by David Marcum
Her language tutor at the finishing school was a handsome young man by the name of Ulrich Hoffmeyer from Göttingen, a university town deep in the countryside of Lower Saxony.
“Uli was brought from Germany because the school wanted us to learn a good accent,” she explained, “not Schwiizerdütsch, the dialect they speak around Zurich.” Uli waited for her every day after her classes. “That spring, we walked away from the whole world and sat among the drifts of tiny crocuses and gentians and primroses.” After some months Hoffmeyer asked her to marry him, “and I accepted immediately”.
She failed to inform her parents because of their prejudiced views against all Germans. After her return, Uli and she corresponded furtively, even more so after the war broke out. “Uli wrote to say he was returning to Germany. Then the letters ceased.”
She feared he had been sent to the Front Line, even that he may have died at the Battle of the Marne. “Then, six months ago, something happened which made me jump for joy,” she continued. “A letter arrived. It was sent from Sweden, but it was from Uli. I recognised his handwriting at once.” The letter was in a code he used when he wrote to her at her parents’ farm. “Somehow, he heard I was working at an Army Remount depôt up north. He was safe in Berlin, in the Imperial German Army, the Deutsches Heer, but working for the Chief of the German General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn.”
By now the words were tumbling out. “There was something special he wanted to ask me. It could make a difference to whether we would ever see each other again. He said there were a considerable number of people in the General Staff who felt things were not turning out as they expected. The French had rallied at Verdun and halted the German Army’s advance on Paris. The British were not being driven back into the Channel. There were already signs of a stalemate. Uli and others in the German General Staff believed it might be possible to get von Falkenhayn to suggest a cessation of hostilities between England and Germany. But he said there was a serious problem: The Kaiser! Wilhelm’s pride was ‘too much on the line’ to accept an armistice.”
She hurried on. “Uli said that millions of ordinary Germans didn’t want to go on fighting England. In German, ‘England’ means ‘the Land of the Angels’. It had been a terrible slip-up.”
“I presume your fiancé came up with a solution?” I heard Holmes ask, the words not altogether lacking a sarcastic undertone.
She nodded. “He said in trench warfare, all information collected on the battle front only gave a local and more-or-less temporary advantage over the opponent. They needed to know more. Uli said if they could break the stale-mate on the battlefields, the Kaiser might agree to a ceasefire and discuss peace. He said that awful as it must seem, if the German air force could make a couple of spectacular strikes and cripple England’s ability to wage war in Flanders through the lack of horses, the heavy ones in particular, the Kaiser’s Selbstachtung - his amour propre - would be satisfied. He might agree to discussing terms for peace.”
My revolver felt very heavy in my hand. “And that’s when you first informed him through your knitting code when the horses were about to arrive?” I pursued.
Again, now almost indiscernibly, she uttered the word, “Yes”.
“And for fear your treachery might be discovered if you stayed on at that depôt, Chef 111b ordered you to ask to be moved to another Remount depôt,” Holmes broke in, “which is why you took up employment here at Raffley Park.”
Again she nodded.
Unable to hide my despair, I asked, “Adrienne, couldn’t you see this Ulrich Hoffmeyer was taking advantage of your puppy love for him? The Kaiser’s amour propre be damned! I doubt if the Deutsches Heer has any intention of calling for a ceasefire. Obtaining such information on our military resources could help to create a decisive advantage for the Hun, not some sort of balance! Without horses to draw our vehicles in the mud of Flanders, our Army would soon be starved of food and clothing and ammunition. The troops would be overwhelmed in no time. If we hadn’t caught you, you could have gone on to one Remount depôt after another. Within a year, the Boche could be marching down Whitehall.”
“I want this war to end,” she wailed, tears welling up in her eyes. “I want to get back with Uli.”
I expected Holmes to remark it was much too late for that, that the gallows would intervene, when to my astonishment he said, “That might be possible one day, but there would be a condition. Shall we say a necessary correction to the balance of treason?”
