The Countryman of Kant
Dr. Dunston had a way of introducing a new chap to the school after prayers. The natural instinct of a new chap, of course, is to slide in quietly and slowly settle down, first in his class and then in the school; but old Dunston doesn’t allow this. When a new boy turns up, he jaws over him, and prophesies about him, and says we shall all like him, and so on; and if the new chap’s father is anybody, which he sometimes happens to be, then Dunston lets us know it. The result is that he generally puts everybody off a new chap from the first; but the Fifth and Sixth allow for this. As Travers major pointed out, it’s a rum instinct of human nature to hate anything you are ordered to like, and to scoff at anything you are ordered to admire; so, thanks to Travers, who is frightfully clever in his way, and, in fact, going to Woolwich next term, we always allowed for the Doctor’s great hope about a new boy, and didn’t let it put us off him. As a matter of fact, Dunston often withdrew the praise afterwards, and we noticed, for some queer reason, that if a boy had a celebrated father, he always turned out to be the sort that Dunston hated most; and often and often, when he had to rag or flog that sort of boy, the Doctor fairly wept to think what the boy’s celebrated father would say if he could see him now.
When Jacob Wundt came to Merivale, Dunston just went the limit about him; and it was all the more footling because Wundt grinned, and evidently highly approved of what was said about him. He was the first German the Doctor had ever had for a pupil, I believe—anyway, the first in living memory—so, perhaps, naturally he got a bit above himself about it; and Wundt got a bit above himself, too.
“In Jacob Wundt we embrace one from the Hamlet among nations,” began Dr. Dunston. “In Jacob Wundt we welcome the countryman of Kant and Schiller, the contemporary of Eucken and Harnack! Moreover, Colonel von Wundt, his esteemed parent, occupies a position of some importance in the Fatherland, and has done no small part to perfect the magnificent army that great nation is known to possess.”
Well, we looked at Jacob Wundt, and saw one of the short, fat sort, with puddingy limbs and yellowish hair close-cropped, and a fighting sort of head. He looked straight at you, but he never looked at anybody as though he liked them, and we jolly soon found he didn’t.
As to Dr. Dunston’s German heroes, we only knew one name, and that was Schiller; but as the Fifth and Sixth happened to be swotting “The Robbers” for an exam., and as “The Robbers” happens to be a ripping good thing in its way, we were not disinclined to be friendly to Wundt, as far as the Fifth and Sixth can be friendly to a new boy low in the school.
We soon found that Wundt was very un-English in his ideas, also in his manners and customs. He could talk English well enough to explain what he meant, and we soon found that he thought a jolly sight too well of Germany and a jolly sight too badly of England. At first we thought he had been sent to Merivale to make him larger-minded, so that he could go back and make other Germans more larger-minded, too. But he said it was nothing of the kind. He hadn’t come to England to learn our ways—which were beastly, in his opinion—but to get perfect in our language, which might be useful to him when he became a soldier.
He was very peculiar, and did things I never knew a boy do before. And the most remarkable thing he did was always to be looking on ahead to when he was grown up. Of course, everybody knows they’re going to grow up, and some chaps are even keen about it in a sort of way, but very few worry about it like Wundt did. I said to him once—
“What the dickens are you always wanting time to pass for, so that you may be grown up? I can tell you it isn’t all beer and skittles being a man. At any rate, I’ve often heard my father say he wishes he was young again.”
“He may,” answered Wundt. “You’ve told me your father was an ‘International’ and a ‘Blue,’ and no doubt he’d like to excel at football again. But I despise games, and I’ve got very good reasons for wanting to grow up, which are private.”
Of course, he didn’t put it in such good English as that, but that was the sense of it.
He wasn’t what you call a success generally, for he didn’t like work, except history; and he hated our history, and there wasn’t much doing at Merivale in the matter of German history. But he took to English well, and would always talk it if he could get anybody to listen, which wasn’t often. He said it was all rot about English being a difficult language. He thought it easy and feeble at best. All his people could speak it—in fact, everybody in Germany could, when it suited them to do so.
