Kriegspiel: the War-Game

Front matter

KRIEGSPIEL DR. ROBERT WATSON, Primus. [From portrait painted at Rome in 1817, by Prof. Vogel vom Vogelstein, and now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.] Kriegspiel : The War-Game EY FRANCIS HINDES GROOME AUTHOR OF 'TWO SUFFOLK FRIENDS,' ' IN GYPSY TENTS,' ETC. "But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days : Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the Cupboard lays." Omar Khayyam WARD, LOCK & BOWDEN, LIMITED LONDON, NEW YORK, AND MELBOURNE 1896 [Alt rights reserved] TO Jttg Jranb THEODORE WATTS

Preface

Some friends, to whom I have submitted my manu script, assure me that I have been grossly unjust to the Rev. Thomas Discipline. If so, I regret it. Another objection has been raised, that many of my scenes and conversations must be purely imaginary. True ; but imagination is surely the staple of Fiction. The Authob.

Chapter I

A LETTER Schloss Kailcstein, " Zittau, Saxony, " October 21, 1867. " My deae Charles, " TT is a long time since we wrote to one another, but X I have something special to say to you. You may remember an old school-friend of mine, Charlotta von Kalkstein ; she stayed with us several times at Hen ningham. I visited her once here at her father's, thirteen years ago ; and then there was a long interval, during which she has married a Count Rudolf von Heeringen. And now I have come to visit her again, again at her father's, where she and her husband and their two little boys are spending the autumn. Her father, Count Otto, is a general in the Saxon army ; and that was how we came to go, just a week since, to a little place, Hochkirch, where a statue was to be unveiled of a Field-Marshal Kite — so the name sounded to me.

He was a Prussian commander, the old Count told me; he did not seem much pleased about the matter, but it was to be a very grand function. " He and Count Rudolf were on horseback in attend- KRIEGSPIEL ance on King John ; but Lotta and I, with the children, drove over from Bautzen. Our horses were taken out, and the carriage was drawn up with many others in the market-place not far from the statue, which was all enveloped in white. "We had not to wait very long before King John arrived, and with him the King of Prussia and a whole host of generals and other notables. The bands played, and then there was a speech made ; and whilst it was making I noticed through a field-glass a small boy standing at the foot of the statue, and holding a silken cord attached to the drapery. He was dressed in an old-fashioned way — a three-cornered hat, a powdered wig, high boots, and a little truncheon in his left hand ; and all of an instant, almost just as I noticed him, I was hundreds of miles away from Hoch kirch, at the children's fancy dress ball at the Glever ings', to which you, you remember, went as the Marshal.

You were dressed like that picture in the dining-room at Fressingham, which hangs to the right of the side board. And then all of a sudden I found myself back at Hochkirch, for the bands had struck up again, the boy had pulled the cord, the covering dropped, and there stood the big bronze statue — hat, wig, boots, baton, everything, exactly like the boy and Hke the picture. I seemed to be dreaming, and Lotta must have noticed something strange about me, for she said — " ' What is it, Dorothy ? You look as if you had seen a ghost.' " ' Why is he dressed like that ? ' was all I could say. "'Who?' " ' The statue.' "'Oh! that is how they did dress a hundred years ago ; it is a hundred years ago since he was killed here.' " ' But who was he 1 ' I asked. '"Who was he? Why, the Feld-Marschall Eete to be sure, or "Keith," you English would call him; I believe he was English himself.' " Then I knew half the puzzle : the statue was of the same man as your portrait.

But who was the boy 1 I could not rest till I had found that out; it seemed KRIEGSPIEL 5 so strange. The ceremony was over now, and Count Rudolf joined us for a few minutes ; and through him I got hold of an official programme, in which it was announced that the statue would be unveiled, after King William's speech, by ' the high-born Lionel Keith Glemham, a collateral descendant of the Field-Marshal Keith.' " And in him, of course, I recognized your boy, the boy Tom has sometimes spoken of, but who I only knew was being brought up somewhere on the Continent. Naturally I couldn't rest there, no woman could ; and through Count Rudolf I made still further inquiries, and learnt that the boy, your boy, had been brought the day before from Gottingen (you lived yourself once, I know, for nearly a twelvemonth at Gottingen) by an old Professor Miiller, and they were stopping in the chief inn of the place.

