The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

  I put the message in my hair and slipped down the darkened stairs, then into the silent streets. My hospital night-pass allowed me perfect freedom, but I shrank away into the shadows as the gruff voices of a patrol and the clink of metal reached me from the other side of the square. It was very dark, but presently I arrived at the silent alleyway which harboured the mysterious No. 63. At the fifth window on the left-hand side I tapped according to the signal, once—a pause—then a rapid double knock. The frame slid up without a sound, the mysterious hand appeared, and into it I pushed my precious notes, then, as though the Evil One himself was after me, I sped away from the alley.

  A few mornings later I saw Canteen Ma in the Grande Place. She was, as usual, surrounded by laughing soldiers, giving a joke and taking some good-humoured chaff as she sold the fruit and vegetables from her cart. She had been named Canteen Ma since the day the Roulers canteen sergeant-major had taken the whole of his supplies from her. In her he had discovered a shrewd, clever spy of indomitable courage, and one who in the capacity of vegetable-hawker covered a wide and vital area. Besides the incredibly important items of news she managed to pick up, she had organized a gang of desperate runners who, fearing nothing, kept up an uninterrupted line of communication with the Dutch frontier. It was through this heroic woman I received my instructions from British Intelligence.

  As her shrewd eyes met mine they glittered, and she made a sign to me indicating she wanted to speak. I contrived to move close to her, and she whispered: “Martha, there is something in the air…too much talk of sweeping victory amongst the men for things to be normal….Yet nobody seems to know anything.”

  She brushed a few grinning soldiers away from her cart, then turned to me again and asked:

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “No,” I returned, “but I have heard the same talk amongst the officers billeted with us.”

  “We must keep our eyes and ears open, Martha,” she enjoined anxiously as she moved away.

  That same evening Stephan supplied another piece of the puzzle. He said that Reichmann had started sending in weather reports to Brigade twice a day. The variations of the wind were graphed. The district comprised the Roulers-Menin and Poelcappelle-Passchendaele Roads. Red Carl had several times been up in an aeroplane taking observations, and twice in an observation balloon on the Menin Road. I came to the conclusion that Hauptmann Reichmann might have some papers in his room which would perhaps supply a clue. Accordingly I asked my mother to help make beds with the maids and to keep her eyes open. She quickly told me that Reichmann filed duplicate copies of strange graphs on his table, and that he was also keeping a sort of log of the weather, and wind movements.

  I determined then to search the room myself.

  Next morning I sent to the hospital saying I was unwell, and when I saw Red Carl, Hauptmann Reichmann, and Leutnant Otto depart, I crept from my room into Reichmann’s and examined the documents on his table. Sure enough, there was the weather log, along with its movements and the wind graphs; but there was nothing else. I also tried the papers of Red Carl, but there again I found nothing of any interest, only strange calculations and figures of which I could not make head nor tail. I left the room as mystified as I went in. But again that night I informed the British by the hand of “63,” insisting that something mysterious was afoot.

  A few days later Canteen Ma called, and in the small pin-cushion she left which contained my messages I found this screed in code:

  Do not worry about weather reports. Troop movements, designation of units, and destination of trains, etc., etc., of more value.

  But for all that I did continue to worry. And that night I found myself going to bed even more puzzled.

  Red Carl was sitting in a corner of the smoky lounge by himself. He looked slightly the worse for drink, and appeared to want someone to talk to. He beckoned to me, so I crossed and stood awhile by his side.

  “Have you ever been to Germany, Fräulein?” he asked, offering me a cigarette and lighting it with a rather shaky hand.

  “No, Herr,” I replied, perhaps a little too shortly.

  “You do not like the Germans—hein?”

  “Well, you could not expect us exactly to love them after what we have suffered, and after the shambles they have made of our country, could you, Herr Hauptmann?”

  “Ach! Never mind, Fräulein…you will like us better when you understand us…and even if we don’t win the war soon we shall have pressed so far into France that Roulers will hardly know a German soldier except for a patrol now and then. Nach Paris! Nach Calais!” He banged his empty glass so hard I was surprised it did not break in his hand. Then ensued a little pause while he sat dreaming heroically in a mirage of alcoholic glory.

  “You Germans are good at that story,” I taunted quietly. “I could tell you the names of several officers who used the same war-cry last year. Nach Paris! Nach Calais! is as great a dream as ever.”

  “Ach, you may think so, Fräulein; you may all think we are slow, but I know….” And in his deep way he chuckled. “And yet it’s all funny, mein Fräulein…damned funny! Here I am…Carl Sturmo, a despised chemist, and a man whom these snobs of generals, with their choker collars, their eyeglasses and brass hats, would in the old days have regarded with as much respect as they did the cobble-stones under their feet, but who is now going to play a bigger hand in winning the mightiest war the world has ever seen than they themselves, for all their swaggering militarism.”

  He continued chuckling to himself drunkenly, until some friends came up to him, when I left him. But all the evening he kept them laughing with a continual flow of tipsy bragging, and through my mind the news for some unaccountable reason kept drumming.

