PAGE 6
Satire Of The Sea
by
“He was busy with some final orders, so he put out his arm and allowed the nurse to take the pins out of the split sleeve and adjust the dressing. She put on some bandages, made a little timid curtsey and went out.
“St. Alban didn’t think of it again until the German U-boat stopped the transport the next morning in the Channel. He wasn’t disturbed when the submarine commander came into his cabin. He knew enough not to carry any papers about with him. But Plutonburg didn’t bother himself about luggage. He’d had his signal from the factory chimney at Auteuil. He stood there grinning in the cabin before St. Alban; that Satanic, Chemosh grin that the artist got in the Munich picture.
“‘I used to be something of a surgeon,’ he said, ‘Doctor Ulrich von Plutonburg, if you will remember. I’ll take a look at your arm.’
“tit, Alban said he thought the man might be moved by some humane consideration, so he put out his arm.
“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!”
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. “No living man but that Prussian could have put the Satanic humor into the rest of the affair.”
He paused as under the pressure of the memory.
“St. Alban always maintained that from the moment he saw the long map on the bandage everything blurred around him, and began to clear only when he spoke on the deck. He used to curse this blur. It made him a national figure and immortal, but it prevented him, he said, from striking the Prussian in the face.”