‘Yes, I’ve heard,’ said Schuylenboeck. He automatically fingered his beloved pencil with the dose of poison hidden under the eraser. If he were ever in danger of being sent to the same place, the poison would be useful. A pity that the old Honigs had not had such a poison in their possession when they were arrested.
Four times the Lek II and her captain took big tows of loot up the Rhine for delivery in the industrial towns. On one occasion the British bombers raided Ruhrort while Schuylenboeck was there, and one bomb burst on the quay not very far from the Lek II, and started a beautiful fire among the very stores she had brought up the river. Schuylenboeck thought to himself how glad the people to whom he used to report would have been to receive that piece of news. But Schuylenboeck had no intention at all of risking detection in order to convey what would be, after all, a very minor piece of news. He was saving himself for something more important than that; he did not know what, but he thought the opportunity would come one of these days - that is, unless he was compelled to use the dose of poison which lay concealed under the eraser in his pencil. If that bomb had hit the Lek II and killed Schuylenboeck at that time, the fading memory of him would have been merely that of one more of the few pitiful traitors who betrayed the Netherlands.
And then came a change of duties to Schuylenboeck and a change of scene for the Lek II. The long journeys up the Rhine - somehow pleasant despite the torrent of unhappy memories which they evoked - ended for good. It was not because there was no more loot to be extracted from Holland; there was still plenty, but it could be entrusted to tug masters of less ability and less reliability than Schuylenboeck.
Flushing was a scene of boiling activity. For the defensive - to guard against an English attack - there were minefields being laid and big guns being mounted and concrete blockhouses being erected. For the offensive there was a German army to be trained in embarkation and debarkation; also there was a motley flotilla of tugs and lighters and shallow-draft steamers to be trained in the same operations.
Schuylenboeck had often devoted some of his thoughts to the problem facing the Germans of invading England. To start with, there was the question of obtaining, even temporarily, the command of the sea. Schuylenboeck dismissed that from his mind; the Nazis might by some astonishing combination of circumstances be able to bypass it. But after that came the question of ferrying over a large number of men and a huge mass of material. Schuylenboeck could make calculations about that; he had spent his life dealing with questions of water transport. Before his eyes here in Flushing he could see some of the steps the Nazis were taking to solve the problem. First he scratched his head, with its thinning straw-coloured hair, and then, finding little inspiration in that, he pulled at his fat pink cheeks and stared out over the crowded harbour, narrowing his eyelids over his slightly protuberant blue eyes. He was not a handsome man, nor did he appear to be a particularly intellectual man. And certainly he did not appear to be a man who could evolve and cherish through months of intense danger a deep design.
About a hundred men to a lighter, Schuylenboeck saw that the Nazis were allowing. What would be the total force they would try to employ? Schuylenboeck had little idea, but he fixed arbitrarily upon three hundred thousand. That meant three thousand lighters. That meant - Schuylenboeck was not good at mental arithmetic, but he dared not risk putting such calculations on paper - a string of lighters one hundred and fifty miles long if in single file, taking about twenty hours to pass a given point at their best speed - doubtful when there were intricate channels, through shoals and minefields to be traversed. But of course every harbour from Emden down to Cherbourg, or beyond, would be employed. Then came the question of equipment, of tanks and guns. Schuylenboeck groaned in misery at the thought of all those unknown quantities intruding themselves into his calculations. He had no idea how much space they would require. Schuylenboeck was reminded of the little boy who asked his father how much a million pennies made, and, being told that it made the devil of a lot of money, got into trouble next morning in school because it was the wrong answer.
The Nazis had the devil of a problem on their hands - a problem depending on the utmost nicety of timing, on the most accurate planning, on the most careful consideration of navigational conditions of tides and wind. And he was well aware that they were doing their usual painstaking best to eliminate all the possible unknowns.
Colonel Potthoff was in charge of the embarkation arrangements in the Flushing sector. Schuylenboeck came to know him well, a man almost as bulky as Schuylenboeck himself, with a good deal of the bulk protruding over the back of his collar in naked, fleshy rolls. Potthoff used to sit at his desk in the harbour-master’s office and wheeze heavily over timetables.
