The Return of the Saboteur: 1

Chapter I.
Die Postkarte

The Autumn Fog had descended upon the trenches and crept into every niche the men had dug to keep themselves dry. It spun along the ground like tormented ghosts and hid the shattered wood to the right, the ruined château to the left, and the enemy trenches a hundred yards in front. It shut down on all sides and locked the men into a small, quiet world of their immediate surroundings. It was the sort of weather in which men were shut up with their thoughts however desperately they wanted to get away from them.
Another winter in the trenches stared them bleakly in the face. Another winter away from home with no restaurants, no cinemas and worst of all, no Christmas. Soon “Hauptman Kälte” would come marching through no-man’s-land, turning mud to iron and barbed wire to fuzzy caterpillars of frost.
But there was one fellow, at least, who was not concerned by such grim reflections.
“What are you making now—another sign?”
“Yes; for the Tommies to shoot at.”
“They won’t be able to see it in the fog.”
“I’ll wait till it clears. This one’s gonna say ‘Boats for Sale!’”
“What? Why?”
“’Cause their trenches are full of water. That’ll make ‘em real mad.”
“Humph! Toffi, you’re daft!”
“No I’m not!”
This rather unique conversation was held between Speindal and Schupberthofhen-Meinenhoven, or “Toffi”, as the other men called him. At this point Krönermann joined in.
“I don’t see why you take the trouble of making signs when the Britishers will just shoot them up in a few minutes.”
“Don’t ever ask him why he does things. He doesn’t know,” said Günter. “Do you?”
“I don’t know; there’s nothing else to do.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Who cares?”
Just then three men came down the trench. Two of them were ambulance men and the third was a wounded soldier they were helping to the rear.
“Hallo, Mïller!” said one of the ambulance men. “You know that fellow you rescued out in no-man’s-land several months ago—the aviator?”
“Yes?” replied Mïller, a young, rather absent-looking fellow.
“Well, he’s mending well. I mentioned that I knew you and he said for me to thank you for him.”
“Good fellow! Will he have to go to prison when he recovers?”
“No; that’s the queerest part of it; he wasn’t American, actually. He’s German. He said he was escaping.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes, funny, isn’t it? I’ve got to get this man to hospital so I can’t tell you any more of the story now. Later, perhaps. Auf Wiedersehn!”
“Extraordinary!” said Mïller, lapsing into English as he had a habit of doing when German wouldn’t express his feelings.
“Well, so you turned out to be a hero instead of a fool this time,” said a corporal who leaned on his rifle nearby. “You were lucky. But I warn you not to crawl out there after every crashed aviator after this. It isn’t worth the risk.”
“I couldn’t help it,” said Mïller. “I felt sorry for the poor fellow.”
“Pooh! Feel sorry for our men, if you like, but where’s the use in feeling sorry for the enemy?”
“He wasn’t the enemy, you see.”
“Now you know that, but for all you knew then he was only a scoundrelly American. I hate Americans. A bunch of sorry democrats, that’s what they are.”
“Oh, by the way,” the corporal went on, a wicked gleam coming into his eye. “I have a postcard I bought on my last leave. Thought you men might like to see it.”
The men crowded around to look.
“What is it?” asked Günter.
“It’s an American aviator our men shot down in July. His father’s some big nob in the States so it got a lot of publicity.”
The card was passed from hand to hand. Mïller had it last.
The picture was of a pilot stretched out on the ground beside the wreck of an American aeroplane. Although the body was badly burned one could see that the fellow had not been very old.
“Where did you get it, Führler?” asked Mïller.
“At a train station between here and Stuttgart.”
Mïller handed the card back to him but Führler ignored it.
“You can keep it; I’ve got several. In fact, I bought that one for you, since you seem to be so taken with unlucky aviators.”
“Danke,” said Mïller, pocketing the picture, albeit somewhat reluctantly. He did not like it. He could not say why.