We — Charlotta and I — were to have lunched with royalty in a great pavilion ; but I begged off, and went straight to the inn. Alas ! boy and Professor were both to be at the banquet, so I had to wait for more than a couple of hours. And then I saw him. Charles, he is such a beautiful boy, so frank and generous, a little old-fashioned perhaps, but such a thorough little gentleman. And so like you, not in face so much as in voice and gesture ; he has a trick of sitting with his right knee clasped in both hands that I remember well. " I like him ; and he, I think, likes me. And we talked, and talk still, much together. For — was it not good of them? — Lotta's father let me ask him and Professor Miiller to come back with us to Kalkstein, and they are staying here until Friday week. The Professor is a historian, a man, I am told, ' of European fame.' I don't particularly take to him myself, but he has been very kind to Lionel.

And Lionel's talk is all about you and Fressingham. He speaks wonderfully good English, considering ; and he knows about you, and your school-days, and Balder the old mastiff, and how you got the V.C. (he has a book about that, he tells me, at Gbttingen), and more too about the Glem- KRIEGSPIEL hams and Fressingham than ever I knew myself. Some of this he has learned from the Professor, who it seems has published a book or a pamphlet or something of the sort about your family; and some from Sergeant Mackenzie, your old Scotch butler or steward, who (it seems so strange) goes over to Germany every summer to see him. But, Charles, — and this is why I am writing to you — he tells me he has never once seen you to his knowledge ; he never hears from you, and has never written to you ; and he has never set foot in England since he was brought from it a baby.

Now, is this right? If it is wrong, I do hope my writing to you may help to bring things right. Anyhow, I do not believe you will be angry with " Your old friend, " Dorothy Discipline. " P.S. — I don't of course know your address, but I am enclosing this to Tom, who will, I expect, be able to forward it through your bankers or somehow. He is such a brave little fellow, Charles." [Addressed to Sir Charles Keith Glemham, Bart., under cover to the Rev. Thomas Discipline, Henningham Rectory, Thwaite, Suffolk ; and readdressed to Major Glemham, Poste restante, Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.] A Telegram. "New York, March 23, 1868. Mackenzie, Fressing ham Priory, Thwaite, Suffolk. England. Am returning. Fetch boy from Gbttingen. Glemham." Another Telegram. "New York, March 23, 1868. Rev. Discipline, Hen ningham, Thwaite, Suffolk, England. Am returning. Boy summoned. Will write London. Glemham."

Chapter II In

1868 it was still slow travelling by the Great Eastern Railway from London to Thwaite Junction ; and the train by which Sir Charles Glemham came down on the evening of April 15, was not even called an "express," but took fully four hours to do the eighty odd miles. Glemham had tipped the guard for a first class compartment to himself ; but long before the train reached Colchester he had begun to weary of his solitude. He glanced through a bundle of newspapers, only to pitch them aside ; he rolled and smoked cigarette after cigarette, and at last he fell to counting the telegraph posts, that slowest resource for making a journey pass quickly. His thoughts meanwhile ran somewhat thus — " Twenty posts — or is it twenty-five? — to a mile. Say twenty-five, then a hundred posts makes four miles.

Four into eighty-three, that's roughly a twentieth, and the twentieth of four hours is twelve minutes. Now then, five, ten, fifteen, twenty — hullo 1 what station is this ? Chelmsford, yes, that is the church-tower. I remember when I was at school coming home for the holidays, there were two other Stonyhurst boys, the Ratcliffes, used to get out at Chelmsford ; two of their sisters often came to meet them, and one of them was a very pretty girl. Off again at last. Let's try another count. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five— missed one there ; well, it's so much to the good — thirty, thirty-five. By Jove, this is slow work, though, worse than crossing KRIEGSPIEL the Rockies, for then one had something to do besides smoke and think. I wish I could help thinking now ; if only I knew, if only I could be certain !

She says he is like me, not in face but in manner ; how on earth could he be like me, unless — unless — ? Bah ! I wish I knew one way or other, and most likely I never shall know. Three months ago I felt certain that he was none of mine ; and then comes Dorothy's letter, and certainty changes to doubt— a doubt that must be solved, and that most likely never will be solved. For two pins I would get out at the very next station and go right back to Mexico. Only it was strange her meeting him like that ; it must have been meant for something. And besides, before I was half-way across I know I should be wanting to turn again. Well, in four hours' time now I ought to know something. How I have counted the weeks and the days since I got Dorothy's letter seven weeks ago. It was good of her to write it ; and yet I half wonder at Tom's forwarding it.

