by John Buchan
Orders from headquarters, frequently countermanded and habitually misinterpreted, kept the division north of the Bulgar Dagh till early August, and it did not reach Aleppo till the beginning of September. During the summer heats Adam had been a good deal away from headquarters by permission of Colonel Aziz, and had been in many strange places and among many queer folk in his task of tangling up the connections which linked the embarrassed Liman to his base. . . . These were laborious and difficult days, but he found them curiously exhilarating. He felt himself within the electric zone of war, an actor in a drama which was moving to some stupendous climax. The toil of it rejuvenated a body which had been too long cramped and under-exercised. Moreover, he was among novel scenes, and his interest in the unfamiliar revived in him. Almost he became young again.
By way of motor-car, motor-bicycle or weedy horse, and sometimes on his own feet, he prowled about a land which had been for many thousands of years the cockpit of war. It was all pared and gnawed to the bone. He found everywhere irrigated fields where the water-furrows were dry, and orchards which had been felled for firewood. He entered towns where the lattices hung broken, and the mud walls crumbled, and only a lean child or a beggar showed in the narrow streets. He had days of blistering heat, when the sky was copper above and the earth iron below, and when hot winds stirred the baked mud into dust-devils. He had days, too, when bitter blasts blew from the north-east, or when the rain storms swept in battalions till he could almost cheat himself into the belief that he was on a Scots moor and that the tamarisk scrub was heather. The open air and the weather’s moods put new vigour into his body, and never for one moment was he sick or sorry. There was disease everywhere among the troops, but, while his colleagues went down like ninepins with fever and dysentery and heat-stroke, Adam in his shabby field-grey went steadily about his business. “You are a mountaineer like my own folk,” said the admiring Aziz. “You are as hard as the hillside quartz.”
As they moved south he began to mix with new types — shaggy Druses, sleek Damascenes, Arabs from the Syrian desert as thin and fine as sword-blades. His imagination caught fire, and he had visions of the vast hidden life astir behind the front where Liman played his mechanical game of war. That life was breaking loose from the game, and it was his task to expedite the breaking. For a blow was in preparation, and its force must be aided by defection in the rear, so that when it fell it would strike not a solid but a hollow shell.
The blow came, as all the world knows, at dawn on the 19th of September, by which time Adam’s division had not reached the Asian corps in Djevad’s Eighth Army to which it had been attached as reserve. It was still a mile or two short of Nablus. Presently it was caught up in the backwash of the great defeat, and turned its face northward. Down upon it came the fog of war, nay the deeper fog of a pell-mell retreat. . . . These were busy days for Adam — and for Aziz and for many obscurer folk. There was a German staff-officer who used to appear mysteriously at cross-roads and give authoritative orders to fleeing columns. He must have been raw to his job, for most of his orders contrived to shepherd those who obeyed them into the arms of Allenby’s terrible horsemen.
Adam had one moment of indecision. Liman was routed, so his task must be over. Was not the next step for him to be picked up by the pursuit and restored to his own people? But a thought deterred him. He did not know what might be happening in the north. There might be a stand beyond the Lebanon at Homs or Aleppo, or in Anatolia itself, and work for him to do. So he clung to his fleeing division, and struggled with it past Rayat to the broad-gauge line, and across the Orontes till the minarets of Aleppo rose above its orchards — on past the junction with the Bagdad railway, and up the long slopes of the hills which circle Alexandretta. The division was now only a rabble of scared and starving men, and soon he was convinced that Turkey’s last shot was fired, and that for her broken army not even the shores of the Marmora would be a sanctuary. His work was done.
He realised something more — that it was high time for him to go. Aziz had left him, and there were ugly faces turned on him among the troops. He was a reminder of the race that had led the children of Islam into the mire. One night he had to run for it to escape a rifle bullet at the hands of a crazed sergeant. He had for some days dropped his uniform, retaining only his field-boots, and wore a ragged Turkish tunic and greatcoat. He had made ready, too, a slender packet of food, and he had a map, a compass, and twenty rounds for his revolver. Thus equipped, he hid for one night in the scrub of a nullah, and next morning started, like Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, on his march to the sea.