He moved off down the line and mounted the fire step to look out into no-man’s-land. The fog was blowing in thicker than ever and one could not see more than ten feet in any direction. Everything was very still—for the front lines, anyway. A dull report sounded regularly from the enemy guns up the line, but most of the shells seemed to be falling somewhere to their right. One might hear in the pauses the drip of condensation on the wire entanglements. Mïller fingered the bolt of his rifle and stared ahead into the white bank. The photograph of the dead aviator rose before his imagination. He shook his head and screwed his eyes shut, and tried to think of something else, but still his thoughts came back to it. Why had they taken that photograph anyway? Poor fellow. How would his mother feel if he were lying smashed beside an aeroplane and people sold pictures of it?
The sound of a gramophone broke into his thoughts. Immediately several voices further down the line rose in protest.
“Oh, you’re not going to play that song again, are you?”
“I like it,” said Toffi, who was the one who had turned it on.
“Turn it off!”
“Why?”
The song in question was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”. Just who Alexander was or what bearing his ragtime band had on anything I don’t know any more than I know how Toffi had acquired a recording of the song in such a culturally cognisant nation as Germany. Wherever he had gotten it, it had soon become his favourite song and the other men had by now heard it so often that most of them had learned it by heart whether they liked it or not.
“It’s stupid!” continued the protests.
“It’s American, which amounts to the same thing,” said Günter.
“What do the words mean, anyhow?” asked Krönermann.
“Nothing,” said Mïller, who had learned English at school. “They don’t really make sense.”
“That’s why Toffi likes the song so much,” said Führler disagreeably.
“No it’s not,” said Toffi.
“Turn it off,” said Speindal. “If any of the other companies heard us listening to that trash we’d be the laughing-stock of the whole brigade.”
“But—”
“Turn it off!” said Führler and even Toffi didn’t dare argue further. Führler was not one to be trifled with.
“What should we listen to, then?”
“Do we have to listen to anything?”
“I want to,” said Toffi.
They were interrupted by a sudden squall from behind a stack of ammunition.
“Hullo, Szpotzii’s got a rat! Well done!” and the platoon terrier emerged, wrestling a rat half his own size. The soldiers called them “corpse rats” and Mïller still felt a thrill of disgust whenever he saw their sleek, pulpy bodies long after the other men had gotten used to them. Any kind of diversion (besides Toffi’s music) was welcome to the men in the dreary state they were in and a group of spectators gathered around to see the sport.
“Get him! Bekommen sie ihn!” “Hurrah!” “That’s it!” “Now for his throat!” “Come on, Szpotzii!” The little dog did his best, but in the end Günter had to finish the rat off with his rifle butt.
“Now we throw him way out into no-man’s-land to warn all his friends not to bother our platoon,” said Günter, suiting action to word.
“I threw three dead ones out yesterday,” said Krönermann. “They don’t seem to take warnings.”
“They are like the English,” said Speindal.
Toffi had gone back to his sign painting.
“You’ll be able to put that up soon, Dummkopf,” said Führler. “The fog’s lifting.”
Mïller looked out over the parapet. The white bank was becoming translucent and an occasional sniper’s bullet, from which they had been relatively safe in the fog, cracked over their heads from time to time.
“There’s a sniper in that building to the left,” observed Führler. Mïller glanced in that direction. Every once in a while he could discern a flash of light in one of the windows of the ruined structure and a bullet would fly over.
“He’s got his sights on us,” said Krönermann.
Führler calmly put his rifle to his shoulder and, sighting carefully, fired a shot. They waited for a moment and then another flash and a bullet in the concrete parapet behind them informed the men that the shot had been wasted.
“You missed him,” said Speindal.
“Flüche!” exclaimed Führler in frustration. “If only I had a scope!”
“There, it’s all finished,” said Toffi, straightening up.
“Toffi, get down!” cried Mïller, clapping his hand over Toffi’s helmet and thrusting his head below the level of the parapet. The next instant he was thrown against the side of the trench.
“What happened?” asked Toffi, who had escaped harm.
“You idiot, you stuck your head up,” said Krönermann. “Are you hurt badly, Mïller?”
Mïller looked down. His sleeve was covered in blood.

