and she turned
mischievous eyes on me.

'I knew I should have a scene with you, Dick. I told Mr Blenkiron
so ... Of course I agreed. I'm not even very much afraid of it. I'm
a member of the team, you know, and I must play up to my form. I
can't do a man's work, so all the more reason why I should tackle
the thing I can do.'

'But,' I stammered, 'it's such a ... such a degrading business for
a child like you. I can't bear ... It makes me hot to think of it.'

Her reply was merry laughter.
'You're an old Ottoman, Dick. You haven't doubled Cape Turk
yet, and I don't believe you're round Seraglio Point. Why, women
aren't the brittle things men used to think them. They never were,
and the war has made them like whipcord. Bless you, my dear,
we're the tougher sex now. We've had to wait and endure, and
we've been so beaten on the anvil of patience that we've lost all our
megrims.'

She put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes.

'Look at me, Dick, look at your someday-to-be espoused saint.
I'm nineteen years of age next August. Before the war I should
have only just put my hair up. I should have been the kind of
shivering debutante who blushes when she's spoken to, and oh! I
should have thought such silly, silly things about life ... Well, in
the last two years I've been close to it, and to death. I've nursed the
dying. I've seen souls in agony and in triumph. England has allowed
me to serve her as she allows her sons. Oh, I'm a robust young
woman now, and indeed I think women were always robuster than
men ... Dick, dear Dick, we're lovers, but we're comrades too -
always comrades, and comrades trust each other.'
I hadn't anything to say, except contrition, for I had my lesson. I
had been slipping away in my thoughts from the gravity of our
task, and Mary had brought me back to it. I remember that as we
walked through the woodland we came to a place where there were
no signs of war. Elsewhere there were men busy felling trees, and
anti-aircraft guns, and an occasional transport wagon, but here there
was only a shallow grassy vale, and in the distance, bloomed over
like a plum in the evening haze, the roofs of an old dwelling-house
among gardens.

Mary clung to my arm as we drank in the peace of it.

'That is what lies for us at the end of the road, Dick,' she said softly.

And then, as she looked, I felt her body shiver. She returned to
the strange fancy she had had in the St Germains woods three days before.

'Somewhere it's waiting for us and we shall certainly find it ...
But first we must go through the Valley of the Shadow ... And
there is the sacrifice to be made ... the best of us.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
St Anton

Ten days later the porter Joseph Zimmer of Arosa, clad in the
tough and shapeless trousers of his class, but sporting an old
velveteen shooting-coat bequeathed to him by a former German master
- speaking the guttural tongue of the Grisons, and with all his
belongings in one massive rucksack, came out of the little station of
St Anton and blinked in the frosty sunshine. He looked down upon
the little old village beside its icebound lake, but his business was
with the new village of hotels and villas which had sprung up in
the last ten years south of the station. He made some halting
inquiries of the station people, and a cab-driver outside finally
directed him to the place he sought - the cottage of the Widow
Summermatter, where resided an English intern, one Peter Pienaar.

The porter Joseph Zimmer had had a long and roundabout
journey. A fortnight before he had worn the uniform of a British
major-general. As such he had been the inmate of an expensive Paris
hotel, till one morning, in grey tweed clothes and with a limp, he
had taken the Paris-Mediterranean Express with a ticket for an
officers' convalescent home at Cannes. Thereafter he had declined
in the social scale. At Dijon he had been still an Englishman, but at
Pontarlier he had become an American bagman of Swiss parentage,
returning to wind up his father's estate. At Berne he limped
excessively, and at Zurich, at a little back-street hotel, he became
frankly the peasant. For he met a friend there from whom he
acquired clothes with that odd rank smell, far stronger than Harris
tweed, which marks the raiment of most Swiss guides and all Swiss
porters. He also acquired a new name and an old aunt, who a little
later received him with open arms and explained to her friends that
he was her brother's son from Arosa who three winters ago had
hurt his leg wood-cutting and had been discharged from the levy.

A kindly Swiss gentleman, as it chanced, had heard of the deserving
Joseph and interested himself to find him employment. The
said philanthropist made a hobby of the French and British prisoners
returned from Germany, and had in mind an officer, a crabbed
South African with a bad leg, who needed a servant. He was, it
seemed, an ill-tempered old fellow who had to be billeted alone,
and since he could speak German, he would be happier with a
Swiss native. Joseph haggled somewhat over the wages, but on his
aunt's advice he accepted the job, and, with a very complete set of
papers and a store of ready-made reminiscences (it took him some
time to swot up the names of the peaks and passes he had traversed)
set out for St Anton, having dispatched beforehand a monstrously
ill-spelt letter announcing his coming. He could barely read and
write, but he was good at maps, which he had studied carefully,
and he noticed with satisfaction that the valley of St Anton gave
easy access to Italy.