For three weeks he was a hunted man, and had his fill of the hardships which those British soldiers suffered who escaped from a Turkish prison-camp. To be sure, there was no pursuit, but there was a more menacing thing, a land where all order and discipline had gone, and a stranger was like a sheep among wolf-packs. The countryside was starving, with the people fighting like wild beasts for food. Also it was strewn with broken men on the same desperate errand as himself, striking out frantically for safety like a weak swimmer in a heavy sea. He moved only by night, and in these weeks he learned the shifts of primeval man whose mind is narrowed to a single purpose — the purpose of the meanest sentient thing. He had schooled his body to need the minimum of food, but even that little was in constant jeopardy. He had twice to fight for his life with famished dogs, and used up four of his pistol cartridges. Once he stumbled on a group of Kurdish soldiers who had set up as bandits, and only the fortunate approach of a moonless night enabled him to escape. Every day he felt his strength growing less, so he husbanded it like a miser. Lightheadedness was what he feared: too often the scrub and the hills would dance about him, and he would lie face down, his fingers pressed on his throbbing eyeballs, till he won touch with earth again.
It was a nightmare time, but he was not unhappy, for a veil seemed to be lifting from his horizon. He had recaptured his own country. The most alien sights and scents were translated into the idiom of home. As he lay in the hot tamarisk at midday he smelled thyme and bracken, and under a sky of glittering stars he could make believe that he was belated on some familiar moorland. Especially in rain could he retrieve these links, for the odour of wet earth seemed to re-create for him a whole world of ancient comfortable things. His body might be stretched to its ultimate endurance, but his mind was at peace. . . .
One afternoon he came over a scarp of hill and looked down at last on the sea. There was a little bay below him and a few fishers’ huts; off shore lay a British destroyer, from which a watering-party had just landed. He looked at this assurance of safety with no quickening of the pulse, for he was too weary for such emotion. Besides, he had somehow expected it.
He was taken on board and met by a brisk young lieutenant. There had been a conversation between the lieutenant and a petty officer. “Escaped prisoner, I suppose. Good God, what a scarecrow! I suppose we must take charge of the poor devil. Bring him along at once.”
A few words from Adam sent the lieutenant’s hand to his cap.
“Adam Melfort! Of course I know all about you, sir! What almighty luck that we put in to this God-forgotten hole! You want a long drink, and then a bath, and a square meal, and then you ought to sleep for a week. I can lend you some kit. . . . Hold on, sir. Perhaps you haven’t heard the news. It came through to us last night. The jolly old war is over. Yesterday morning Germany got down from her perch.”
But Adam scarcely listened, for he was in a happy dream. The lapping of green water and the tang of salt had carried him over great tracts of space and time. He had found Eilean Bàn.
CHAPTER III
I
In the smoking-room of the club where this story opened Christopher Stannix sat on a warm June evening. It was the day of the Peace celebrations in London, when the returning generals had passed through the streets, and from Pall Mall came the shuffling sound of homing spectators. The war had grizzled Stannix’s thick dark hair above the temples, and had slightly rounded
his shoulders, for he had spent four years at office work. Also it had hollowed his cheeks, and made faint pencillings at the corners of his eyes. His face was that of a man a decade older than his age. The lawyers’ primness of mouth had gone, for he had given up the Bar, and, having been in the House of Commons since 1913, had now turned definitely to politics. He was one of the younger men who were beginning to make their mark in the dull and docile Coalition Parliament.
Lyson, his companion, was in uniform, for he had been engaged in the day’s procession. He was skimming an evening paper while the other ordered tea, and dispensing fragments of news.
