A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan John

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      The two went to Stockholm at different times and by different routes. In that city of the isles Adam found himself in a society which was strongly sympathetic to Germany, and he met many unobtrusive folk in whom it was easy to recognise German agents. Presently with some of them he began to have highly confidential conversations, especially when Lassom arrived, for Lassom seemed to have a vast acquaintanceship. One day in an office on the top floor of a fine new apartment-house he had an interview with a thin, grey-bearded man, who spoke openly of his visiting Germany. “It can be arranged,” he was told, “for one who is discreet and well-accredited, such as you, Herr Randers.” He bent his brows on Adam, and his small bright eyes seemed to hold a world of menace and warning. “You are neutral, yes,” he continued, “but neutrality is no protection for the bungler—or the traitor.” He gave him certain provisional instructions with the same heavily charged voice and the same lowering brows.

      Lassom, when he was told of the interview, laughed. “That is according to plan,” he said. “That is he whom we call the Cossack. Formidable, is he not? He has also another name and a number, for he is one of us. He is a Czech, and the Czechs, having no fatherland at present, are the greatest secret agents in this war.”

      Then they went to Copenhagen, a precarious journey, and in Copenhagen Adam spent two weeks of crowded busyness. His Danish was fluent, but, said his friends, the speech of a man who had been much about the world and had picked up uncouth idioms. But oftenest he found himself talking German, for that tongue was favoured by the men—and women—whom he met by appointment at odd hours in back rooms in hotels and suburban tea-houses and private flats. Lassom did not appear at these conferences, but he was always at hand to advise. “It is necessary that you have open communications behind you,” he said, “for you are a channel between an enclosed Germany and the world—one of a thousand channels. You must have a conduit both for your exports and your imports.”

      Adam met, too, many people in Copenhagen who made no secret of their sympathy with the Allies, and with such he had to be on his best behaviour. The florid bagman had no bias one way or another; the war was not his war, and would to Heaven it was over, that honest men might get to work again! “These folk do not like you,” Lassom told him, “but it is necessary that the others should know that you have access to their company… Now, my friend, to work. There is much to talk over between us, for the day after to-morrow you cross the frontier.”

      Adam left Copenhagen alone. But, when five days later he sat in the lounge of a Cologne hotel, he saw Lassom at the other side of the room behind a newspaper.

      Flanders had been lonely enough, but this new life was a howling desert for Adam, because he could not even keep company with himself. For every waking hour he was on the stretch, since he lived in the midst of a crowd and had to maintain a tight clutch on his wits. No more days and nights of wandering when he could forget for a little the anxieties of his task. His existence was passed in a glare like that of an arc-lamp.

      Lassom he saw regularly, but only for hurried moments, for Lassom was constantly on the road. He recrossed the Dutch and Danish frontiers frequently; sometimes the Swiss too, for he was busy in mysterious negotiations with neutrals on the supply of vital chemicals. Adam himself had a double rôle. He was supposed to be engaged in various branches of neutral trade, and carried samples which, with Lassom’s assistance, were periodically renewed. But his main task in the eyes of the authorities was to be the means of bringing them news through neighbouring countries of the Allied plans. This meant that he, too, occasionally passed the borders, and was fed with tit-bits of confidential information by several people in Zurich and Copenhagen. These tit-bits were mostly of small importance, but they were invariably true, and their accuracy was his prime credential. But now and then came pieces of weightier news, which he made a point of offering diffidently, as if not perfectly sure of their source. Yet, on the credit of the many accurate details he had furnished, these other things were as a rule believed—and acted upon—and their falsity did not shake his credit. For example, there was the report of a British attack due at Lens in February, ‘18, which led to a wasteful and futile German concentration.

      That was one side. The other was not known to the stiff soldiers who received him for regular conferences and treated him so condescendingly. All the time he was busy collecting knowledge for export—knowledge of the condition of the people and the state of the popular mind, and word of military operations, which great folk sometimes discussed in highly technical language in his presence, believing them beyond his comprehension. It was Adam’s news that largely filled those desperately secret reports on Germany’s internal condition which circulated among the inner Cabinets of the Allies. Now and then he sent them fateful stuff—the story, for instance, of the exact sector and day of the great German assault of March, ‘18, which the British staff alone believed. Lassom was the principal agency for getting this information out of Germany, but sometimes impersonal means had to be found—sealed Kodak films, the inner packets of chewing-gum, whatever, in the hands of innocent-looking returning nationals, might be trusted to escape the eye of the frontier guards.

      Adam had still another task. There was much ingenious Allied propaganda already circulating in the country, based for the most part on Switzerland. It was not anti-German but anti-war, and its distributors were largely members of the Socialist Left Wing. He had to keep an eye on this, and now and then to direct it. It was a delicate business, for it would have been ruin to one of his antecedents to be seen speaking to the intellectuals of the pavement. Yet this was the only duty from which he extracted any comfort, for each encounter involved a direct personal risk which steadied his nerves.

      For the rest he hated his work bitterly—far more bitterly than at any moment of his years in Flanders. There was no groove to get into where one could move automatically, since every day, almost every hour, demanded a new concentration of his powers. It was work which he loathed, dirty work, all the dirtier for being done under conditions of comparative bodily comfort. He had nothing to complain of; he lived as well and slept 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?”

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