The figures he spelt out very carefully, repeating them three times so that there could be no mistake. Again he paused, until, from Berlin, they were repeated for confirmation. Then Rodwell glanced again at the closely-written sheet spread before him, and began to tap out the following secret message in German to the very heart of the Imperial war-machine.
“Official information just gained from a fresh and most reliable source—confirmed by H.238, M.605, and also B. 1928—shows that British Admiralty have conceived a clever plan for entrapping the German Grand Fleet. Roughly, the scheme is to make attack with inferior force upon Heligoland early on Wednesday morning, the 16th, together with corresponding attack upon German division in the estuary of the Eider and thus draw out the German ships northwards toward the Shetlands, behind which British Grand Fleet are concealed in readiness. This concentration of forces northward will, according to the scheme of which I have learned full details, leave the East coast of England from the Tyne to the Humber unprotected for a full twelve hours on the 16th, thus full advantage could be taken for bombardment. Inform Grand Admiral immediately.”
Having thus betrayed the well-laid plans of the British Admiralty to entice the German fleet out of the Kiel canal and the other harbours in which barnacles were growing on their keels, Lewin Rodwell, the popular British “patriot,” paused once more.
But not for long, because, in less than a minute, he received again the signal of acknowledgement that his highly interesting message to the German Admiralty had been received.
He gave the signal that he had ended his message, and, with a low laugh of satisfaction, rose from the rickety old chair and lit another cigarette.
Thus had England been foully betrayed by one of the men whom her deluded public most confidently trusted and so greatly admired.
From Number 70, Berlin, by William Le Queux; Hodder and Stoughton; London, 1916.
Far Too Young to Assist
—Charles Amory Beach
That night Tom and Jack preferred the quiet of their own apartment to the general sitting room, where the tired pilots gathered to smoke, talk, play games, sing, and give their opinions on every topic imaginable, including scraps of news received in late letters from home towns across the sea.
“Do you know, Tom,” Jack said unexpectedly, “I’d give something to know where Bessie Gleason is just at this time. It’s strange how often I think about that young girl. It’s just as if something that people call intuition told me she might be in serious trouble through that hard-looking guardian of hers, Carl Potzfeldt.”
Tom smiled.
Bessie Gleason was a very pretty and winsome girl of about twelve years of age, with whom Jack in particular had been quite “chummy” on the voyage across the Atlantic, and through the submarine zone, as related in “Air Service Boys Flying for France.” The last he had seen of her was when she waved her hand to him when leaving the steamer at its English port. Her stern guardian had contracted a violent dislike for Jack, so that the two had latterly been compelled to meet only in secret for little confidential chats.
“Oh, you’ve taken to imagining all sorts of terrible things in connection with pretty Bessie and her cruel guardian. He claimed to be a native of Alsace-Lorraine.”
Bessie Gleason was a little American girl, a child of moods, fairylike in appearance and of a maturity of manner that invariably attracted those with whom she came into contact.
Her mother had been lost at sea, and by Mrs. Gleason’s will the girl and her property were left in Potzfeldt’s care. Mr. Potzfeldt was taking her to Europe, and on the steamship she and Jack Parmly had been friends, and as Potzfeldt’s actions were suspicious and, moreover, the girl did not seem happy with him Jack had been troubled about her.
“I’m afraid you think too much about Bessie and her troubles, Jack; and get yourself worked up about things that may never happen to her,” Tom went on after a pause.
“She’s a queer girl, you know, and intensely patriotic.”
“Yes, I noticed that, even if you did monopolize most of her time,” chuckled Tom.
“How she does hate the Germans! And that’s what will get her into trouble, I’m afraid, if she and her guardian have managed to get through the lines in any way, and back to his home town, wherever that may be.”
“Why should she feel so bitter toward the Kaiser and his people, Jack?”
“I’ll tell you. Her mother was drowned. She was aboard the Lusitania and was never seen after the sinking. Mr. Potzfeldt was there, too, it seems, but couldn’t save Mrs. Gleason, he claims, though he tried in every way to do so.”
“Then if Bessie knows about her mother’s death,” Tom went on to say, “I don’t wonder she feels that way toward everything German. I’d hate the entire race if my mother had been murdered, as those women and children were, when the torpedo was launched against the great passenger steamer without any warning.”
“She told me she felt heart-broken because she was far too young to do anything to assist in the drive against the central empires. You see, Bessie had great hopes of some day growing tall enough to become a war nurse. She is deeply interested in the Red Cross; and Tom, would you believe it, the midget practices regular United States Army standing exercises in the hope of hastening her growth.”
“I honor the little girl for her ambition,” Tom said. “But I’m inclined to think this war will be long past before she has grown to a suitable size to enlist among the nurses of the Paris hospitals. And if that Carl Potzfeldt entertains the sentiments we suspected him of, and is secretly in sympathy with the Huns, although passing for a neutral, her task will be rendered doubly hard.”
“I’m sure that dark-faced man is a bad egg,” expostulated Jack. “If only we could prove that Potzfeldt was in the pay of the German government, don’t you see he could be stood up against a wall and fixed.”