The words sounded the more incongruous coming from a man attired in a Free Church clergyman’s dress.
“At the previous Remount depôt,” Holmes continued, “you passed information to the enemy which had damaging consequences. Luckily the people escaped the firebombing, but several hundred horses were killed. You left there and came to Raffley Park and repeated the same treason. Again by sheer luck, none of the staff died. It’s only fair if now you find a way to pass an equal amount of military information back to your own country.”
The young woman fell quiet, looking from Holmes’s face to mine and back. The words, “Do I have a choice?” fell from her lips.
“Certainly,” Holmes said in an accommodating tone. “Cooperate with us and live, or, as you see, my friend has an old Army service revolver from his India days.”
Holmes continued, “You hesitate. Let me spell it out. You can cooperate, or you can walk over to that wall right now and my friend will shoot you through the forehead. I assure you he will pull the trigger. This bunker will become your tomb.”
“I suggest you cooperate, Adrienne,” I begged, hoping fervently she would take Holmes’s unexpected offer.
Seconds ticked by. At last her defiant look gave way to one of near despair.
Holmes spoke. “I take it from your look you accept our terms. You speak excellent German. You have already been trained in wireless telegraphy. We shall expect you to balance your crime against England by fleeing to Occupied Europe and sending back military information - the state of airfields, location of ammunition depots, and above all, railway intelligence - troop movements and so on. Go to your quarters and collect your things. Return here straight afterwards. Speak to no-one. Make use of the hole in the fence already known to you. At the earliest hour, we shall escort you to General Headquarters in London. You must sign the 1911 Official Secrets Act. You’ll then join the Secret Service section of MI6.”
Holmes pointed at the wireless receiver. “In turn, we shall make sure this bunker is completely cleared. No-one here will ever know you spied for the Germans. I suggest you leave behind a note addressed to Lady Mabel. Explain your nerves have been badly shattered. You want to get away from danger for a while, somewhere so remote it will seem the War is a million miles away.”
“And what do I tell the Germans?” she asked, her voice quavering.
“You heard an investigation into the fire-bombings was imminent. You feared someone would put two and two together because your previous depôt was also firebombed by airships. It might be a matter of days, hours even, and you would be found out, so you had to flee.”
He added, “Go now. If you do not return here within the half-hour, I can assure you not even my friend Mr. Wilson here nor I can save you. A watch will be put in place at every port and airfield. Within a matter of days, you will be captured and put before a firing-squad and buried in an unmarked grave. Your family will be told the reason why. They will live with the shame of knowing their daughter was a traitor to her country.”
I intervened. “Assuming you agree to these terms, the Germans may ask the identity of the person who was about to be called in to uncover you.”
I waved the pistol at my companion.
“In which case you may reveal the identity of the person standing before you.”
“And your name, Parson?” she asked, staring doubtfully at the clerical outfit.
�
��Sherlock Holmes,” came the answer.
Without the blink of an eyelid she turned to me and asked coolly, “So do I assume you are not Mr. Wilson, but the famous Dr. Watson?”
I bowed. “If not as famous as you make me sound, I am certainly Dr. Watson.”
For some reason I cannot explain, I felt a surge of warmth towards this young woman fighting to keep her composure. “Will you be able to get through the borders and check-points?” I asked more gently.
“Yes,” she replied. “I have a code name that can be checked. It will get me through.”
“And this nom-de-guerre?” Holmes asked.
“Die Weisse Frau,” came the reply. “‘The White Lady’.” She pointed upwards. “But what of the Zeppelins? They’ll be coming over at any moment.”
“We’ve taken care of that,” I heard Holmes reply.
I pointed across to the four dried little violets. “The flowers. Are they some sort of cipher?”
“In a way, yes,” she replied. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Those violets were the last thing Uli gave me when I left Switzerland. He picked them for me on the slopes of the Swiss mountain. One for each of the kisses he gave me. First on the forehead, then on either cheek, and last of all a kiss on the mouth.”