‘Six hours for the troops to file into the lighters, Major Roth!’ said Potthoff. ‘That is too much. Then four more to get the lighters clear of the mole. Quite impossible ... Captain Schuylenboeck, you must see to it the lighters get to sea quicker than that.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Schuylenboeck and Roth dutifully; presumably, Roth’s tone was sincere.
It was an intricate, difficult job to arrange for the troops, on the word being given, to march out of their barracks and take their position in order in the waiting lighters - the harbour was chock-a-block with them - and then make up the tows and get them out of the harbour through the narrowed entrance. Nor was the situation eased by the fact that half the tug masters were Dutch and did their best unobtrusively to muddle the business; the captain of a tug with six lighters in tow can cause a quite amazing tangle, if he is so inclined. There was one Dutch captain who managed to get his tow into the minefield outside the entrance and blow one lighter of troops to fragments. But the Germans shot him even though he pleaded that it was an unavoidable accident.
Schuylenboeck approved of the blowing up of the lighter, but he never indulged in the petty obstructionism of the other captains. He was hoping, deep down in the stolid bulk of him, for larger game. His helpfulness in the matter of manoeuvring tows won him still further the confidence of his Nazi tyrants; it won him the responsibility of handling a tow of no fewer than ten lighters - the Lek II’s fullest capacity - and it won him the hatred of all those who had once been his friends. Schuylenboeck was reduced to drinking his evening beer - thin wartime stuff - in the company of his brother-in-law, eyed askance by the loyalists. There were small compensations; Braun still had a stock of the thin Sumatra cigars with a straw up the middle that Schuylenboeck loved, and he told Schuylenboeck scraps of information that Schuylenboeck stored up in his mind, ready to tell when the time should come, if he did not have to use the poison under the eraser first.
It was not only in embarkation that the Nazi troops had to be drilled. They also had to practise disembarkation. The tows, when they had crept out as far to sea as they dared, turned about and headed for shore again; there to practise, some of them, running around in the shallows, where the troops leaped out waist deep and poured up the beaches, and some to practise running alongside the jetty in what, for the purposes of the manoeuvre, was assumed to be a captured port. There were times when the Royal Air Force came over, raining bombs, and with the fighters spouting 20-mm shells, wreaking destruction on the flotilla and killing the hapless soldiers in the lighters. Yet after each such attack, more lighters crept round from the German shipbuilding yards, more troops came to fill the gaps, and the rehearsal went steadily on. And during this dreadful August, when the RAF was fighting to preserve England from Goering’s bombers there was not much strength to spare to harass the invasion forces.
August shifted into September. Still the bombers roared overhead on their way to raid London, and still they came limping back in diminished numbers. The days were growing shorter, the nights longer. And Schuylenboeck still waited, imperturbable, for his opportunity, whatever that opportunity might be; his gesture towards his breast pocket where lay his pencil had by now become quite habitual to him.
It was Colonel Rucker’s engineer regiment, th
e 79th Pioneers, which was allotted to the Lek II’s tow. Colonel Rucker was one of those fierce, conscientious soldiers with an infinity of training who have helped to make the German army what it is. The Nazis have worked out a system which puts the engineer regiments in the forefront of the battle; the way to every victory is cleared by the pioneers. Rucker was the man who had first set foot in Eben Emael and struck the first blow in the campaign which was to carry the Germans from the Rhine to the Pyrenees. The lines on his face made him look older than his thirty-eight years, and if one looked closely at his shorn head one could see plenty of grey hairs, but he still carried himself with a spring and an elasticity which would have been a credit to a boy of half his years. The 79th Pioneers, hard-bitten veterans, all of them, were waiting for their chance to head the landing force that would march on London just as they had marched on Paris. In those early weeks of the war against England, left single-handed, there was no doubt in their minds that the enterprise would succeed, just as every other enterprise had succeeded up to that time; the disappointments for the German army still lay in the future.
