A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan John

as soft as other people; he had even a certain amount of consideration paid to him; the risk, so long as he kept his head, was not great, and he had a task which kept his mind working at high tension. There were immense ultimate dangers, no doubt, but they did not come within his immediate vision. What irked him was the necessity of thinking another’s thoughts and living another’s life every minute of his waking hours. He felt the man who had been Adam Melfort slipping away from him, and his place being taken by a hard, glossy, fraudulent being whom he detested.

      Now and then he had narrow escapes which helped his self-respect. Once he was all but caught in the kitchen of a man who had a cobbler’s shop in Freiburg, and who had for some time been closely sought in Westphalia. Adam got out of a back window, and had two days of circuitous tramping in snowy forests before he was certain that he had shaken off pursuit. Twice, when his secret information had proved false, he looked into the barrel of a pistol in the hand of a furious Erster Generalstabsoffizier. More than once he was rigorously examined and every detail of his dossier tested. But he had grown an adept at this business, and each syllable of his bourgeois bewilderment rang true.

      Once, when his soul was sick within him, he laid it bare to Lassom.

      “I have learned nothing,” he told him, “except to be an actor of character parts, and to keep the shutter down on my thoughts.”

      “Not so,” said the other. “You have sharpened your mind to a razor edge, and made steel hawsers of your nerves. You have acquired the patience of God. You have taught yourself to look at life uncoloured by the personal equation. What more would you have?”

      “Tell me, am I honestly and truly serving my country?”

      “You served her nobly in Flanders—that you know as well as I.”

      “But here?”

      Lassom looked grave. “Here you are worth to her—how shall I put it?—more than a division of good troops. More, I think, than an army corps.”

      There came an hour in May ‘18 when Lassom arrived by night and sat on his bed.

      “There are commands for you to leave Germany,” he said. “You have finished your task. This people is breaking, for the last gambler’s throw has failed, and your work now lies elsewhere.”

      “Am I suspected?”

      “Not yet. But suspicion is coming to birth, and in a week, my friend, it might be hard for you to cross the frontier.”

      “And you?”

      “I stay. I have still work to do.”

      “You will be in danger?”

      “Maybe. That is no new thing.”

      “Then I will not leave you.”

      “You must. You add to my danger, if danger there is. I am a man of many shifts, remember. Also it is your duty to obey orders.” He passed to Adam a slip of paper with a few words on it, which Adam read carefully and then burned.

      “Au revoir,” said Lassom gaily. “We will meet some day outside Jerusalem.”

      On the fourth morning after that visit Adam was speaking English to two men in a small hotel in a side street of Geneva. A few hours earlier, in the courtyard of a military prison in a certain Rhineland city, a small man with a pointed beard and a nervous mouth had confronted a firing squad. On that occasion he did not look down, as had been his habit, but faced the rifles with steady, smiling eyes.

      Chapter 9

       Table of Contents

      On the quay at Marseilles, as Adam was embarking in a converted liner, he met Lyson, the brother-officer whom we have seen waiting in the Pall Mall club for the verdict. They said much to each other before they had to separate.

      Lyson, who was on his way to Palestine, was now an acting lieutenant-colonel on the staff. He looked curiously at Adam’s Special List badge, second-lieutenant’s star, and undecorated breast.

      “I suppose your rig is part of the game,” he said, “but it is a little behind the times. What has become of your order ribbons?”

      Adam smiled. “They’re not much use in this show. I have been on enemy soil till a week ago, and I fancy I am going back to it.”

      “Still, you’re among friends for the present. I should have thought too that you’d take your proper rank on your travels.” When Adam looked puzzled, he exclaimed. “Didn’t you know? It was in the Gazette months ago. You have been reinstated in the regiment without any loss of seniority. Also they gave you a brevet.”

      Adam was surprised that the news excited him so little. The regiment and all it stood for seemed a thing very small and far-away. The name on his passport was John More, and he did not trouble to have it altered. But he held his head a little higher among the crowd of officers, mostly very young, who for the next fortnight voyaged in his company over dangerous seas.

      At Salonika after various interviews he was handed over to a Greek doctor, whose profession seemed to embrace many queer duties. In his house he stayed for three days, and during that time he exchanged his khaki uniform for reach-me-down flannels. Also various things were done to his appearance. His face had become very lean, but his skin was puffy and white from a sedentary life, so now it was stained to an even brown. During those days he talked nothing but Turkish, and his host had something to say about his pronunciation. Then one evening, with a brand-new kit-bag, he embarked in a sea-plane and headed eastward. Two days later he was in occupation of a back room in the house of a man called Kuriotes, a Greek fruit-merchant in the town of Kassaba, where the railway line from Smyrna climbs to the Anatolian plateau.

      Here he suffered a complete metamorphosis and acquired a new set of papers. It appeared that he was a Hanoverian by birth, who had for ten years been in business in Stambul—there were all kinds of details about his past life set down very fully in close German typescript. His identity card was signed by the German Ambassador, and stamped by the Turkish Ministry of the Interior. It seemed that he had been commissioned, and had served on the Balkan front as an interpreter, and was now to act in the same capacity with a Turkish division.

      To the back room came a certain Circassian colonel, Aziz by name, who commanded a battalion in the same division, and from him Adam learned many things. One was that the best German troops had been withdrawn from the Palestine front to stop the gaps in Europe, and that many of the guns were following. The latter were being replaced by an odd assortment, including Skoda mountain howitzers which had once been destined for the Hedjaz. The word of Germany was now all in all, and Enver was sulking. But the great Liman was not loved, and the Turks were very weary of the business. “They will send us south,” said the colonel, “but if Allah wills, the war may be over before we reach Aleppo.” He winked, for he had been much in Egypt and had picked up foreign manners.

      Adam joined his division at Afium Karahissar on the great Bagdad railway, and found his task as interpreter a delicate one. The Austrian officers of the Skoda batteries were sullen and puzzled, and perpetually quarrelling with the divisional staff… But bit by bit he discovered other duties. His business now was not that of a spy but of a fomenter of mischief, a begetter of delays—for great things were preparing in the south, where Liman was holding a long line in face of an enemy who showed an ominous quiescence. Adam had been instructed in his rôle and he found many helpers. Aziz, for one, who during the endless delays of the journey was very busy and often absent from camp. Everywhere in the army there seemed to be disaffection, and the countryside was plagued with brigandage and full of deserters and broken men. Purposeless brigandage it seemed to be, for there was a perpetual destruction of bridges and culverts and telegraphs, which can have offered no booty to the destroyers. Adam, as the only German officer in the division, was the recipient of the complaints and curses of many furious Teutonic colleagues. More than once he was placed under arrest, and was only released by the intercession of his corps commander. He was set down by his German