“Still, we can’t do the least thing about it, Jack. If fortune should ever bring us in contact with that pair again, why then we could perhaps think up some sort of scheme to help Bessie. Now, I’ve got something important to tell you.”
“Something the captain must have said when he was chatting with you in the mess-room immediately after supper, I guess. At the time I thought he might be asking you about our adventures of to-day, but then I noticed that he was doing pretty much all the talking. What is on the carpet for us now?”
“We’re going to be given our chance at last, Jack!”
“Do you mean to fly with the fighting escadrille and meet German pilots in a life and death battle up among the clouds?” asked Jack, in a voice that had a tinge of awe about it; for he had often dreamed of such honors coming to him.
“That is what we are promised,” his chum assured him. “Of course our education is not yet complete; but we have shown such progress that, as there is need of additional pilots able to meet the Fokker planes while a raid is in progress, we are to be given a showing.”
“I’ll not sleep much to-night for thinking of it,” declared Jack.
From Air Service Boys Over the Enemy’s Lines, by Charles Amory Beach; World Syndicate Publishing; New York, 1919.
To Die is Easier
—Edgar A. Guest
The Mother on the Sidewalk
The mother on the sidewalk as the troops are marching by
Is the mother of Old Glory that is waving in the sky.
Men have fought to keep it splendid, men have died to keep it bright.
But that flag was born of woman and her sufferings day and night;
’Tis her sacrifice has made it, and once more we ought to pray
For the brave and loyal mother of the boy that goes away.
There are days of grief before her, there are hours that she will weep,
There are nights of anxious waiting when her fear will banish sleep;
She has heard her country calling and has risen to the test,
And has placed upon the altar of the nation’s need, her best.
And no man shall ever suffer in the turmoil of the gray
The anguish of the mother of the boy who goes away.
You may boast men’s deeds of glory, you may tell their courage great,
But to die is easier service than alone to sit and wait,
And I hail the little mother, with the tear-stained face and grave
Who has given the Flag a soldier—she’s the bravest of the brave.
And that banner we are proud of, with its red and blue and white
Is a lasting tribute holy to all mother’s love of right.
A Patriot
It’s funny when a feller wants to do his little bit,
And wants to wear a uniform and lug a soldier’s kit,
And ain’t afraid of submarines nor mines that fill the sea,
They will not let him go along to fight for liberty.
They make him stay at home and be his mother’s darling pet,
But you can bet there’ll come a time when they will want me yet.
I want to serve the Stars and Stripes, I want to go and fight,
I want to lick the Kaiser good, and do the job up right.
I know the way to use a gun and I can dig a trench
And I would like to go and help the English and the French.
But no, they say, you cannot march away to stirring drums;
Be mother’s angel boy at home; stay there and twirl your thumbs.
I’ve read about the daring boys that fight up in the sky;
It seems to me that must be a splendid way to die.
I’d like to drive an aeroplane and prove my courage grim
And get above a German there and drop a bomb on him,
But they won’t let me go along to help the latest drive;
They say my mother needs me here because I’m only five.
From Over Here, by Edgar A. Guest; Reilly & Lee; Chicago, 1918.
That Dumb, Backwoods, Pie-faced Stenographer
—Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Ellen, plain, rather sallow, very serious, was a sort of office manager in the firm of Walker and Pennypacker, the big wholesale hardware merchants of Marshallton, Kansas. She was there at twenty-seven, on the day in August, 1914, when she opened the paper and saw that Belgium had been invaded by the Germans. She read with attention what was printed about the treaty obligations involved, though she found it hard to understand. At noon she stopped before the desk of Mr. Pennypacker, the senior member of the firm, for whom she had great respect, and asked him if she had made out correctly the import of the editorial. “Had the Germans promised they wouldn’t ever go into Belgium in a war?”
“Looks that way,” said Mr. Pennypacker, nodding, and searching for a lost paper. The moment after, he had forgotten the question and the questioner.
Ellen had always rather regretted not having been able to “go on with her education,” and this gave her certain little habits of mind which differentiated her somewhat from the other stenographers and typewriters in the office with her, and from her cousin, with whom she shared a small bedroom in Mrs. Wilson’s boarding-house. For instance, she looked up words in the dictionary when she did not understand them, and she had kept all her old schoolbooks on the shelf of the boarding-house bedroom. Finding that she had only a dim recollection of where Belgium was, she took down her old geography and located it. The relation between the size of the little country and the bulk of Germany made an impression on her. “My! It looks as though they could just make one mouthful of it,” she remarked. “It’s awfully little.”
In the days which followed, the office-manager of the wholesale hardware house more and more justified the accusation of looking “queer.” It came to be so noticeable that one day her employer, Mr. Pennypacker, asked her if she didn’t feel well. “You’ve been looking sort of under the weather,” he said.
She answered, “I’m just sick because the United States won’t do anything to help Belgium and France.”
Mr. Pennypacker had never received a more violent shock of pure astonishment. “Great Scotland!” he ejaculated, “what’s that to you.”
“Well, I live in the United States,” she advanced, as though it were an argument.