That September day the orders came through early in the morning, and the German army came pouring out from its billets and its barracks, and marching in from the outlying suburbs with the regularity to be expected of a disciplined army after a dozen rehearsals. The motor vehicles came roaring along the quay and down the ramps laid down for them - five armoured cars and five light tanks, one for each of the ten lighters in the Lek II’s train. Simultaneously came the 79th Pioneers, marching swiftly in column of threes and taking their places in the lighters in mechanical obedience to the unhurried orders of the non-commissioned officers.
Colonel Rucker and the regimental headquarters took their places in the leading lighter; Rucker was aware that it would be more dignified for him to stand on the bridge of the tug, but the Lek II drew far more water than the lighters, and it was the lighters that would run ashore under their own impetus after the tug had cast them off. On board the Lek II there came only Krauss, the assistant signalling officer, and a couple of privates, ready to receive any communication which Colonel Rucker might see fit to make.
As the last man stepped aboard, the warps were cast off, and Schuylenboeck, with a last glance round him from the bridge, rang down for slow speed ahead. With infinite slowness, lest a sudden jerk should snap the tow ropes, the tow was under way, circled and headed for the harbour mouth; even as it moved, fresh barges were being warped into their places and fresh troops were marching down onto the quay, ready to embark. Still moving slowly, the Lek II and her lumbering train passed out into the open sea, almost glass smooth, and with a dim sun looking down upon it. Overhead at that moment there passed a vast diamond of bombers, the fighter escort so tiny as almost to be lost in the faint haze, heading for England. The war in the air was being fought out to its climax while war on land was still in rehearsal.
‘A nice calm day,’ said Lieutenant Krauss benignly. The slightest lop on the water, even such as would not prevent the unseaworthy barges from carrying out their exercises, was enough to make him seasick and miserable.
‘A beautiful day,’ agreed Schuylenboeck heartily.
He looked up at the dim sun and at the haze-shrouded horizon, and then hastily, in fear lest even that gesture should have betrayed his thoughts, at the rest of the barges jockeying their way out of the harbour. And lest he had betrayed himself, he felt in his pocket for the reassurance of his pencil. He knew much more about the Narrow Seas than did Lieutenant Krauss; he knew what kind of weather that glassy sea and indistinct horizon portended. Right ahead, for that matter, he was almost sure he could see a hint of the fogbank he was hoping for.
Despite Colonel Potthoff’s complaints, it still took a most unconscionable time for the whole flotilla to get clear of the harbour mouth and the minefields beyond. The Lek II chugged slowly ahead while the rest of the flotilla emerged and took up its formation; in that formation the Lek II was still destined to be ahead for the 79th Pioneers to make the first landing. But time today was not of so much importance, for when the embarkation rehearsal was completed, the force was destined to turn leisurely about - and with that agglomerate mass of barges every tiny movement had to be leisurely - and return to the shore after nightfall to practise a night landing. Slowly the flotilla headed out to sea, until almost beyond the protection of the heavy shore batteries. Farther ahead still were to be seen the dim shapes of the light cruiser and the half-flotilla of destroyers which guarded against some unforeseen eruption of the British light forces. Dimmer and dimmer grew those shapes; soon a little wreath of fog, twisting sluggishly over the water, came athwart the Lek II’s bows and was cut by them into halves. There was no heat to the pale sun now; within a few minutes there was no sun to be seen, and the destroyer screen on the horizon was entirely invisible.
One of the privates on the bridge beside Krauss and Schuylenboeck suddenly called attention to the tow; a signaller in the leading barge was sending a message by semaphore, and Krauss read it off with the ease of long practice. ‘We are to go back without carrying out the night landing,’ said Krauss, and Schuylenboeck nodded ponderously and rang down for full speed ahead.
‘What are you doing that for?’ asked Krauss curiously, noting the quickened beat of the propeller.
‘It is necessary to go faster in order to lead round on the curve,’ explained Schuylenboeck without emotion.
Further wreaths of fog were curling past them now, and a moment later they had reached the fogbank. From the bridge of the Lek II it was impossible to see even the bows of the tug. The people in the barges would not be able to see the tug ahead or the barge behind. Schuylenboeck gave a slight alteration of course to the man at the wheel, and five minutes later a much larger one in the opposite direction. That was sufficient to put confusion into Krauss’ mind, and possibly into the helmsman’s. They were headed for England now by the shortest route, but only Schuylenboeck was aware of it; he had no intention at all, and never had, of taking any of the crew into his confidence. When one lives under Nazi rule one takes no one into one’s confidence.