At that very moment the rat-tat-tat of half a dozen Royal Garrison Artillery pom-poms broke out, barely muffled by the layer of leaves and branches. The thud of the shells was interspersed with the crack of Pomeroy 0.303in. calibre explosive bullets. The firing continued for several minutes and all fell silent. Holmes gestured at the open trapdoor.
“It’s time you were on your way,” he told our captive.
The next morning brought an unexpected bonus. Among the twisted wreckage of the two airships, a valuable and recently-introduced German signal book was recovered intact.
Before sun-up, Holmes and I took Adrienne to the railway station for the journey to London. It had been a long night spent agonising over her fate. Sleep had eluded me, even when Holmes took over the watch. Whenever I looked across at our young captive, she was leaning on her suitcase, staring down at the dried violets in her hand. It seemed clear to me that Holmes was sending her to certain death. The Zeppelins had come in once again on her knitted instructions, but this time they had run into a very heavy barrage and been utterly destroyed. The crew’s bodies would have been burnt to cinders before they struck the Wiltshire soil.
The St. Leger Stakes took place in the September. Holmes was back at his bee-farm on the Sussex South Downs. I was at the Queen Anne Street surgery, attending my well-to-do patients. My five guineas on the Stakes paid handsomely. Hurry On came in first. More months went by. The adventure at Raffley Park faded from my mind until one morning a letter arrived, postmarked Folkestone.
Dear “Mr. Wilson” (it read),
I foresee the end to this terrible war in England’s favour cannot be too far off. Therefore I have chosen to escape back to my homeland. Soon the Kaiser will be forced into exile. I am posting this the very moment my feet once more walk upon my country’s soil. I was received like a Wagnerian heroine in Berlin, and after some interrogation (which I passed satisfactorily!) posted to their front lines, Fourmies, thirty-one miles from Valenciennes, surrounded by forests and ponds, where German Intelligence suspected a “nest of British spies” was at work. As it turned out, they were right. Soon I uncovered the nest, led, as it turned out, by a French childhood friend of mine, Felix (codenamed “Dominique”). He and his wife and two young sisters lived in a cottage overlooking a railway line. Not only did I not give them away, I was able to keep their activities hidden from the Germans. On certain occasions I joined them. I must now be the only English woman saboteur who has actually put sand into axle-boxes.
(The letter continued) Together, Felix and family worked in shifts twenty-four hours a day, watching for trains through a small slit in the heavy curtains, reporting the results to me. At one point, one-hundred-and-sixty trains per day went past. We estimated a heavy Howitzer train would contain 6,000 150-millimeter rounds. I can assure you, not a single troop train passed unobserved, day or night. Felix and family (and I) survived, though several hundred of the others connected with train-watching were caught and imprisoned, and over one-hundred shot. The intelligence they obtained saved thousands of Allied lives. At the end of each shift, Felix made use of foodstuffs to keep tally on the number of trains and soldiers - beans for soldiers, coffee for guns, chicory for horses and so on. When they put the information on paper, they rolled the page up and tucked it inside the hollow handle of a broom standing in a corner of the kitchen until I passed by to collect it. Then I sent it on in code with all possible speed to the War Office Secret Service via Colonel “O”, the British Military Attaché at The Hague.
(The note ended with) The area has now been liberated from German occupation. I hope you and Mr. H and I will meet again, under more promising (and peaceful) circumstances. I shall be eternally grateful to you both for allowing me my life. I hope I have repaid our country for my stupidity and your kindness.
DWF
P.S. I miss the Who’d A Thought It pub.
“DWF,” I murmured, folding the letter. “Die Weisse Frau.” No mention of her German fiancé Ulrich - nor of the four dried violet leaves. It now seemed incredible that if Holmes had ordered me to shoot her, I would have done so with not a moment’s hesitation. She would have become the only woman I had ever killed in the line of duty. Spies are spies. The rules of war demanded it. Yet I admired how collected she had stayed that evening in her bunker, even in the face of immediate annihilation.
A week later another letter arrived, this time from Toby McCoy.