The Compulsion of the Pen

writer: n. One who commits his thoughts, ideas, &c., to writing. (Webster’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary) synonyms: author, novelist, inditer, belletrist, scrivener, amanuensis

“Are you a serious writer?”

Allow me to define what a serious writer is exactly. He is someone who has fallen prey to the dreaded and most uncomfortable disease known as—well, I don’t know exactly what it is known as; I don’t believe it has ever been clinically diagnosed. I shall give it the name invented by my learned colleague—graphomania.

Although graphomania sometimes manifests itself in physical symptoms (such as wearing a pencil behind one’s ear, a blank, far-off look, or a callous on the last knuckle of the middle finger of the right hand), it affects most directly the mental processes. One who has the disease is not quite rational. He sees in a blank sheet of paper an un-scaled Everest; feels himself, with a good pen in his fingers, an armed warrior; and hears in the grind of a pencil sharpener a clarion call to arms. His writing is his world,and he does not function very well outside of it.

Merely writing does not make a person a victim to the disease, although it may predispose to it. There are those who can putter among the inkpots with impunity. When you ask such people why they write, they may reply with utopian ideas of fame, fortune, or influence, while other less ambitious and perhaps more sincere admirers of the art say they write for fun. If someone ever tells you he writes for Fun, you will know he is safe. No one who has graphomania writes merely for Fun. Should you ask a graphomaniac why he writes he will likely give you rather a puzzled look and you will see that he had not considered the why as yet. He writes because he must, because he can’t help it, and even when it is not Fun, which it very often isn’t.

The disease is, in fact, very troublesome to the person who is afflicted by it. Writing seems a simple enough task to the uninitiated, but when once it is entered upon, its innocent exterior proves to be misleading in the extreme. It isn’t easy at all to translate one’s thoughts into a visible form; it is a hard and thankless task and is only learnt well by much experience. Almost every writer begins his career with a disproportionate amount of failure.

Graphomania not only takes much of a person’s useful time by forcing him to spend it in useless writing, it deprives him of many ordinary pleasures as well. Graphomaniacs are often voracious readers at some point in their lives. However, they will generally begin to find that they cannot enjoy books like they once used to. If it is a poorly written book that the sufferer is reading he will drive himself distracted by repeatedly exclaiming at different parts of the story, “Not that way; that’s not how it should happen! Make him do it this way!” while the story plods inexorably on, without paying the least attention to his excellent suggestions. If he is listening to the book being read aloud he will ruin the story and make all the other listeners very angry with him by matter-of-factly telling them which characters will get married, which characters will die, and which one is the carefully-disguised villain, all before the first chapter is halfway finished. The fact that he is always right does nothing to lessen the offence.

On the other hand, if he is reading a book by a very good writer (say, Robert Louis Stevenson or Agatha Christie), he will enjoy every bit of it but be driven to tears and wild despair by the firm conviction that he will never be able to write so well as that, never!

I don’t mean to say that the disease is entirely without its good side. Some diseases impair the normal functions of the mind, while compensating for this by giving extraordinarily sharp perception in unusual directions. Graphomania works in this way by generally giving the person who has it only a very vague perception of what is going on around him while what is taking place in his mind absorbs the greater part of his thought. However, on occasion he will be more aware of outward circumstances than other people are. He may see great significance in an occurrence that no one else notices, and be heard to mutter, “I should put that in a story sometime.”

In the first stages, a person infected with graphomania begins to feel that everything is not quite right with the world. He is vaguely dissatisfied with The Way Things Are and rather wishes they would be some other way—rather like they are, for instance, in his favourite novel. For him, the universe does not measure up. This often drives him, if not to suicide, to the next stage of the disease which is trying to change all that in his mind at least by making up stories of his own where everything is as he would like it to be.

The disease might very well stop here, but it doesn’t. Or not generally, anyway. This is all owing to, and can be blamed on, the utter un-imaginativeness of society in general and the graphomaniac’s personal chums in particular. When he tries to talk with them about The Way He Would Like Things to Be they aren’t interested because they are content, more or less, with The Way Things Are.

At this point, he either becomes a hermit in some secluded cave somewhere, or he goes on to the next stage which is trying to put his ideas out on paper. His first attempts in this direction often meet with failure, but the nature of the disease is such that it will not allow this to deter him, but will drive him on even against his will.