“Hullo!” he said, “I see Falconet is lost. No word of him for four months, and he is more than a month overdue at his base. You remember him, Kit? The long American who had a hospital at Arville? Began the war as a French airman, till he smashed himself up. He was a bit of a nuisance to us at G.H.Q.”
“He was a bit of a nuisance to us at the War Office,” said Stannix. “I never saw a man with his temper so handy. I daresay that was due to his left arm giving him neuritis. Also he was some kind of multi-millionaire and used to getting his own way. Well I remember his lean twitching face and his eye like a moulting eagle’s. Where do you say he has got to now?”
“That’s the puzzle. He has gone over the edge somewhere in Northern Greenland. He always made a hobby of exploring unholy corners of the earth and financed several expeditions, and he had some theory about Greenland, so, as soon as he was certain that the Allies were winning, he bolted off to have a look at it. Funny business, if you come to think of it, changing the racket of the front for the peace of an Arctic desert! And now he has gone and lost himself, and this paper says they’re talking of a relief party.”
“We’re in for a lot of that sort of thing,” said Stannix. “There’s going to be all kinds of queer byproducts of the war. You know how after a heavy day you are sometimes too tired to sleep. Well, that is the position of a good many to-day — too tired to rest — must have some other kind of excitement — running round like sick dogs till the real crash comes. The big problem for the world is not economic but psychological — how to get men’s minds on an even keel again.”
“I daresay that is true,” said the other. “But the odd thing is that it is not the people who had the roughest time that are the most unsettled. There was a little chap at home who was the local postman. He enlisted at the start in a Fusilier battalion and had four of the most hellish years that ever fell to the lot of man — Gallipoli and France — blown-up, buried, dysentery, trench-fever, and most varieties of wounds. To-day he is back at his old job, toddling round the villages, and you would never guess from his looks or his talk that he had been out of Dorset. . . . Then take Adam Melfort. I suppose he had about as nerve-racking a show as anybody, but you couldn’t tell it on him. I ran across him the other day, and, except that he was fined down to whalebone and catgut, he was just the same quiet, placid, considering old bird.”
Stannix smiled. “Funny that you should mention Adam, for he was the case I had chiefly in mind. With him it’s not so simple an affair as your postman. You see, he was in the war, but not of it. He stood a little way apart and got a bird’s-eye view. For him it was only a spell of training for something much bigger, and now he is looking at the world like a philosopher and wondering what his real job is to be.”
Lyson’s face kindled into interest. “Tell me about Adam. You see a lot of him, I know, and I don’t often manage to run him to ground. I’d give a good deal to get back to the old terms with him.”
Stannix shook his head. “You never will. I can’t myself. Adam has made his choice. When he crashed, he decided that God meant him to drop out of the firing-line, and had work for him somewhere in the rear. He has gone deliberately underground, and means to stay there. That was why he was by miles the best secret-service man we had — he took to the job like a crusade, something to which he was specially called by the Almighty. He is the complete philosophic fatalist, waiting for destiny to show him his next move. He’s a lonely man, if you like, but he doesn’t mind that, for he knows that it is his strength. Every journalist is talking about the ‘brotherhood of the trenches’ — a silly, rhetorical phrase, but there’s something in it — people who went through the same beastliness together did acquire a sort of common feeling. Well, Adam had no chance of that; he was as much outside it as if he had been a conchy. He has missed all the comfort one gets from a sense of companionship, but he has missed, too, the confusion of the mass-mind. He has no delusions and no sentimentalities. He is looking at our new world with clear dispassionate eyes, like a visitor from another planet. But, all the same, when he finds his predestined job it will be like the releasing of a steel spring.”
“By Jove, that sounds like trouble for somebody. What is it to be? Russia?”
“It might be. He talks the language, and might put a spoke in the Bolshy wheels. But he hasn’t made up his mind — at least he hadn’t last week. He has been spending recent months having a general look round.”
