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Page 120
"The commander of that submarine was Plutonburg of Prussia. He
was the right-hand man of old Von Tirpitz. He was the one man in
the German navy who never ceased to urge its Admiralty to sink
everything. He loathed every fiber of the English people. We
had all sorts of testimony to that. The trawlers and freightboat
captains brought it in. He staged his piracies to a theatrical
frightfulness. `Old England!' he would say, when he climbed up
out of the sea onto the deck of a British ship and looked about
him at the sailors, `Old, is right, old and rotten!' Then he
would smite his big chest and quote the diatribes of Treitschke.
`But in a world that the Prussian inhabits a nation, old and
rotten, may endure for a time, but it shall not endure forever!'
"Plutonburg didn't let St. Alban and the transport go ahead out
of the promptings of a noble nature. He did it because he hated
England, and he wanted St. Alban to live on in the hell he had
trapped him into. He counted on his keeping silent. But the Hun
made a mistake.
"St. Alban didn't measure up to the standard of Prussian egoism
by which Plutonburg estimated him."
Sir Henry continued in the same even voice. The levels of
emotion in his narrative did not move him.
"Did you ever see the picture of Plutonburg, in Munich? He had a
face like Chemosh. And he dressed the part. Other under-boat
commanders wore the conventional naval cap, but Plutonburg always
wore a steel helmet with a corrugated earpiece. Some artist
under the frightfulness dogma must have designed it for him. It
framed his face down to the jaw. The face looked like it was set
in iron, and it was a thick-lidded, heavy, menacing face; the
sort of face that a broad-line cartoonist gives to a threatening
war-joss. At any rate, that's how the picture presents him. One
thinks of Attila under his ox head. You can hardly imagine
anything human in it, except a cruel satanic humor.
"He must have looked like Beelzebub that morning, on the
transport, when he let St. Alban go on."
The Baronet looked down at me.
"Now, that's the truth about the fine conduct of Plutonburg that
England applauded as an act of chivalry. It was a piece of
sheer, hellish malignity, if there ever was an instance."
Sir Henry took a turn across the terrace, for a moment silent.
Then he went on:
"And in fact, everything in the heroic event on the deck of the
transport was a pretense. The Hun didn't intend to shoot St.
Alban. As I have said, Plutonburg had him in just the sort of
hell he wanted him in, and he didn't propose to let him out with
a bullet. And St. Alban ought to have known it, unless, as he
afterwards said, the whole thing from the first awful moment in
the cabin was simply walled out of his consciousness, until he
began dimly to realize up there in the sun, in the crowd, that he
was being threatened and blurted out his words from a sort of
awful disgust."
Again he paused.
"Plutonburg was right about having St. Alban in the crater of the
pit. But he was wrong to measure him by his Prussian standard.
St. Alban came on to London. He got the heads of the War Office
together and told them. I was there. It was the devil's own
muddle of a contrast. Outside, London was ringing with the man's
striking act of personal heroism. And inside of the Foreign
Office three or, four amazed persons were listening to the bitter
truth."
The Baronet spread out his hands with a sudden gesture.
"I shall always remember the man's strange, livid face; his
fingers that jumped about the cuff of his coat sleeve; and his
shaking jaw."
Sir Henry went over and sat down at the table. For a good while
he was silent. The sun filtering through the limbs of the great
oak-trees made mottled spots on his face. He seemed to turn away
from the thing he had been concerned with, and to see something
else, something wholly apart and at a distance from St. Alban's
affairs.
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