  Carl, the chemist….Red Carl, a chemist, a disgruntled officer with no sort of recognition…a braggart who boasted in his cups of sweeping victory by some mysterious means. He was so cocksure, I told myself, there must be a grain of sense among all the chaff. But where? Where was it? I went to bed racking my brains seeking an answer to the riddle.

  The following day I managed to find an opportunity to tell both Stephan and Alphonse what Carl had said the night before. Alphonse thought that Carl had invented some new type of artillery, and that the calculations and wind graphs might have something to do with accurate firing.

  Stephan suggested that if there was to be a great advance in that area, as was apparently the case, the authorities might be considering Roulers as a Zeppelin base, as there was no doubt the town and the environs were ideally situated for such a base.

  I did not feel satisfied with either of these suppositions, but decided to mention both in my next message.

  Alphonse had another piece of news for me. He said he had been told by a man in charge of the dump of metal cylinders that they contained chlorine, but still he did not know what use was to be made of them. I was not, as a matter of fact, inclined to pay much attention to the cylinders. On the way home, however, the analogy between chemist and chlorine suddenly struck me. Could Red Carl have anything to do with those cylinders? Red Carl had said strange things…and it was my duty to report everything that came under my notice. Perhaps it all seemed a little far-fetched trying to associate Red Carl and Hauptmann Reichmann with swabs, wind graphs, and chlorine, but I risked a snub from Intelligence. I sent over everything, giving my reasons and suggestions. It was my job to report. It was the job of British Intelligence to unravel the puzzle from the clues sent to them, and I contented myself with this thought.

  Three days later back came the message:

  Recent reports from you of a highly speculative nature. Repeat, troop movements, designation of units, trains, and dumps, etc., etc., of more value.

  So they evidently thought me an imaginative girl who conjured molehills into mountains!

  I was not discouraged. The weather-watchers continued to submit their reports day after day,
and I made one new discovery. I talked to the gaunt Reichmann one evening and drew him on to speak of his life in pre-war days and of his home. He had been a professor of a big university. It was not difficult to guess what he had been a professor of when one remembered his association with Carl and, a fact which I subsequently noticed, that he received regularly periodicals of a scientific character by home mail.

  The mysterious rumour of “victory before summer” seemed to have become an obsession among the Germans. The inspired Press helped matters on, and grotesque, ribald and indecent cartoons depicting Allied soldiers in all kinds of degrading situations flooded every journal.

  One morning in April I reached the hospital to find it full of bustle. All possible cases that could be moved were to be evacuated at once. A civilian medical station was to be opened in the town itself so as to relieve the hospital of this branch of work, which was sometimes considerable.

  “Ah, Fräulein,” greeted the Oberartz in his genial voice, “I think we are in for a big advance. All stations this side of Ghent have been warned to evacuate all wounded immediately.”

  Repressing my burning interest, I remained silent, expecting to hear some further information and perhaps the key to the mystery; but to my disappointment he passed on without another word.

  This was important news in any case.

  Evacuation of hospitals close to the Front meant attack!

  Empty hospitals to receive the broken wretches who would return. That night I got my urgent report away by No. 63. Then anxiously I waited and watched for the flood of reinforcements. But day followed day, and no further troops arrived. The 26th and 27th Corps of the Würtemberg Army held the sector, front and reserve lines.

  The Army carried out its reliefs as usual; not an extra gun or an extra soldier passed up the line. We were all completely mystified. In talking the conundrum over with Alphonse, he thought perhaps it might mean a feint at this part of the salient to cover some determined attack at another point. I had grave misgivings, and I could only comfort myself with the thought that we had done everything possible. I had faithfully recorded every clue that had come under my notice.

  Then a short week later the solution fell with a blinding crash. The 22nd of April, 1915, I well remember, was a beautiful day with gentle spring breezes bringing promise of early summer—but from the slopes of the Passchendaele ridges another kind of breeze—a devil’s wind—had been slowly creeping over No Man’s Land enveloping the Allied trenches about Poelcappelle and Langemarck in a mysterious haze of death.

  Soon after dawn on the 23rd I received an urgent message from the hospital to be in attendance immediately. I hurried there, and almost at once the stream of ambulances with the unfortunate prisoners began to arrive. At first scores, then later hundreds, of broken men, gasping, screaming, choking. The hospital became packed with French and British soldiers beating and fighting the air for breath. Dozens of men died like flies under our eyes, their clothes and uniforms rent to ribbons in their agony, their faces a horrible sickly green contorted out of all human shape. Tunics and brass buttons turned a greyish green, and a pungent, suffocating smell hung around them. When no more room could be found along the hospital corridors, the stretcher-bearers laid the unfortunate gasping pieces of humanity out on the footpaths on the open streets surrounding the building.

  “What is it?…What is it?” kept pounding in my brain. “What devil’s work is this?”—as I worked amid that hellish scene striving to soothe and quieten the stricken. And still the ambulances came packed with tortured prisoners…more and more forms struggled and tossed in the roadway.

  My heart bleeding with pity, I bent over a young British soldier, a Canadian, and whispered:

  “What has happened, brother?”

