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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.
I cried out in astonishment. "So that's what you meant," I said, "by the trailed thing turning on him!" "Precisely," replied the Baronet. "The very thing that St. Alban labored to prevent another from doing, he did awfully himself!" The big Englishman's fingers drummed on the table. "It was a great moment for Plutonburg," he said.
"My word!" he said, "is it any wonder that the devil, Plutonburg, grinned when he put up his automatic pistol? Why shoot the Englishman? He would do it himself soon enough. He was right about that. If he had only been right about his measure of St. Alban, the drive on the Somme would have been a ghastly catastrophe for the Allied armies." I hesitated to interrupt Sir Henry.
'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.
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.
"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.
"Plutonburg took the pins out of the sleeve and removed the bandage that the nurse had put on in the Hotel Meurice. Then he held it up. The long, cotton bandage was lined with glazed cambric, and on it, in minute detail, was the exact position of all the Allied forces along the whole front in the region of the Somme, precisely as they had been massed for the drive on July first!"
"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.
"He thought it was safe to let St. Alban go ahead. And he would have been right if St. Alban had been the great egotist that he was. "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.
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