The fog was clammy and chill; Krauss began to pace the little bridge to keep himself warm; after the beautiful weather of August 1940, he was a little susceptible to cold. But Schuylenboeck stood there unmoving, his hand, in its characteristic attitude, resting over his inside breast pocket. He was aware of the importance of showing no sign of nervousness.
Then, just ahead, a slightly more solid nucleus of the grey fog flicked past the Lek II’s bows; it was come and gone in a flash, but Schuylenboeck felt the Lek II pitch a little under his feet as she met the resultant wash. That was one of the German destroyers, and they were through the screen now, with nothing hostile between them and England, unless some dreadful coincidence - Schuylenboeck felt for his pencil again - should guide them into contact with a lurking U-boat. Schuylenboeck ordered another small alteration of course, kept to it for half an hour, and then, to anticipate Krauss’ inevitable restlessness, he bellowed an order forward for a hand to go to work with the lead. That would look as if he were expecting to approach the shore at any moment, and the five fathoms which the leadsman got was, as he had anticipated, the tail of the Camelbank. Schuylenboeck discontinued the heaving of the lead immediately; he did not want deep water reported.
Half an hour more of this. That was the utmost limit of time he dared to allow himself. Krauss was restless by now, and far back in the fog he could guess that Colonel Rucker was also growing restless. They ought to have made the harbour mouth an hour back. It was fortunate that, having started at the head of the procession, they would return at the tail, so that there was nothing very surprising about their having seen nothing of the other tows; and Schuylenboeck, ponderously working out a psychological problem, could guess that Rucker, with his vast experience of war and of the confusion resulting even in a well- drilled army like the German at an unexpected change of conditions, would expect a certain amount of d
elay, and would rely, in his disciplined German fashion, on the judgement of the man on the spot.
Schuylenboeck nerved himself to speak; it was one thing to be his usual ponderous self and quite another to have to say words like an actor.
‘I shall have to send a radio call,’ he said to Krauss. ‘Then I can pick up my bearings with the direction finder.’
‘Very good,’ said Krauss. Schuylenboeck’s blue eyes noted the fact that Krauss was nervous, but not yet suspicious. What he was afraid of was the minefields, and the possibility of bumping into the breakwater or running down another tow. Schuylenboeck scribbled the message on the pad and handed it to Joris Hohlwerff in the little radio room beside the chart- room. He had no knowledge at all as to whether young Joris was a willing cooperator or not. ‘Cooperator’ in the conquered countries has the special meaning of a man who has taken the German side. If he had been sure that Joris was not one, Schuylenboeck might have sent a very different message, but under Nazi rule one is sure of nothing. The hiss and crackle of the transmission showed that Joris was dispatching the message, and the British kept a ceaseless wireless watch, and they had direction finders as well.
A precious ten minutes passed - another mile nearer England - before Joris came out with the reply sent out by a puzzled German station.
‘Repeat my message,’ ordered Schuylenboeck. He met Joris’ eyes with a stony stare, and Joris’ stare was just as stony. Neither of these men knew anything at all about what was passing in the other’s mind. But the transmission hissed and crackled. The British navy must be picking up those waves.
Far out here in the North Sea there was a perceptible movement of the water. The Lek II was positively lively and the lighters astern must be lurching disgustingly. Schuylenboeck hoped that Rucker would be too sick to be suspicious. It was twenty minutes now since the first wireless message. Any British destroyer taking it in ten miles away could be here by now to investigate. To convey an attitude of activity, Schuylenboeck began ringing down messages to the engine room for half speed, for slow speed ahead, for half speed again. Lieutenant Krauss, beside him, marvelled at the assurance of this experienced tug master who could bring a great tow into port with such a sureness of touch in a fog that limited visibility to twenty yards. Krauss still had not the least idea that he was forty miles out in the North Sea instead of being at the entrance to Flushing.
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