  He looked up with inflamed, swollen eyes almost bursting from their sockets; but he could not speak, only painfully shake his head as he tried to prop himself up in my arms, and then, coughing and spitting and choking, he fell back dead.

  As the number of prisoners grew, the civilian population had gathered at both ends of the street. A section of German soldiers was trying to keep them back with the butts of their rifles…when suddenly a voice from the crowd cried: “Vive la France!…Vive l’Angleterre!”

  That is a moment that will live for ever in my memory, for the cry burst from every throat until it swelled to a mad, indignant roar. Even the poor gassed prisoners tried to sit up and join in the cry: “Vive la France! Vive l’Angleterre!” as a last defiant battle-cry to their implacable foes.

  Blinded with tears, the civilians pressed ever forward and showered useless cigarettes, bread, and chocolate on the stricken soldiers. God only knows where it came from, for all were fearfully short and hungry in those days. The savage crowd was getting out of hand, and several soldiers had been roughly treated, when suddenly there came the clatter of hooves and a posse of mounted gendarmes trotted rapidly up the road. They put their horses into the crowd and started to force them away.

  …The riddle of the wind graphs had been answered….It is for the historian to tell how the Allied line was shattered and bent, how near the Germans were to a crushing victory, but how the comrades of those stricken wretches who could still cry out “Vive la France! Vive l’Angleterre!” withstood the shock and desperately won their way back through a hell of carnage.

  Nor will the historian forget those heroic victims who died under the first gas attack.

  THE LOATHLY OPPOSITE

  JOHN BUCHAN

  JOHN BUCHAN, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (1875–1940) was a Scottish diplomat, journalist, publisher, and author of historical works and espionage and adventure fiction, some of which features his famous hero Richard Hannay and his activities for British Intelligence. More than half of his literary output was nonfiction, including his first book, a biography titled Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895), published when he was only twenty years old. But Buchan is most remembered today for his thrillers, particularly those involving Hannay.

  Modeled after one of Buchan’s military idols, General Edmund “Tiny” Ironside, Hannay’s first adventure was the classic The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), set just before the outbreak of World War I. The success of this novel spurred the sequels Greenmantle (1916), Mr. Standfast (1919), The Three Hostages (1924), and The Island of Sheep (1936).

  The enduring popularity of The 39 Steps is partially due to the outstanding 1935 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock that starred Robert Donat (as Hannay) and Madeleine Carroll. The motion picture version is considerably different from the novel, which did not have a female character in a major role. It was changed into mostly a chase film with the British police hunting Hannay because they believe he killed an American spy. Foreign spies also want to capture him because they believe he has information that they want to prevent from being delivered to the British government. It was remade in a forgettable 1959 production with Kenneth More and Taina Elg.

  Buchan had a career in journalism as a war correspondent in France in 1915 and was for a time the executive deputy chairman of the Reuters news agency. He also was a partner in the publishing firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., discovering E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913) and other major works. His interest in politics impelled him to run for Parliament and he was elected as a Conservative in a 1927 landslide.

  “The Loathly Opposite” was originally published in the October 1927 issue of The Pall Mall Magazine; its first book publication was in the short story collection The Runagates Club (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1928).

  THE LOATHLY OPPOSITE

  JOHN BUCHAN

  OLIVER PUGH’S STORY

  How loathly opposite I stood

  To his unnatural purpose.

  KING LEAR

  BURMINSTER HAD BEEN to a Guildhall dinner the night before, which had been attended by many—to him—unfamiliar celebrities. He had seen for the first time in
the flesh people whom he had long known by reputation, and he declared that in every case the picture he had formed of them had been cruelly shattered. An eminent poet, he said, had looked like a starting-price bookmaker, and a financier of world-wide fame had been exactly like the music-master at his preparatory school. Wherefore Burminster made the profound deduction that things were never what they seemed.

  “That’s only because you have a feeble imagination,” said Sandy Arbuthnot. “If you had really understood Timson’s poetry you would have realised that it went with close-cropped red hair and a fat body, and you should have known that Macintyre (this was the financier) had the music-and-metaphysics type of mind. That’s why he puzzles the City so. If you understand a man’s work well enough you can guess pretty accurately what he’ll look like. I don’t mean the colour of his eyes and his hair, but the general atmosphere of him.”

  It was Sandy’s agreeable habit to fling an occasional paradox at the table with the view of starting an argument. This time he stirred up Pugh, who had come to the War Office from the Indian Staff Corps. Pugh had been a great figure in Secret Service work in the East, but he did not look the part, for he had the air of a polo-playing cavalry subaltern. The skin was stretched as tight over his cheekbones as over the knuckles of a clenched fist, and was so dark that it had the appearance of beaten bronze. He had black hair, rather beady black eyes, and the hooky nose which in the Celt often goes with that colouring. He was himself a very good refutation of Sandy’s theory.

  “I don’t agree,” Pugh said. “At least not as a general principle. One piece of humanity whose work I studied with the microscope for two aching years upset all my notions when I came to meet it.”

  Then he told us this story.

  * * *