Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  4. Limits as after the first Balkan war, inclusive Macedonia (exchange Kavalla against Valona with Greece?).

  5. Greece. See clause 4.

  6. Italy to abandon influence on east coast of the Adriatic. A rectification of the Austro-Italian frontier if desired by Austria-Hungary to be agreed to by Italy. No war contribution.

  7. Turkey. Status quo ante. Signatory powers guarantee integrity of the Turkish Empire.

  8. Belgium. Re-establishment against return German colonies to Germany.

  9. France. Status quo ante.

  10. Russia. Kingdom of Poland to be created as in existence between 1772–93. The King to be chosen by Great Britain out of three presented by Austria-Hungary. The Crown lands within the limits of the future kingdom of Poland to serve as security for the interest and principal of a loan of 25,000,000,000 marks in favour of Austria-Hungary. Great Britain will raise the full amount of the loan, i.e. 25,000,000,000 marks on behalf of Austria-Hungary, to whom the money is to be paid and who will settle all the expenses incurred in the arrangement for the preliminary conference mentioned in the first paragraph.

  In the event of His Majesty the King of Spain declining two delegates as mentioned in the first paragraph the two governments will consider any further suggestion for the holding of the preliminary conference.

  Amsterdam, 27 April 1916

  In the course of conversation he gathered that the Austrians were not officials but directors of important shipping concerns who may have had some quiet official sanction for their errand. No money passed between them and Señor P—, but when Mr H— pointed out that he had come over on the understanding that he was not to be put to personal expense, they did give him £100 to cover his journey, which seemed to show that they thought his intervention was worth at least that amount.

  It is to be feared that poor Señor P— did not enjoy his reception on his return to this country. His stay was extremely short and part of it was passed in a room without any of the amenities that he had been accustomed to in his suite at a first-class hotel. Since the Armistice he has again appeared as a man who can make fortunes. His fluent tongue, his moist eye and his extremely well-fed appearance were not given him for nothing.

  Among the many queer people who graced my room was a certain Jugo-Slav lawyer-journalist who came I do not quite know why and left I do not quite know whither. He talked unceasingly about nothing in particular. He assured me that he was a frequent visitor to the Foreign Office and that he was a person to be reckoned with. I consulted a friend who knew him well and when I remarked that he did not quite seem to know what he wanted and that his discourse was sometimes incoherent, my friend assured me that all Jugo-Slav journalists are like that and that everything reasonable should be done to encourage him. And so when he called again and again I did not attempt to interrupt him: my time was a sacrifice laid on the altar of our international relations.

  One day the awful news was received that the Jugo-Slav journalist was under arrest in Northumberland. In defiance of every prescription, human and divine, he had taken the train for Newcastle without complying with any of the police requirements and had gone straight off to the residence of Lord Grey of Fallodon. Lord Grey was away and his housekeeper, naturally disturbed, communicated with the police, when it was found that my Jugo-Slav friend had neglected to register his arrival. He was then contemplating a journey to Glasgow, Inverness and Edinburgh, but he was remitted under escort to London, where again he appeared before me. On this occasion incoherence would be a grave understatement of the nature of his discourse. I gathered that he had been grossly insulted, and that all Jugo-Slavia would rise as one man when they came to know of it. It was useless to point out that the law was no respecter of persons and that even the most distinguished foreigner was liable to indignities if he broke it, because my friend had no time for listening. He wanted to talk and talk he did. Still, he was no exception to the unbroken rule that no one who came into my room should leave it without thanking me and we patched up some kind of arrangement. I was shocked some few weeks later at learning that the poor man had died of general paralysis of the insane.

  Among the detentions made at this period was that of an ex-naval officer, Commander von Rintelen. After leaving the German Navy he had embarked on international trade, chiefly in Mexico and had become a power in Central America. He had done many things that would have brought him within reach of the law in the United States. For some time he denied his identity, but the interrogation by the naval officers was conducted with remarkable skill and in the end he confessed. At subsequent interviews he became quite communicative, while of course he gave nothing away that would have injured his government. He was interned as an officer at Donington Hall.

  The Americans would have been very glad to have him within their jurisdiction, but it was, of course, impossible to transfer a prisoner of war to the custody of a neutral. On the day when America entered the war on the side of the Allies the position changed. There seemed to be nothing to prevent a prisoner of war interned in one of the allied countries from being interned in another and it was decided to send von Rintelen over to America in British custody. A curious light is thrown upon the German mentality by an incident that took place just before he embarked. He stopped to make a solemn protest as a prisoner of war against his life being placed in jeopardy from German submarines if he were embarked upon a merchant vessel. His escort listened quite gravely to his protest and asked him to move on.

