It was a fine morning after the rain, and we wandered about in the streets for a couple of hours. They were busy enough, and the shops looked rich and bright with their Christmas goods, and one big store where I went to buy a pocket-knife was packed with customers. One didn’t see very many young men, and most of the women wore mourning. Uniforms were everywhere, but their wearers generally looked like dug-outs or office fellows. We had a glimpse of the squat building which housed the General Staff and took off our hats to it. Then we stared at the Marineamt, and I wondered what plots were hatching there behind old Tirpitz’s whiskers. The capital gave one an impression of ugly cleanness and a sort of dreary effectiveness. And yet I found it depressing—more depressing than London. I don’t know how to put it, but the whole big concern seemed to have no soul in it, to be like a big factory instead of a city. You won’t make a factory look like a house, though you decorate its front and plant rose-bushes all round it. The place depressed and yet cheered me. It somehow made the German people seem smaller.
At three o’clock the lieutenant took us to a plain white building in a side street with sentries at the door. A young staff officer met us and made us wait for five minutes in an ante-room. Then we were ushered into a big room with a polished floor on which Peter nearly sat down. There was a log fire burning, and seated at a table was a little man in spectacles with his hair brushed back from his brow like a popular violinist. He was the boss, for the lieutenant saluted him and announced our names. Then he disappeared, and the man at the table motioned us to sit down in two chairs before him.
‘Herr Brandt and Herr Pienaar?’ he asked, looking over his glasses.
But it was the other man that caught my eye. He stood with his back to the fire leaning his elbows on the mantelpiece. He was a perfect mountain of a fellow, six and a half feet if he was an inch, with shoulders on him like a shorthorn bull. He was in uniform and the black-and-white ribbon of the Iron Cross showed at a buttonhole. His tunic was all wrinkled and strained as if it could scarcely contain his huge chest, and mighty hands were clasped over his stomach. That man must have had the length of reach of a gorilla. He had a great, lazy, smiling face, with a square cleft chin which stuck out beyond the rest. His brow retreated and the stubby back of his head ran forward to meet it, while his neck below bulged out over his collar. His head was exactly the shape of a pear with the sharp end topmost.
He stared at me with his small bright eyes and I stared back. I had struck something I had been looking for for a long time, and till that moment I wasn’t sure that it existed. Here was the German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against. He was as hideous as a hippopotamus, but effective. Every bristle on his odd head was effective.
The man at the table was speaking. I took him to be a civilian official of sorts, pretty high up from his surroundings, perhaps an Under-Secretary. His Dutch was slow and careful, but good—too good for Peter. He had a paper before him and was asking us questions from it. They did not amount to much, being pretty well a repetition of those Zorn had asked us at the frontier. I answered fluently, for I had all our lies by heart.
Then the man on the hearthrug broke in. ‘I’ll talk to them, Excellency,’ he said in German. ‘You are too academic for those outland swine.’
He began in the Taal, with the thick guttural accent that you get in German South West. ‘You have heard of me,’ he said. ‘I am the Colonel von Stumm who fought the Hereros.’
Peter pricked up his ears. ‘Ja, Baas, you cut off the chief Baviaan’s head and sent it in pickle about the country. I have seen it.’
The big man laughed. ‘You see I am not forgotten,’ he said to his friend, and then to us: ‘So I treat my enemies, and so will Germany treat hers. You, too, if you fail me by a fraction of an inch.’ And he laughed loud again.
There was something horrible in that boisterousness. Peter was watching him from below his eyelids, as I have seen him watch a lion about to charge.
He flung himself on a chair, put his elbows on the table, and thrust his face forward.
‘You have come from a damned muddled show. If I had Maritz in my power I would have him flogged at a wagon’s end. Fools and pig-dogs, they had the game in their hands and they flung it away. We could have raised a fire that would have burned the English into the sea, and for lack of fuel they let it die down. Then they try to fan it when the ashes are cold.’
He rolled a paper pellet and flicked it into the air. ‘That is what I think of your idiot general,’ he said, ‘and of all you Dutch. As slow as a fat vrouw and as greedy as an aasvogel.’
We looked very glum and sullen.
‘A pair of dumb dogs,’ he cried. ‘A thousand Brandenburgers would have won in a fortnight. Seitz hadn’t much to boast of, mostly clerks and farmers and half-castes, and no soldier worth the name to lead them, but it took Botha and Smuts and a dozen generals to hunt him down. But Maritz!’ His scorn came like a gust of wind.
‘Maritz did all the fighting there was,’ said Peter sulkily. ‘At any rate he wasn’t afraid of the sight of the khaki like your lot.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t,’ said the giant in a cooing voice; ‘maybe he had his reasons for that. You Dutchmen have always a feather-bed to fall on. You can always turn traitor. Maritz now calls himself Robinson, and has a pension from his friend Botha.’
‘That,’ said Peter, ‘is a very damned lie.’
‘I asked for information,’ said Stumm with a sudden politeness. ‘But that is all past and done with. Maritz matters no more than your old Cronjes and Krugers. The show is over, and you are looking for safety. For a new master perhaps? But, man, what can you bring? What can you offer? You and your Dutch are lying in the dust with the yoke on your necks. The Pretoria lawyers have talked you round. You see that map,’ and he pointed to a big one on the wall. ‘South Africa is coloured green. Not red for the English, or yellow for the Germans. Some day it will be yellow, but for a little it will be green—the colour of neutrals, of nothings, of boys and young ladies and chicken-hearts.’
I kept wondering what he was playing at.
Then he fixed his eyes on Peter. ‘What do you come here for? The game’s up in your own country. What can you offer us Germans? If we gave you ten million marks and sent you back you could do nothing. Stir up a village row, perhaps, and shoot a policeman. South Africa is counted out in this war. Botha is a cleverish man and has beaten you calves’-heads of rebels. Can you deny it?’
Peter couldn’t. He was terribly honest in some things, and these were for certain his opinions.
‘No,’ he said, ‘that is true, Baas.’
‘Then what in God’s name can you do?’ shouted Stumm.
Peter mumbled some foolishness about nobbling Angola for Germany and starting a revolution among the natives. Stumm flung up his arms and cursed, and the Under-Secretary laughed.
It was high time for me to chip in. I was beginning to see the kind of fellow this Stumm was, and as he talked I thought of my mission, which had got overlaid by my Boer past. It looked as if he might be useful.
‘Let me speak,’ I said. ‘My friend is a great hunter, but he fights better than he talks. He is no politician. You speak truth. South Africa is a closed door for the present, and the key to it is elsewhere. Here in Europe, and in the east,