Mr. Pennybacker looked at her hard. It was the same plain, serious, rather sallow face he had seen for years bent over his typewriter and his letter files. But the eyes were different—anxious, troubled.
“It makes me sick,” she repeated, “to see a great big nation picking on a little one that was only keeping its promise.”
Her employer cast around for a conceivable reason for the aberration. “Any of your folks come here from there?” he ventured.
“Gracious, no!” cried Ellen, shocked at the idea that there might be “foreigners” in her family. She added: “But you don’t have to be related to a little boy, do you, to get mad at a man that’s beating him up, especially if that boy hasn’t done anything he oughtn’t to?”
Mr. Pennypacker stared. “I don’t know that I ever looked at it that way.” He added: “I’ve been so taken up with that lost shipment of nails that I haven’t read much about the war. There’s always some sort of war going on over there in Europe seems to me.”
On the 8th of May, 1915, when Ellen went down to breakfast, the boarding-house dining-room was excited. Ellen heard the sinking of the Lusitania read out loud by the young reporter. To every one’s surprise, she added nothing to the exclamations of horror with which the others greeted the news. She looked very white and left the room without touching her breakfast. She went directly down to the office and when Mr. Pennypacker came in at nine o’clock she asked him for a leave of absence, “maybe three months, maybe more,” depending on how long her money held out. She explained that she had in the savings-bank five hundred dollars, the entire savings of a lifetime, which she intended to use now.
It was the first time in eleven years that she had ever asked for more than her regular yearly fortnight, but Mr. Pennypacker was not surprised. “You’ve been looking awfully run-down lately. It’ll do you good to get a real rest. But it won’t cost you all that! Where are you going? To Battle Creek?”
“I’m not going to rest,” said Miss Boardman, in a queer voice. “I’m going to work in France.”
The first among among the clashing and violent ideas which this announcement aroused in Mr. Pennypacker’s mind was the instant certainty that she could not have seen the morning paper. “Great Scotland—not much you’re not! This is no time to be taking ocean trips. The submarines have just gotten one of the big ocean ships, hundreds of women and children drowned.”
“I heard about that,” she said, looking at him very earnestly, with a dumb emotion in her eyes. “That’s why I’m going.”
Then she went back to the boarding-house and began to pack two-thirds of her things into her trunk, and put the other third into her satchel, all she intended to take with her.
At noon her cousin Maggie came back from her work, found her thus, and burst into shocked and horrified tears. At two o’clock Maggie went to find the young reporter, and, her eyes swollen, her face between anger and alarm, she begged him to come and “talk to Ellen. She’s gone off her head.”
The reporter asked her what form her mania took.
“She’s going to France to work for the French and Belgians as long as her money holds out … all the money she’s saved in her life!”
The first among the clashing ideas which this awakened in the reporter’s mind was the most heartfelt and gorgeous amusement. The idea of that dumb, backwoods, pie-faced stenographer carrying her valuable services to the war in Europe seemed to him the richest thing that had happened in years! He burst into laughter. “Yes, sure, I’ll come and talk to her,” he agreed.
He found her lifting a tray into her trunk. “See here, Miss Boardman,” he remarked reasonably, “do you know what you need? You need a sense of humor! You take things too much in dead earnest. The sense of humor keeps you from doing ridiculous things, don’t
you know it does?”
Ellen faced him, seriously considering this. “Do you think all ridiculous things are bad?” she asked him, not as an argument, but as a genuine question.
He evaded this and went on. “Just look at yourself now … just look at what you’re planning to do. Here is the biggest war in the history of the world; all the great nations involved; millions and millions of dollars being poured out; the United States sending hundreds and thousands of packages and hospital supplies by the million, and nurses and doctors and Lord knows how many trained people … and, look! who comes here?—a stenographer from Walker and Pennypacker’s in Marshallton, Kansas, setting out to the war!”
Ellen looked at this picture of herself, and while she considered it the young man looked long at her. As he looked, he stopped laughing. She said finally, very simply, in a declarative sentence devoid of any but its obvious meaning. “No, I can’t see that this is so very funny.”
From Home Fires in France, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher; Henry Holt and Company; New York, 1918.
The Azure Gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick
—Edith Wharton
It was a big cellar, but brown uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it from wall to wall. In one corner the men were sitting on packing boxes at a long table made of boards laid across barrels, the smoky light of little oil-lamps reddening their cheeks and deepening the furrows in their white foreheads as they laboured over their correspondence. Others were playing checkers, or looking at the illustrated papers.
It was the first time that Troy had ever seen a large group of his compatriots so close to the fighting front, and in an hour of ease, and he was struck by the gravity of the young faces, and the low tones of their talk. Everything was in a minor key. No one was laughing or singing or larking; the note was that which might have prevailed in a club of quiet elderly men, or in a drawing room where the guests did not know each other well.
Troy and Jack perched on a packing box, and talked a little with their neighbors; but suddenly they were interrupted by the noise of a motor stopping outside. There was a stir at the mouth of the cavern, and a girl said eagerly: “Here she comes!”
Where Wars Go to Die Page 28