  A good deal of latitude is allowed to prisoners on board steamers and one day von Rintelen found himself in company with a young South American who spoke German fluently. When he heard that he was going to South America he asked him to call upon the German minister in Venezuela and say to him the two words ‘Rintelen Meldet’ (Rintelen has arrived). That, he explained, would set certain machinery to work. He hinted darkly that there would be reprisals upon Colonel Napier, who was interned as a prisoner of war in Austria and he declared his intention of getting President Carranza to seize three prominent Americans in Mexico and make reprisals on them. His passion for reprisals knew no bounds. Some months later, while he was awaiting his trial in New York, he told this young man when he came to see him that he need not trouble further about delivering the message because Admiral von Hintze had passed through New York on his way from China and would see that the necessary steps were taken. I was glad to learn a little later that the British officer in question had been released and sent to England.

  One early morning some fishermen who were walking under the cliff between Robin Hood’s Bay and Filey saw two men wandering along the beach. They stopped them and, believing them to be Germans, took them to the nearest constable. Nothing very much could be got out of them except that they were German sailors and that they had buried some of their belongings in the sand. These were recovered and among them was a cheap watch which was still going. On the way to London they declared that they had swum ashore from a submarine in Robin Hood’s Bay. It seemed impossible that a watch which had been immersed in sea water for perhaps twenty minutes should still be going and it was thought that they might have been landed intentionally. They proved to be a very interesting couple. The younger man was barely twenty-one. He had passed his examination for an officer’s commission. The older man was a quartermaster of past forty. He could look for no further promotion. Both had been on night-watch on a German submarine lying in Robin Hood’s Bay. The older man had suddenly shouted, ‘Motorboat!’ (Submarines were particularly nervous about our fast motorboats at that time.) At the same moment he clapped down the hatch, which was secured from inside and the submarine began to submerge. There was no escape for either man except by swimming. It was pretty obvious that the older man had had enough of cruising and intended to desert, for there had been ample time for both men to have passed through the hatch before it was secured.

  And now they were marooned in the enemy country with nothing before them but internment as prisoners of war. I did not c
over myself with glory during their examination. I asked the older man whether he would mind if I immersed his watch in a tumblerful of water during the interview. He made no objection and there that watch stayed under 3 inches of water for a full half-hour. When I took it out it was still going. If it had stopped, as any respectable watch would under such treatment, their story about swimming ashore would have been upset. It remained only to ask him where such a watch was made. He had bought it in Stettin for 5 marks!

  During the last month in 1916 the Commissioner of Police was asked to furnish 800 trained police to serve in France, partly to regulate the traffic on the French roads behind the line. They were converted into military police for the purpose. I saw a few of them afterwards on this duty and very well they did it. There is a story, perhaps mythical, that during the retreat of the 5th Army in March 1918 a London policeman was seen standing at a corner where two roads converged. Down one was marching a body of British troops, down the other a body of Germans and he put out one arm mechanically to stop the Germans and with the other waved to the British to proceed as if, for all the world, he was controlling the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. With their innate obedience to authority, it is said that the Germans marked time. The story did not go on to say what became of the policeman, but there are not a few of my acquaintance whose calmness in moments of excitement would be quite equal to such an occasion.

  One drawback to the submarine campaign against shipping was that we could no longer compel neutral ships to come in to Falmouth and Kirkwall for examination, since both these ports were in the danger zone: consequently the examinations were made in Halifax, Jamaica and Sierra Leone and no more suspicious travellers came to Scotland Yard.

  In February 1917 drafts of civilian prisoners of war from the Isle of Man in exchange for an equal number of British from Ruhleben were shipped to Holland in the Rjndam. The representative of the Holland–America Line called at the American embassy to demand their passage money in advance. On being asked to collect it from the German government he replied that this was out of the question: they knew the German government too well.

  It has always been a matter for wonder what led the Germans to adopt the suicidal policy of torpedoing hospital ships. The case is not made better by the reason given by themselves, namely, that an Austrian named Adalbert Messany had made a declaration that when he was repatriated in the ‘hospital ship’ Britannic there were 2,500 armed troops on board. A concert singer of that name, aged twenty-four and suffering from tuberculosis, had been deported from Egypt to Mudros in November 1916 and at Mudros he was embarked on the transport Britannic for repatriation. On such evidence as this the Germans sought to justify crimes as stupid as they were dastardly.

  The long sojourn of the British Army in northern France was said to be causing uneasiness to some of the French, who viewed the erection of semi-permanent buildings as an indication that the British might delay demobilisation for years and be in virtual possession of all the Channel ports. One of them is said to have approached a certain eminent English official and to have asked how long he thought it would take the British to evacuate Calais at the end of the war. This Englishman, who is a cynic with a love for equivocal speech, replied, ‘Well, I don’t know. Last time it took them 200 years.’