So she never has married. I was certain I never had seen it." And so on, and so on, and so on, to the accompaniment of the train's slow rumble. The man whose musings ran thus was just in his thirty-sixth year, but looked both older and younger. His close-cut hair and heavy moustache were more than grizzled ; but his mobile, finely-cut features, his fresh complexion, and his quick, bright, grey eyes might have been those of a lad hardly twenty. In build he was small but wiry, with a soldierly carriage and with a nervous restlessness of movement betokening impulsiveness. Im pulsive he was, and yet there were two deep furrows between his eyebrows that spoke of thoughtfulness and resolution. There have been men more unlike in some ways than he and the great Earl of Strafford. At Colchester he alighted and took a turn along the train, and then, to the guard's surprise but with the guard's assistance, shifted into a third-class smoking carriage, its occupants two farmers and a blue-jacket.

The farmers got out at Ardleigh, and Glemham by that time had fallen into talk with the sailor. He was a KRIEGSPIEL pleasant young fellow, a gunnery instructor on his way from Plymouth to Lowestoft to join a gun-boat. "And isn't it odd, sir?" he said; "I've an elder brother aboard her ; and all the eleven years I've been in the service this'll make the third time we two shall have sailed together; once in the Pacific and once on the China station." He went on to tell how they were natives of Tavistock, and had been left orphans at an early age, so that till two years ago he had had no home that he could rightly call his own. But then he had married, and now had a wife and a baby-boy at Plymouth. "It's a rare thing," he observed, "to keep a chap steady, to think he has his missus and a young 'un to look to him."

"Yes," Glemham answered, "that must be a rare thing indeed." It was curious how quickly the telegraph-posts flashed by unnoticed now ; and curious also how quickly these two had become almost friends. The sailor himself seemed surprised, for, as he took a fill of tobacco from Glemham, he said — " It isn't every genlleman, sir, would speak to a blue jacket like you've been talking to me." " No ! is that so ? more's the pity, then. But I was a soldier myself once ; and, besides, I've just come from a country where one is glad sometimes to have a talk with anybody, even a horse-thief. That sounds a rude thing to say ; but I couldn't tell you how glad I am to have changed into this carriage. The first two hours of the journey seemed like a long day ; this last one has gone in no time. Whereabouts have we got to, I wonder ?

" It was dark now, but the moon was up, and through the window he could dimly make out a wide estuary. The Stour? no, the Orwell, for here came the tunnel, and then the gas-lamps of Ipswich. The journey was three-fourths done ; and the last fourth, after Ipswich, sped quickly by, though the train's pace grew even slower than before. But Westerfield station was past, and Bealings and Woodbridge ; and at last, yes, here KRIEGSPIEL was Thwaite Junction. Glemham got his things together, and, helped by the sailor, alighted, then turned on the step, and shook hands through the window, the sailor leaning out as he wished him " a lucky arrival. And I'm downright sorry, sir," he added, " to part from you. Good-bye." A man came up and asked, Was he going by the 'bus? " No," Glemham replied, " I want my things here and the others out of the van taken over to the Dragon, and a trap from there to drive over to Fressingham."

" There ain't no Dragon now," said the man ; " it's the Station Hotel. And you won't be able to have no trap either ; both our hosses are running in the 'bus." "All right, then, I'll leave my things and walk. Only I shall want something to eat first." He followed his luggage over to the inn. As he remembered it, fourteen years before, it had been a quaint gabled building, whose huge sign, the Roaring Dragon, had once been the figure-head of a Dutch man of-war, which went down in the Solebay sea-fight. The present " hotel " was an ugly white-brick erection ; and the parlour into which the landlady showed him, all horsehair and veneer, was a sorry substitute for the old sanded kitchen of its predecessor, with oaken settles and vast open fire-place. Still, the cold round of beef that was presently set before him, with bread and cheese, and a jug of ale, proved acceptable enough after the long journey.

He had not finished when a tap came to the door, and the landlady entered again, full of apologies. " I am sure, Sir Charles Glemham, if only John — Mr. Cox — had knowed for one minute it was you at the station ; but there ! seeing you get out of a third-class, and shaking hands with a sailor, and him not being much of a scbolard. But I — I was under-housemaid at the Priory, seventeen years since come Michaelmas, which you mayn't remember me, but Mrs. Mackenzie will, the name being Susan Marsh, though my christened name was Cassandra, only her ladyship thought it too sine — the moment ever I saw your boxes, and read one KRIEGSPIEL 11 of the di-rections, ' Why, John,' I cries, ' if it isn't Sir Charles hisself, returned from foreign parts, and that's why the young gentleman will have come the other day by train with Mr. Mackenzie.' But I am real put about John didn't keep one of the horses.