As for games, he had no use for them; but he was sporting in his own way. His favourite sport consisted in going out of bounds; and he showed very decent strategy in doing so, and gave even Norris and Booth a tip or two. Norris and Booth had made a fair art of trespassing in private game preserves, at the Manor House and other such places round about Merivale. In fact, game preserves were just common or garden Sunday walks to them. But they had been caught by a gamekeeper once and both flogged; and Wundt showed them how a reverse like that need never have happened. He could turn his coat inside out, and do other things of that sort, which were very deceptive even to the trained gamekeeper eye; and, finding a scarecrow in a turnip field, he took it, and as it consisted of trousers and coat and an old billycock hat, Wundt was now in possession of a complete disguise. He hid the things in a secret haunt, that really belonged to Norris and Booth; and they liked him at first and helped him a good deal; but finally they quarrelled with him, because he said England was a swine’s hole, and told them that a time was coming—he hoped not till he grew up—when England would simply be a Protectorate of Germany, whatever that is. So they invited him to fight whichever he liked of them, and when he refused, though just the right weight, they smacked his head and dared him to go to their secret cave again.
When they smacked his head, his eyes glittered and he smiled, but nothing more. He never would fight with fists, because he said only apes and Englishmen fought with Nature’s weapons. But at single-stick he was exceedingly good, and, in fact, better than anybody in the school but Forrester. He much wished we could use swords and slash each other’s faces, as he hoped to do when he became a student in his own country, and he said it was a mean sight to see old Dunston and Brown and Manwaring and Hutchings and the other masters all without a scratch. He said in Germany every self-respecting man of the reigning classes was gashed to the bone; and decent people wouldn’t know a man who wasn’t, because he was sure to be a shopkeeper or some low class thing like that. As to games, he held them in great contempt. It seems people of any class in Germany only play one game and that’s the war game—Kriegspiel, he called it.
I said: “What the deuce is the good of always playing the war game if you’re not going to war?”
And he said: “Ach!”
It was a favourite word of his, and he used it in all sorts of ways with all sorts of expressions. Forbes, who, like me, had a kind of interest in Wundt that almost amounted to friendship, asked him if women played the war game, and he said he didn’t know what they played except the piano. All women were worms, in his opinion. Of course, he gassed about everything German, and said that, from science and art and music to matchboxes and sausages, his country was first and the rest nowhere. He joined our school cadet corps eagerly, and became an officer of some sort in a month; but he was fearfully pitying about it, and said that English ways of drilling were enough to make a cat laugh, or words to that effect. After he became an officer, he put on fearful side, though as just one of the rank and file he’d been quite humble; and then, when he ordered Saunders, who wasn’t an officer, to do something out of drill hours, and Saunders told him to do it himself, he turned white and dashed at Saunders, who, of course, licked him on the spot and made his nose bleed. He was properly mad about that, and said that if it had happened in Germany, Saunders would have been shot; but as it happened in England, of course Saunders wasn’t. Travers major tried to explain to Wundt that we weren’t real soldiers, and that, when not with the cadet corps, he was no better than anybody else, but he couldn’t see this. He said that in his country if you were once an officer, you were always an officer, and that there was a gulf fixed between the men and their officers; and he called Saunders “cannon fodder” to Batson; and when Batson told Saunders, Saunders made Wundt carry him on his back up to the gym., and there licked him again and made his nose bleed once more, much to his wrath.
On the whole, owing to his ideas, which he wouldn’t keep to himself, Wundt didn’t have too good a time at Merivale. He couldn’t understand us, and said we were slackers and rotters, and that our mercenary army was no good, and that Germany was the greatest country in the world, and we’d live to know it—perhaps sooner than we thought. Travers major tried hard to explain to him how it was, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.
Travers said: “It’s like this. Germany takes herself too seriously and other countries not seriously enough. An Englishman is always saying his own country is going to the dogs, and his Army’s rotten, and his Navy only a lot of old sardine tins that ought to be scrapped, and all that sort of thing. That’s his way, and when you bally Germans hear us talk like that, you go and believe it, and don’t understand it’s our national character to run ourselves down. And you chaps always go to the other extreme and brag about your army, and your guns, and your discipline, and your genius, and all the rest of it; and, of course, we don’t believe you in the least, because gas like that carries its own reward, and nobody in the world could be so much better than all the rest of the world as you think you are. And if you imagine, because we run ourselves down, we would let anybody else dare to run us down, you’re wrong. And if you think our free army is frightened of your slave army, and would mind taking you on, ten to one, on land or sea, you’re also wrong.”