  CHAPTER 20

  THE BOGUS PRINCESS

  DURING THE WAR bogus royalties and princesses sprang up like toadstools. Any young woman with a turn for private theatricals and a vivid imagination could burst forth as a high-born refugee and get someone to believe in her and, incidentally, to finance her until she found a husband from among the officers in one or other of the camps. The first I remember was a Russian princess who, while staying with a very influential lady in the Midlands, had become engaged to a certain temporary officer of large expectations. She was described to me as beautiful, with a peculiarly Russian type of loveliness, emotional, as all Russians are, with blue eyes that became easily suffused with tears and with a charming flow of broken English. I think it was the broken English that was her undoing, for she had the ill-fortune to come into contact with an Englishwoman who prided herself on her Russian and would insist upon showing it off to every Russian she met. Curious to relate, the princess had entirely forgotten her Russian and for some reason her parents had neglected to have her taught French, which is in the ordinary curriculum of well-born Russians. She accounted for this by vague allusions to the misfortunes of her family, who had had so troublous an existence that they appeared to have forgotten to teach her anything but English and this only broken English.

  It was in the height of the spy mania and, not un-naturally, the Russian-speaking Englishwoman jumped to the conclusion that she had to deal with a German spy and, worse, a German spy who had got herself engaged to a British officer and so she came to me. I found that the princess’s hostess was still ready to go bail for her and could not bear that her protégée should undergo the humiliation of being called to Scotland Yard, but I was adamant. Come the lady must. All I could promise was that she should not be dealt with harshly even if she proved to be a spy.

  There walked into my room a beautifully dressed young woman with a full outfit of furs, because, I suppose, a Russian princess would not be Russian without them. Her broken English was certainly not the broken English of a Russian nor of a Frenchwoman nor of a German nor, indeed, of any nation that I had yet encountered. It was the broken English of the English stage; and when I came to look at the lady I was quite sure that whatever knowledge she had acquired of life had been acquired in the lower ranks of the profession.

  I said: ‘English does not come very easily to you. Shall we talk French?’

  ‘I not speak French, sir.’

  ‘But you are a Russian?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And your parents are now in Russia?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And yet you do not speak Russian?’

  ‘No, sir. Russia I leave many years ago.’

  ‘Can you describe to me your Russian home?’

  ‘I leave, sir, when quite a leetle child.’

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘I want you to give me the address of your English mother. You see, in this room one has to drop all play-acting and tell the truth.’

  Her blue eyes filled with tears, but at last, quite faintly, she gave me an address in London and retired to await the arrival of her mother.

  There was no play-acting about this good lady when she arrived. She was a buxom woman of fifty, who earned her living as a housekeeper and had two daughters, one in a good situation and the other a young woman who had become stage-struck at eighteen and would from time to time fill the breasts of her mother and sister with silent indignation by flouncing in upon them in expensive clothes and attempting to patronise them. ‘I always told her that she’d get herself into trouble if she went on as she did and now she has. You just let me see her for five minutes and talk to her.’ I asked whether she had ever heard that her daughter was posing as a Russian. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I remember that one Christmas she got a part as a Russian princess in a pantomime and had to talk broken English.’

  In fact, the war had broken out just in time to give this young lady an opportunity of continuing her part off the stage. She had had a glorious time. I was not present at the interview between mother and daughter, but at the end of it the mother informed me that she had promised to be a good girl and make a clean breast of it all to her patroness and also to the man whom she was about to marry and I heard that he, good fellow that he was, married her all the same.

  Another young woman who appeared in 1915 aimed higher and, being better educated, played her part with more distinction. She was no less, according to the accounts that first came to me, than a daughter of Marie Vetsera, the heroine of the mysterious tragedy in which Prince Rudolf of Austria met his death and of course I need hardly say that Prince Rudolf was her father. She arrived from America and almost immediately became engaged to a British officer. She
was invited to Scotland Yard for an interview. She did not talk broken English, but her accent was neither American nor English and, unlike the Russian princess, she was possessed of some means. Her story was full of mysteries and reticences. She could only tell me, she said, what she had herself been told. Her earliest recollections were of the convent in America in which she had been brought up. The Sisters would only tell her that a foreign-looking stranger had brought her there as a baby and that her parentage was very distinguished indeed. She must not ask too many questions. He had invested for her a large sum of money which she was to enjoy when she came of age. It had been placed in trust with a firm of lawyers who were under an obligation not to tell her whence it came. As the years went on there were hints about the Austrian royal family. Prince Rudolf had been mentioned and then one day the Mother Superior put her arm round her and whispered that her mother had been very unhappy, that the whole thing was very tragic and, again, that she must not ask too many questions. From this she inferred the rest – that she was the daughter of Marie Vetsera, born some time before the tragedy.

  ‘I am sorry to interrupt you,’ I said, ‘but Marie Vetsera never had a daughter. The whole of her history is well known.’

  Her eyes filled with tears and she replied that she could only tell me what she had been told. When she left the convent the lawyer had hinted at the same thing and had paid over to her the money that had been placed in trust.

  ‘The lawyer’s name?’

  ‘Alas, sir, he is dead and the firm no longer exists.’

  She then asked for advice as to how she should manage about her boy, then a child of about six. As far as I could gather, she had for some time been living on her capital, which must in due course come to an end. Asked what she would do when the inevitable happened, she shook her head and hinted that she would put an end to herself.