By this time the infected person’s friends and family will begin to notice that he is different. He spends more time writing than can really be good for him and his other work begins to suffer. He will often smile over nothing in particular and acquires a disconcerting habit of laughing suddenly when there is nothing visible to laugh at. Some days however he will be in the depths of despair over nothing more dreadful than that he is “stuck” in one of his stories and can’t figure out what to make happen next. Moreover, he appears to know a lot of people that no one else has ever heard of and when asked by the confused observer whom he is talking about he will reply carelessly, “Oh, he’s a character in one of my stories, that’s all.”

They try to be understanding—after all, artists are supposed to be rather, well, odd, you know. He’s only absent-minded because he is working on some colossal work that will one day be on the New York Times’s best-sellers list. One mustn’t mind a little peculiarity, but try to understand him. So they will try to appear interested in his book, ask him what it is about, and generously offer to read it when it is finished. They are often surprised to find him far more lacking in confidence than they themselves, as he explains in embarrassment that it isn’t finished yet, that it may never be finished, and that it probably won’t be worth reading when it is.

“Why ever spend all that time writing it, then?” they think, and sometimes if not very polite, ask. He can’t give a satisfactory answer. “It’s all on account of my graphomania, you know; dreadfully bad this season,” doesn’t convince them. “I don’t think there really is such a disease—at least I’ve never heard of it,” they say; “it’s all in your head.” This information is extraneous because the victim of the disease already knows that it is all in his head and that he can’t get rid of it no matter how hard he tries.

Oh yes, he will have tried to give it all up. Time and again he will shake himself and say, “Now you know this is all a waste of time. You’ve never written anything worth-while and likely you never will. Chuck it all and try to interest yourself in sports or something people will understand.”

He may get on in this resolve for some time—several days perhaps. Then, just when he isn’t expecting it, he will find himself thinking about one of his stories, or something will remind him of one of his characters, and he will think, “I never did figure out what to make happen in that part, you know.” Then he will remember that he is through with all that and think resolutely about something else, but the world will seem a lustreless place all at once. It is then that he realises that he will never be through with it—that he will never be able to give it all up. Writing has become a part of him and with all its disadvantages he loves it and wouldn’t part with it for anything.

Lest I unduly alarm the reader, let me hasten to add that people with graphomania have been known to lead, I cannot say a normal, but more or less a comfortable existence (Victor Hugo lived to be eighty-three).

* * *

Knight Rupert: VI

Chapter VI.