It was a prophecy in a way, though Travers little knew it, for the war broke out next holidays, and when we went back to school, it was in full swing. And so, naturally, was Wundt. He wasn’t going home for the vac. in any case, but stopping at Merivale, and he had done so. He told me the Doctor had talked some piffle to him about the duties of non-combatants; but, as Wundt truly said, every German in the world is a combatant in time of war, and if you can’t do one thing, you must try and do another. In fact, old Dunston little knew the German character, and when he found it out, he was a good bit astonished, not to say hurt.
He, however, discovered it jolly quickly, and I did first of all, because, owing to being rather interested in human nature, I encouraged Wundt in a sort of way, and let him talk to me, and tried to see things from his point of view, as far as I could—that is, without doing anything unsporting to England. The great point was to keep your temper with Wundt; and, of course, most chaps couldn’t, because he was so beastly sure he was right—at least, his nation was. But I didn’t mind all that humbug, and found, by being patient with him, that, under all this flare-up, he was what you might call deadly keen on his blessed Fatherland. He fairly panted with patriotism, and in these moments, quite ignored my feelings.
“Now you know why I wanted to grow up,” he said to me. “I hoped this wouldn’t have happened till I could be in it. But it will be all over and your country a thing of the past before I’m sixteen—worse luck!”
As he was going to be sixteen in October, that was a bit hopeful of Wundt. His father or somebody had stuffed him up that Germany was being sat on by the world, and couldn’t stand it much longer; and after the war began, he honestly believed that it was the end of England, and, in a way, he was more decent than ever he’d been before. When we came back at the end of the holidays, Wundt welcomed me in a very queer sort of manner. Somebody had treated me just the same in the past, and, after trying for a week to think who it was, I remembered it was my Uncle Samuel, after I’d lost my mother. Wundt evidently felt sorry for all of us in general and for me in particular as his special friend.
“Of course,” he said, “I can’t pretend I didn’t want it to happen; but you won’t see it is for the good of the world that your country’s got to go down. And so I’m sorry for you, if anything.”
“Do you really think it has got to go down?” I asked Wundt, and he said it wasn’t so much what he thought as what was bound to take place.
“Either England’s got to go, or else Germany,” he said, “and as the Teuton is the world-power for religion and culture and everything that really matters, and also miles strongest, England’s naturally got to go. You’ve had your turn; now it’s ours. The Kaiser speaks, Germany listens and obeys.”
Booth asked him what day the Germans would be at Merivale, and if he’d got a plan of campaign marked out; and he said about the half-term holiday, or earlier, they would come. And Booth said that would mean a short term, anyway, which had its bright side.
Then Tracey, who is awful sarcastic, though it doesn’t generally come off, asked Wundt how he had arrived at this idea, and Wundt said from reading papers that his father had sent him via Holland.
“Your papers are chockful of lies,” he said. “If you want the truth, those of you who can read German can see it in my papers.”
Of course, some of the Sixth could read German, and they borrowed his papers, and were much surprised that Wundt really believed such absolute rot against the evidence of our papers. But he was simply blind, and went so far as to say that he’d sooner believe the pettiest little German rag than all our swaggerest papers, let alone the Merivale Weekly Trumpet, which was fearfully warlike, because the editor had a son who was training for the Front.
But most of all, Wundt hated Punch, and, finding this out, we used to slip the cartoons into his desk, and put them under his pillow, and arrange them elsewhere where he must find them. These made him fairly foam at the mouth, and he said he hoped the first thing the Germans would do, when they got to London, would be to go to Punch and put the men who drew the pictures and made the jokes to the sword.
No doubt it was because they were so jolly true.
The masters were very decent to Wundt, especially Fortescue, who saw how trying it must be for him, living in an enemy’s country; and when Wundt told me in secret that he felt his position was becoming unbearable, and that he had written and asked if he could be exchanged for a prisoner, or something. He said in a gloomy sort of voice: “I may tell you I haven’t wasted my time here, and perhaps some day Doctor Dunston and you chaps will know it to your cost.”
Well, though friendly enough to Wundt, I didn’t much like that, and told my own special chum, Manwaring, what he’d said; and Manwaring told me that in his opinion Wundt ought to be neutralised immediately. But I knew enough of Wundt to feel certain he could never be properly neutralised, because he had told me that once a German always a German, and that he’d rather be a dead German than a living King of England, and that if he had to stop in England for a million years, he’d still be as German as ever, if not more so. And he’d also fairly shaken with pride because he’d read somewhere that the Kaiser had said that he would give any doctor a hundred thousand marks if he would draw every drop of English blood out of his veins. And when he said it, Tracey had answered that if the Kaiser came over to England, there were plenty of doctors who would oblige him for half the money.