You see, Sir Charles, they take the 'bus up to the town, three miles off, and stop the night there ; but he could have kept 'em here easy, or one of them ; and what to do for you now, I am sure I don't rightly know, without John was to run up to the Vicarage, and ask for the loan of the pheayton." "Oh, no," said Glemham. "I would really just as soon walk, only is there any one can carry a bag for me?" " Carry your bag, Sir Charles, why John would him self, and proud to ; but, as luck will have it, there's young Job List in the bar at this present minute, and he comes from Bartlemere, just this side of Fressingham, so that fare as if he was there for the purpose." So ten minutes later, it being a little past ten, Glem ham and Job set out upon the three-mile walk. Job had evidently been cautioned to be extremely respectful, and respect with him took the form of taciturnity.

This chimed in, however, with Glemham's present mood. That road, so long untraversed, was a road of many memories, of many home-comings, all joyous but the last one and — the present. Here was the bend where one night as he was driving from the station (he had been to a cricket-match at Ipswich), the mare had shied into the hedge, and by the lamp he had dimly descried something right in the middle of the road. " What's that ? " he had cried ; and a hiccuppy voice had re sponded, "It's only me, I am rather inebriated, I am." Further on was the turnpike ; Job said that old Ben kept it still, and was deafer than ever. Half-a-mile further yet was Bartlemere church, in front of which used to stand the stocks ; Glemham turned a few yards aside to see if they still were there, and felt comforted to find they were not gone.

And that white post marked the boundary of Fressingham parish — barely a KRIEGSPIEL mile now to home. Yonder was the spinny, near which he had shot his first partridge; and here came the gravel-pit and the hill leading down to the river. From its brow in the daytime may be caught the first sight of the Priory ; but all was black now, not so much as a gleam from a window. It is a pretty steep hill for Suffolk ; and so, too, is the ascent on the opposite side. The water-meadows below looked un altered in the moonlight, with the little, deep-pooled Ken winding through them between the willows and poplars. The road crosses the stream by a shallow ford, which yet in time of flood is dangerous. Then horsemen, as well as foots arers, must take to the narrow, buttressed red-brick bridge, which was built by the monks long centuries ago.

Midway across the bridge there is a triangular recess, in which now stood the figure of a man, outlined blackly against the moonshine. As Glemham came opposite, the figure removed his hat, and, bowing gravely, said — " Buenas noches, Senor Caballero." "Vaya usted " Glemham began, then breaking off suddenly cried — " Spanish 1 And you know me ! Now who on earth are you ? " " A tenant of yours, Sir Charles Glemham ; Job List there will tell you who." And with those words the stranger moved quickly off in the direction whence they had come, till, striking to the left, he was lost in the darkness. "That's curious," said Glemham; "do you know who that is ? " "That," Job replied, "that's Master Gripper, that be." "And who in the name of wonder is Master Gripper ? " "Well, he's one o' the wise men, folks saa."

" One of the wise men ; whatever do you mean ? " "Why them what Parson reads about in charch. But Master Gripper he lives down there in th' owd mill." " Not the Gibbet Mill, surely? " KRIEGSPIEL 13 "Yes," Job replied, in the old Gibbet Mill, which had been shut up for more than fifty years, since the last miller was brained in it with a mallet by his man, who for the crime had been hanged in chains outside ; the stump of the gibbet still is visible. " But," Glemham asked, " how long has he lived there, and what does he do? this Mr. Gripper of yours." " Oh ! he'll ha' lived there going four year ; and what do he dew ? why, he tells folks secrets, leastwise his birds dew." "His birds?" "Yes, his dows, they come flying in to him from all parts with the news. Father was at the Glemham Arms once, it was a Saturday night, not long after Master Gripper fust came here, and in he walks, Master Gripper dew, and he towd 'em as how Ben Moyes, Sam Moyes's brother, what was goin' to Australey, were drownded, and hundreds more on 'em.

And Parson he towd father he never knowed nothin' about it hisself till three days arterwards." Job was waxing talkative, but Glemham was relapsing into silence. They had gained the hill-top, had passed the park-gates and the empty lodge, and now were walking up the straight avenue. Two hundred yards more, and he would have reached the old house. For the past three months he had thought incessantly of this home-coming, how he would feel, and what would be the outcome of it all ; and now the meeting with that confounded stranger seemed to dissipate possible hopes — despite himself he had been full of hope — and to raise up impossible fears. To be accosted in Spanish thus here, upon Fressingham bridge — pshaw ! hopes and fears must speedily be solved, for here was the old stone archway, the bridge over the moat, and the house itself.