O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
-Wordsworth

SOPHIA SAT DOWN upon the sunny bank outside the wall to catch her breath. All around her were noises of birds and insects and smells of fresh grass and warm earth and everything was bright and clear. There was no gloominess of stone walls around her, nor the strange dark feeling of the castle. She was as free as a bird.
She was not going to run away from the castle altogether, for it was her home and she had nowhere else to go, but she thought if she kept the hidden door a great secret, she might go out and in whenever she pleased and she did not have to be a prisoner any longer. She caught hold of some vines that had grown to the outside of the stone door and pulled until it came back into place. For some reason—perhaps it was the mechanism inside the wall on which it turned—the door closed much easier than it opened.
Sophia dusted her hands together and looked about her. She was on the north side of the castle, and all around her were the beautiful scenes she had seen from her window, only now they were much closer and far more real looking. Before her was the meadow, looking much wider than it had seemed when she had seen it from inside the castle. To her left was the white road down which she had come in the cart the first night, although of course she had not seen it then because she had been asleep. On the right was the river, but it was hidden by a steep, rocky bank and all Sophia saw was an empty place just beyond the castle. Across the meadow straight ahead of her was the forest.
She skipped down the bank and then with a little leap, began to run through the grass towards the trees. A breeze came briskly up from the river and shook the grass around her and whipped her petticoat about her legs. It was a wonderful, exciting feeling to be running with the warm, free wind and she ran even faster, as if at any moment she might leave the ground and soar up into the air.
She did not stop until she came to the borders of the forest. The air grew cooler as she came into the shade of the trees. It was early summer and the leaves were already so thick at the tops of the trees that only a little sunlight came through. In the bright patches where the sunshine managed to reach the ground, the grass grew rich and green, quite unlike it grows anywhere else but in the shade of the forest. Here and there were sunken hollows filled with ferns like pools full of green water. Everywhere else the ground was covered with a rich black mould out of which sprung moss and toadstools.
It was the most beautiful forest Sophia had ever seen, full of birds and little forest creatures. Sometimes she saw deer grazing in the grassy parts that looked up when they heard her coming and then went bounding off with their splendid heads held high. Once a flock of large, green-winged birds started up from a clump of bushes and flew off with a great beating of wings.
Almost at once Sophia came across a path which the woodcutters had made. It was very old, for people had cut wood in that forest for years and years and the path had been there as long as the woodcutters had. It was a queer little path, always twisting and winding about and never going directly anywhere. Sophia followed it as it led deeper into the forest.
She passed many signs of the woodcutters. Quite often she found places where trees had been cut down or where an old fallen log had been sawed to pieces, the sawdust still lying thickly on the ground. But for all this, not a single person did she see. The forest was quiet and deserted.
The track ran on and on, twisting around great trees and boulders and never looking as if it were going to lead back out of the wood. The trees grew thickly all along the path—mostly summer-green ones, but a few firs as well. They seemed to look at Sophia and whisper about her and shake their heads. The forest was full of warm day-time sounds of leaves rustling and birds calling. Gently and rhythmically the wind swished through the tops of the trees like waves washing the shore.
Presently Sophia heard ahead of her the sound of rushing water and soon afterwards she came upon the brook which she had seen from her tower window coming out between the two hills. It was a large brook, and in places the water would have been up to Sophia’s waist, but in others it was quite shallow and full of stepping stones. The path ran along its bank until it crossed over it on a wide fallen log.
The top of the log bridge was worn smooth and flat from many crossings, and it made a very good bridge, except that it had no handrail. It crossed the stream at a narrow place where the water was deep and flowed like a mill-race. Sophia stepped lightly onto the log and stopped for a moment in the middle to drop a pebble into the rushing white water below.
Soon after this the path became wider and so did the brook and the trees began to grow smaller and further apart and all at once Sophia came out on the banks of the great river. The ground was very level here—so level that it flooded every spring when the river rose. Meadow flowers grew thickly in the high grass and Sophia gathered an armful and plaited a crown for her hair, as she had done in the meadows in England when she had played at being the fairy queen. This place was very different from England, Sophia thought. There were no hedges or stone fences and no sheep or cows grazing, although it was good land for grazing. It all belonged to the Count of Ratavaria and he didn’t keep sheep or cows.
The path went on and Sophia followed it until it ran out onto a wide, flat rock which jutted out into the river’s current. She went all the way to the end of the great rock and stood looking at the river all around her. She had never been so close to it before, and its soft water-music sounded strange and beautiful. Up and down, as far as she could see, the water stretched like a wide, smooth lake.
Far off on the other bank she could see the pine woods. They looked much deeper and blacker than the shady forest she had just come out of and they didn’t look like a very pleasant place at all. Sophia wondered what was hidden in their shadows. A stiff wind came down the river and ruffled the smooth water and whipped Sophia’s hair about her face, and from a willow nearby a little bird with a red throat sang out.