But now I thought, without any unkind feeling to Wundt, that I ought to tell Travers major, as head of the school, of his dark threats; and I did; and Travers thanked me and said I was quite right to tell him, because war is war, and you never know.
Of course, if Wundt was going to turn out to be a spy, it wasn’t possible for me to be his friend, and I told him so. And he saw that. He said he was sorry, if anything, to lose my friendship, but he should always do all that he considered right in the service of his country, and he couldn’t let me stand between him and his duty. Which amounted to admitting that he was a spy, or, at any rate, was trying to be one; for, of course, at Merivale a spy was no more use than he would have been at the North Pole. There was simply nothing to spy about, except the photographs of new girls on Brown’s mantelpiece.
Then Travers made a move, and he was sorry to do it; but he was going to be a soldier, just as much as Wundt was, and though he never jawed about Woolwich like Wundt did about Potsdam, yet he was quite as military at heart; and though he didn’t wear the English colours inside his waistcoat lining, like Wundt wore the German colours, as he admitted to me in a friendly moment, yet Travers felt just as keen about England as Wundt did about Germany, and quite as cast down when we heard about Mons as Wundt was when he heard about the retreat on the Marne. He pretended, of course, it was only strategy, but he knew jolly well it wasn’t.
Then Travers major reluctantly decided that, with a spy, certain things must be done. He didn’t like doing them, but they had to be done. And the first thing was to prove it.
“You can only prove a chap is a spy by spying yourself,” Travers said, and well knowing the peculiar skill of Norris and Booth, he told them to keep a careful lookout on Wundt and report anything suspicious; which they did do, because it was work to which they were well suited by their natures, and they soon reported that Wundt went long walks out of bounds, and evidently avoided people as much as possible. Once they surprised him making notes, and when he saw Booth coming, he tore them up.
Then Travers major did a strong thing, and ordered that the box of Wundt should be searched. I happened to know that Wundt was very keen to get a letter off by post, which he said was important, yet hesitated to send for fear of accidents; and that decided Travers.
So it was done, quite openly and without subterfuge, as they say, because we just took the key from Wundt by force and told him we were going to do it, and then did it. He protested very violently, but the protest, as Travers said, was not sustained.
And we found his box contained fearfully incriminating matter, for he had a one-barrelled breech-loading pistol in it, with a box of ammunition, of which we had never heard until that moment, and a complete map on a huge scale of Merivale and the country round. It was a wonderful map, and how he had made it, and nobody ever seen it, was extraordinary. At least, so it seemed, till we remembered that he had been here through the holidays on his own. There were numbers in red ink all over the map, and remarks carefully written in German; and though it is impossible to give you any idea of the map, which was beautifully drawn and about three yards square, if not more, yet I can reproduce the military remarks upon it, which Travers translated into English.
They went like this, and showed in rather a painful way what Wundt really was at heart. And it showed what Germany was, too; and no doubt thousands of other Germans all over the United Kingdom had been doing the same thing, and still are.
After the first shock of being discovered, I honestly believe he was pleased to be seen in his true colours, and gloried in his crime.
These were the notes in cold blood, as you may say:—
1. A wood. Good cover for guns. In the middle is a spring where a gamekeeper’s wife gets water. It might easily be poisoned.
2. A large number of fields. Some have potatoes in them and some have turnips.
3. A village with fifty or sixty houses and about two hundred and thirty-five inhabitants, mostly women and children. Presents no difficulties.
4. A church with a tower. A very good place for wireless or light gun. The pews inside would be good for wounded. Cover for infantry in the churchyard.
5. A stream with one bridge, which might easily be blown up; but it would not be necessary, as the stream is only six feet across, and you could easily walk over it. Too small for pontoons. Small fish in it.
6. A large field which was planted with corn, but is now empty. A good place for aeroplanes to land. Can’t find out where corn is gone.
7. A railroad with one line that goes up to main line. Could easily be destroyed, but might have strategic value.
8. A hill where guns could be placed that would cover advance of troops on Merivale.
9. The school. This stands on rising ground a mile from the hill, No. 8, and could easily be destroyed by field-guns. Or it could easily be used as a hospital. It contains a hundred beds, and the chapel could easily hold a hundred more. There is a garden and a fountain of good water. Also a well in the house. The playing-field is a quarter of a mile off. Tents could easily be put up there for troops.