Dear Dr. Watson (it began),
I have had the most wonderful surprise. I’ve received a letter from Adrienne. You remember her? One of the girls in the knitting circle? Yes, that one! Then you’ll also know, to everyone’s bewilderment, no doubt yours and Mr. Holmes’s as much as mine, she disappeared after the last airship attack. Until today I’d heard neither hide nor hair of her or her whereabouts. Her letter explains her nerves were stretched to the limit by the repeated Zeppelin attacks. She worried people would feel she was bringing bad luck on the Remount depots, so she took the lease on an abandoned cottage somewhere in the Lake District to recover (by reading Wordsworth, perhaps?). Now, with the war coming to a positive conclusion, she has decided to return to Wiltshire and would like to see me. (The words like to see me were heavily underlined.)
She asked (the letter continued,) if I was still a Second Lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps. I’ve replied already to say how delighted I will be, though rumour has it the Remount depôts will be disbanded the minute the Armistice is signed. Already the girls at Raffley Park are planning their futures. Most want to marry well and settle down to family life and children. Some suffragette types want to go on to university. At least two want to try their hand at becoming jockeys. Although I’m sure with her family connections and all that, Adrienne wouldn’t want to take up with someone like me (romantically I mean,) perhaps we might go into a training business together. She was easily the finest horsewoman here.
Fingers crossed!
Yours sincerely
Toby McCoy
I wrote back:
Dear Toby,
Any young lady should think it a privilege to marry a jockey who won the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket! Make sure you invite Holmes and me to the wedding.
P.S. Is Ballymacad worth a five-guinea bet at the Gatwick Races?
I retrieved Adrienne’s letter from a desk drawer and stared down at it. My forehead wrinkled. Why choose to return before an armistice had been arranged? News from the Eastern Front indicated our ally Russia’s resistance was weakening. If St. Petersburg withdrew from the fight, it would allow untold numbers of hardened German troops to flood back to the Western Front. In fact, according to my
illustrious informer, the Rt. Hon. Sir George C., rumours abounded of a German spring offensive. The German High Command would soon give their Divisions the order to emerge like sewer rats from the Hindenburg trenches, the Siegfriedstellung, and make an irresistible assault on our defences, driving us back northward to the sea. Was Adrienne’s chosen time to return simply a coincidence? Could her story about a childhood friend by the name of Felix (“Dominique”) be complete rubbish? Or had I been reading too many of William Le Queux’s spy stories of late? Surely she wouldn’t return at the behest of the German High Command to become an enemy agent again?
I put the letter back in its drawer. The idea was ludicrous. On the other hand, she had made no mention of the love of her young life, that Ulrich Hoffmeyer. What was he up to now?
I pulled my desk diary towards me and pencilled in a weekend not too far ahead. I would pay another visit to view officers’ chargers (and Adrienne) once more. Just to be sure, I would again take along my old comrade-in-arms, Sherlock Holmes.
NOTES
Given Holmes knowledge of the recondite, he probably knew the origin of Adrienne’s code-name Die Weisse Frau. She was the legendary White Lady of the Hohenzollerns, a dynasty of former princes, electors, kings, and emperors of Hohenzollern, Brandenburg, Prussia, the German Empire, and Romania, a ghostly figure that walked about at night terrifying people. Her appearance was supposed to herald the downfall of the dynasty. It is said she has been seen on many occasions over hundreds of years, and linked to immediate deaths and disasters shortly after each dreadful sighting
“Room 40” refers to MI5 and SIS. Two agencies emerged from the split of the Secret Service Bureau in 1910 into domestic and overseas branches. One was MI5, the Security Service, i.e. the fifth department of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. It had an important role to play in tracking spies, in censorship, blockade operations, and penetrating enemy embassies in Britain.
The other was called MI1c, later SIS - Secret Intelligence Service - and later still MI6. The SIS worked in an occasionally fractious but generally productive collaboration with military intelligence overseas, producing vital information from agents and resistance networks on enemy war preparations and troop movements.