As he journeyed south the reflections of that porter would have
surprised his fellow travellers in the stuffy third-class carriage. He
was thinking of a conversation he had had some days before in a
cafe at Dijon with a young Englishman bound for Modane ...

We had bumped up against each other by chance in that strange
flitting when all went to different places at different times, asking
nothing of each other's business. Wake had greeted me rather
shamefacedly and had proposed dinner together.

I am not good at receiving apologies, and Wake's embarrassed me
more than they embarrassed him. 'I'm a bit of a cad sometimes,'he said.
'You know I'm a better fellow than I sounded that night, Hannay.'

I mumbled something about not talking rot - the conventional
phrase. What worried me was that the man was suffering. You
could see it in his eyes. But that evening I got nearer Wake than
ever before, and he and I became true friends, for he laid bare his
soul before me. That was his trouble, that he could lay bare his
soul, for ordinary healthy folk don't analyse their feelings. Wake
did, and I think it brought him relief.

'Don't think I was ever your rival. I would no more have
proposed to Mary than I would have married one of her aunts. She
was so sure of herself, so happy in her single-heartedness that she
terrified me. My type of man is not meant for marriage, for women
must be in the centre of life, and we must always be standing aside
and looking on. It is a damnable thing to be left-handed.'

'The trouble about you, my dear chap,' I said, 'is that you're too
hard to please.'

'That's one way of putting it. I should put it more harshly. I hate
more than I love. All we humanitarians and pacifists have hatred
as our mainspring. Odd, isn't it, for people who preach brotherly
love? But it's the truth. We're full of hate towards everything that
doesn't square in with our ideas, everything that jars on our lady-
like nerves. Fellows like you are so in love with their cause that
they've no time or inclination to detest what thwarts them. We've
no cause - only negatives, and that means hatred, and self-torture,
and a beastly jaundice of soul.'

Then I knew that Wake's fault was not spiritual pride, as I had
diagnosed it at Biggleswick. The man was abased with humility.

'I see more than other people see,' he went on, 'and I feel more.
That's the curse on me. You're a happy man and you get things
done, because you only see one side of a case, one thing at a time.
How would you like it if a thousand strings were always tugging at
you, if you saw that every course meant the sacrifice of lovely and
desirable things, or even the shattering of what you know to be
unreplaceable? I'm the kind of stuff poets are made of, but I
haven't the poet's gift, so I stagger about the world left-handed and
game-legged ... Take the war. For me to fight would be worse than
for another man to run away. From the bottom of my heart I
believe that it needn't have happened, and that all war is a blistering
iniquity. And yet belief has got very little to do with virtue. I'm not
as good a man as you, Hannay, who have never thought out
anything in your life. My time in the Labour battalion taught me
something. I knew that with all my fine aspirations I wasn't as true
a man as fellows whose talk was silly oaths and who didn't care a
tinker's curse about their soul.'

I remember that I looked at him with a sudden understanding. 'I
think I know you. You're the sort of chap who won't fight for his
country because he can't be sure that she's altogether in the right.
But he'd cheerfully die for her, right or wrong.'

His face relaxed in a slow smile. 'Queer that you should say that.
I think it's pretty near the truth. Men like me aren't afraid to die,
but they haven't quite the courage to live. Every man should be
happy in a service like you, when he obeys orders. I couldn't get on
in any service. I lack the bump of veneration. I can't swallow
things merely because I'm told to. My sort are always talking about
"service", but we haven't the temperament to serve. I'd give all I
have to be an ordinary cog in the wheel, instead of a confounded
outsider who finds fault with the machinery ... Take a great
violent high-handed fellow like you. You can sink yourself till you
become only a name and a number. I couldn't if I tried. I'm not
sure if I want to either. I cling to the odds and ends that are my
own.'
'I wish I had had you in my battalion a year ago,' I said.

'No, you don't. I'd only have been a nuisance. I've been a Fabian
since Oxford, but you're a better socialist than me. I'm a rancid
individualist.'
'But you must be feeling better about the war?' I asked.

'Not a bit of it. I'm still lusting for the heads of the politicians
that made it and continue it. But I want to help my country.
Honestly, Hannay, I love the old place. More, I think, than I love
myself, and that's saying a devilish lot. Short of fighting - which
would be the sin against the Holy Spirit for me - I'll do my
damnedest. But you'll remember I'm not used to team work. If I'm a
jealous player, beat me over the head.'

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