10. A village schoolroom three hundred yards from the church. It has been turned into a hospital for casualties. There are thirteen or fourteen nurses of the Red Cross waiting for wounded soldiers to arrive. They are amateurs, but have passed some sort of examination. The wounded are said to be coming. This place could easily be shelled from the hill marked No. 8.
11. A forest full of game, and in the middle of it a park and the Manor House, belonging to a man called Sir Neville Carew. He has great wealth, and the mansion could easily be looted, and then either used for officers or burned down.
12. A farm rich in sheep and cattle and chickens, also turkeys. It would present no difficulties.
13. The sea. This is distant ten miles from here, and there is an unfortified bay, which looks deep. We went there for a holiday last summer, and some of us went out in a boat. I pretended to fish and tried to take soundings, but regret to report that I failed. However, the water was quite deep enough for small battle-craft. The cliffs are red and made of hard rock. There are about twenty fishing-boats, and a coastguard station on top; but I saw no wireless. There is a semaphore.
14. A medical doctor’s house with a garage. Would present no difficulties. I saw petrol tins in the yard.
That was all, and Travers at once decided to hand the map and the pistol and cartridges to Doctor Dunston.
“I’m very unwilling to do it,” he said, “but this is a bit too thick altogether. It is pure, unadulterated spying of the most blackguard sort. And if I had anything to do with it, I should fine Wundt every penny he’s got and imprison him for six months and then deport him.”
So he took the evidence of guilt to Dunston, and, of course, Dunston had the day of his life over them. Some of the masters considered it funny, and I believe Peacock, who translated the map for Dunston, thought it was rather fine of Wundt; but old Dunston didn’t think it was funny, or fine, either. He had the whole school in chapel, and hung up the map on a blackboard, and waved the pistol first in one hand and then the other, and talked as only he can talk when he’s fairly roused by a great occasion.
I believe what hurt him most was Wundt saying it would be so jolly easy to knock out Merivale; and to hear Wundt explaining how the school could be shelled fairly made old Dunston get on his hind legs. In his great moments he always quotes Shakespeare, and he did now. He said he wasn’t going to have a serpent sting him twice, anyway. He also said it was enough to make Kant and Goethe turn in their graves; and, that for all he could see, they had expended their genius in vain, so far as their native land was concerned. And then he went on.
“Needless to say, Jacob Wundt, you are technically expelled. I say ‘technically,’ because, until I have communicated with your unfortunate father, it is impossible literally to expel you. To be expelled, a boy must be expelled from somewhere to somewhere, and for the moment there is nowhere that I know of to where you can be expelled. But rest assured that a way shall be found at the earliest opportunity. Indeed, it may be my duty to hand you over to the military authorities, and, should that be the case, I shall not hesitate. For the present you are interned.”
Wundt merely said “Ach!” but he said it in such a fearfully contemptuous tone of voice that the Doctor flogged him then and there; and Travers major thought Wundt ought not to have been flogged by rights, but treated as a prisoner of war, or else shot—he didn’t seem to be sure which.
And as for Wundt, he evidently thought the Belgian atrocities were a fool to his being flogged; and he got so properly wicked that the Doctor had him locked up all night, with nothing but bread and water to eat, and the gardener to guard him.
Then a good many chaps began to be sorry for Wundt; but their sorrow was wasted, for the very next day Dunston heard from his father that Wundt could go home through Holland, with two other German boys who were being looked after by the American Ambassador, or some such pot in London. So he went, and after he had gone, Fortescue asked the Doctor if he might have Wundt’s map, as a psychological curiosity, or some such thing, and Dunston said he had burned the map to cinders, and seemed a good deal pained with Fortescue for wanting to treasure such an outrage.
Wundt promised to write to me when he left; but he never did, and, perhaps, if it’s true that German boys of sixteen go to the Front, he may be there now. And if he is, and if his side wins, and if Wundt is with the Germans when they come to Merivale, I know the first thing he’ll do will be to slay old Dunston, and the second thing he’ll do will be to slay Saunders.
But in the meantime, of course, there is a pretty rosy chance he may get slain himself. Not that he’d mind, if he knew his side was on top and going to conquer. Only, perish the thought, as they say.