There was not a house to be seen, except off to the south, far away and looking very small, Ratavaria Castle. Sophia had not seen the castle from any distance before and she found that it looked very pretty—like the castle from her storybook in the picture of St. George. It did not seem so frightening the way she saw it now from outside its walls.
She went back at last along the woodcutter’s track into the forest again. She had come such a long way that it was now very late in the afternoon and the sunlight was beginning to turn to the red-gold of early evening. The birds were starting to sing their evening songs and to think about bed and Sophia remembered that she had not had any dinner and found that the fresh air had made her very hungry. She hurried, hoping that no one had missed her at the castle.
She was nearly to the place where she had first entered the wood when suddenly she stopped and looked down. She had stopped in the middle of a wide patch of grass, and round the edge of it was a fairy ring of red-capped mushrooms. They were all different sizes and all were in a neat line running in a complete circle round the place where Sophia was standing.
It was the roundest fairy ring she had ever seen and it seemed as if each mushroom had been planted there on purpose, which was impossible, of course, because one doesn’t plant a mushroom as one would a cabbage or a turnip. The place was dim and shady and for a moment Sophia almost felt as if she had somehow gotten back into England, this place was like so many of the places around her old home. She got down upon her hands and knees to see if the fairies had left prints where they had danced, but she saw nothing but the marks her own shoes had made.
The wind whispered in the tops of the trees and the grass around Sophia shivered. She knelt there in the middle of the fairy ring, wondering if the fairies in that country were the same sort as the ones in England and if they had a king and queen as well. Her father would have known, she was sure. He had always known everything. Perhaps if he were there now, he could have told her the secret of Ratavaria Castle and why it was she was kept there.
How she wished he were there! How she wished she were back in the countryside in England, walking with him through the fields of corn or climbing the low green hills. She wanted a large strong hand to put hers into and strong arms to carry her when she grew tired. She didn’t want to be alone anymore.
‘Papa is in heaven,’ she said to herself, ‘so why must I keep missing him so? I shall not see him for ever so long.’
The forest around her was silent—so silent! All afternoon she had wandered by herself and had seen not a living soul, except for the wild animals. The world was so great and wide and empty.
‘There is no one,’ said Sophia aloud, and her voice sounded small and lost in the loneliness.
‘Papa!’ she cried with a little gasp, ‘oh, Papa!’
And she began to cry.
She lay face downwards in the grass and cried with the hot tears running into the cool black mould. Crying does no good but it feels as if it might sometimes. Sophia did not cry often and she had not cried once since coming from England, but she couldn’t help it now and there was no one to see her.
How long she lay there she didn’t know. All at once she heard a noise louder than the breeze blowing through the grass and the birch leaves and coming closer. She dried her eyes on her sleeve and getting upon her knees she looked toward the sound.
It was a man on horseback riding, not on the road, but through the woods. He was coming straight towards the place where Sophia was lying and she quickly got to her feet and took shelter behind a tangle of wild roses. She watched him as he rode into the little clearing, dismounted, and tied his horse to a branch. Then he stepped to the edge of the forest, which was only a few yards off, and, putting a pair of field glasses to his eyes, surveyed the castle.
So many strange things had happened already that all this scarcely surprised Sophia—she was only curious. Who was the man and why did he want to spy on the castle? He looked like a perfectly ordinary man, middle-aged with brown hair and a full brown moustache. He wore riding boots and a riding jacket and carried a sabre and pistol on his belt.
He stood gazing for several minutes through his field glasses until suddenly from the castle a white handkerchief fluttered in one window for an instant and then disappeared.
The man seemed satisfied, for he put away his field glasses, mounted his horse, and rode away through the forest again. Sophia watched him, wondering, until he disappeared between the trees.
Of a sudden the sunlight grew dim and the wind rose and began to blow leaves and seed-pods from the poplars about. Sophia looked up at the sky and saw great, dark clouds coming from the east over the pine woods. It looked like a very bad storm and the wind was already twisting the trees about with a great rushing and creaking. Sophia had grown used to rain in England, but she had never been in a place where it stormed quite so often as here. She got to her feet and hurried towards the castle.
She ran as fast as she could, but when she was still on the other side of the meadow the storm began in earnest and great flashes of lightning followed frenzied bursts of rain. She was getting wet, but that did not trouble her so much as the thought that she might be missed inside the castle. The grass was wet and so slippery that it was hard to run on, and everything grew darker and harder to see except when there was lightning. Twice Sophia thought she heard hoof-beats somewhere behind her but, looking back, she saw nothing but the grey rain-sheets blowing across the meadow.
She reached the tower and leaned hard against the wall, but she was so out-of-breath that she could not make the hidden door move. Again and again she tried but it would not budge and she began to grow desperate. What if she could not get it open? They would find her outside the castle—they would discover the secret door—they would lock it up and she would never be able to get out again!
The rain poured down yet more furiously and the thunder-flashes came nearer and nearer. Desperately Sophia put her hands on the wall and pushed with all her might.
Suddenly, two arms appeared on either side of her, two hands appeared above her own, and someone behind Sophia pushed with all his might—
And the door swung open.

* * *