“Go on. Tell me,” said Lyson. “I’m deeply interested.”
Stannix laughed. “It was a funny business, and I saw something of it, for I had to chaperon him in most of his investigations. You see, he had lost touch a little with his kind, and he realised that he must find it again if he was to be of any use. . . . The first thing was to meet the people who had been fighting, of whom he knew nothing at all. He saw a fairly representative lot, from the hearty fellows who had found it rather a lark and were half sorry it was over to the damaged sensitives who had a grievance against humanity. I fancy he did not get much out of any of them, and decided that it would be many a day before we could be certain what effect the war had had on our people. . . . Then he made a tour of the serious folk — the internationalists and the social reformers. He hung about the universities to have a look at the young entry, and went into W.E.A. circles, and put in some time with a Glasgow riveter. Adam was never very communicative, so I don’t know what conclusion he came to, but he did not seem to be depressed by his experiences. . . . Oh, and he sat out a good many debates in the House of Commons. He found them a dusty business, and used to come down from the gallery with puzzled eyes. I wanted to get some of the politicians to meet him, but he wouldn’t have it — didn’t want to hear other people’s conclusions — wanted to make his own.”
“Can’t we get him back into the Service?” Lyson asked. “I know he has sent in his papers, but that could be arranged. There are twenty jobs on hand for which he would be the spot man.”
“Not a chance of it. I put that to him, for it seemed to me common sense. I told him that he was a brilliant soldier and should stick to the profession for which he had been trained. No earthly use. You know that look of intelligent obstinacy which is more unshakable than the Pyramids. ‘You forget,’ he said, ‘that in the past four years I’ve had a training for other things.’”
“A pretty desperate training,” Lyson commented.
“Yes,” said Stannix, “that is the right word. Remember that Adam is a desperate man. There is nothing in Heaven or earth left for him to fear.”
One night later in the summer Stannix dined with Adam Melfort at a restaurant. Thereafter they made a curious progress. First they went to a meeting of a group of serious people who were perturbed about the state of the world, and listened to a paper on the “Economics of Victory.” It was held in the drawing-room of a private house and the paper was read by a brilliant young Oxford don who had made a high reputation for his work abroad on behalf of the British Treasury. . . . They did not wait for the discussion, but moved on to a newly-formed club, patronised mainly by ex-cavalry officers, which boasted a super-excellent American bar. There, as they drank cocktails, they listened to the gossip of youth. Stannix knew many of the members, but he did not introduce Adam. The talk was chiefly of money, for most of the young men seemed to have gone into business and precociously acquired the City jargon. They were determined
to have a good time and had somehow or other to find the cash for it. . . . Then they went to a ball, given by a celebrated hostess who was making a resolute effort to restore the pre-war gaiety. It was gay enough; dementedly gay, it seemed to Adam, as he recalled the balls where he had once danced with Camilla. The female clothes were odd, the dances were extravagant things, the music was barbarous, and the men and women seemed to be there not for amusement but for an anodyne. Adam and Stannix stood in a corner and looked on.
“Isn’t that Meeson?” the former asked, mentioning the name of a Cabinet Minister.
“Yes,” said Stannix. “He comes to this sort of thing, for he thinks it smart, and smartness was beyond him in his old days in the suburbs. There’s Wendell — that man dancing with the Jewess. He comes because he wants to be thought young — age, you know, is the chief crime to-day. Most of the boys want to make up for the war, and the girls have four dull years to forget. It’s all perfectly natural, I suppose, but rather foolish. Half the world is destroyed, so we caper among the ruins. You don’t seem as shocked as I expected.”
“I’m not in the least shocked,” was the answer. “I’m only wondering how long it will last. We must pull up our socks pretty soon, or the rest of the world will go.”
Late that night the two sat in Stannix’s rooms.
“Well, you’ve had your look-round,” the host said. “I take it that to-night was the last lap. I hope I took you to the right places. What do you make of it all?”