It rose up black and white in the moonlight, so like, but unlike, what Glemham remembered it, the likeness of a corpse to the living. " Here, give me the bag," he said quickly, " good night ; there's that for you." And Job went off, well KRIEGSPIEL pleased with half-a-crown ; whilst Glemham, after a momentary pause, pulled hard at the heavy door-bell. It gave back no sound ; the wire had grown slack with disuse. That vexed him, too ; and when he knocked, and knocked, and got no answer, vexation found vent in words — ■ "I might as well have stopped the night in London, and written to Adam, and followed my letter next day. But that's me all over. I fancied they'd be as eager to see me back as I was impatient to arrive. TJiey I and who are ' they ' ? two old servants and " He broke off, and was just going round to try the back of the house, when footsteps were heard within, and, a few words exchanged, the door was hastily opened.

Chapter III The

old man who opened it carried a candle. Its light showed him to be not so very old, not much indeed over sixty. He was hale and comely still, thick-set and vigorous, with curly hair and a merry twinkling eye, an eye that endeared him to womankind. There was something about him of Falstaff, not the Falstaff of caricature, all paunch and vapouring, but Shakespeare's Sir John, the knight whom we cannot help liking, shrewd, jovial, humorous, kindly. " So you're come at last, Sir Charles," he said, "and come like a thief in the night-time. What for, then, could you not drive, and what for did you not write ? Eh ! but, Master Charley, it is glad I am to be seeing you, it is like old times ; and it is glad Alison will be, and young Master Lionel too — you'll not have heard that he's back." "Yes, the woman told me so at the Dragon — the Station Hotel.

How long has he been here ? " "How long? — this fortnight past. Every night the last week he has sat up against your coming, sat up to night till nigh on half-past ten." " Ye-e-es," Glemham said, "and how are you yourself, Addie ? You're looking grand. And Mrs. Mackenzie, she's all right, I hope." " Oh, ay ! there's nothing wrong with the woman ; 'deed, I tell her she's grown ever so much younger now she has got her young master to see to again. She'll be down in a minute ; I told her I knew it was you." KRIEGSPIEL And even as he said it, she entered the big, dark hall ; a little woman, something younger than her husband, with keen-cut, pleasant features, and brown, prominent, spaniel-like eyes. Unlike her husband, she spoke with an unmistakably Scotch accent. " The holy Virgin be praised !

" she cried, " that we have you back again, Sir Charles. It has been sair work waiting on you for us old folk and for Master Lionel. Poor bairn, I thought he never would fall asleep the night, though he was fair tired out." She too, then, would talk of the boy, whom, for all his desire, Glemham himself might hardly have men tioned. Now he said awkwardly — " Oh ! so he is sleeping. Because, Mrs. Mackenzie, I might wish to see him presently — you know I never have seen him yet." "Yes, Sir Charles, I do know that," she said signifi cantly ; " but you'll take some refreshment." " No, I got something back at Thwaite Junction. But I'll have some wine, if Adam can fish up a bottle of claret ; and there's a fire we can smoke by, I hope, for I want to have a good long talk with him." " I could put on a fire anywhere, Sir Charles ; but there's a good one in the housekeeper's room, if you wouldn't mind."

" Mind ! why should I ? if you won't mind the smell of my tobacco. And — Mrs. Mackenzie, where is he — the boy, I mean — sleeping?" " In your old bed-room, Sir Charles — the one you always had as a boy. Would you wish me to waken him?" " No, no, by no means. Only — in case I do want to see him — you might just set a lamp there now, so that it may be the less likely to wake him if I go in. And then you go off to bed ; I'll not keep Adam up so very late." Ten minutes later the two men were sitting together — Glemham with his claret and a cigarette, old Adam with his pipe and a tumbler of toddy. They had talked KRIEGSPIEL 17 for a little while of things indifferent, his voyage, the crops, even the weather, when Glemham said suddenly — • "•You remember, Adam, fourteen years ago, when I was stationed at Plymouth ?

" " Do I remember 1 as if I was likely to forget." " And the lady of Lansdowne Cottage, Ercilla — ' Miladi ' I used to call her ? " " Ay, the young foreign lady, Sir Charles, Master Lionel's mother." " Did you know I was married to her — that she was Lady Glemham ? " " At the finish I did, by reason that she told Alison. Before that Alison and I had often had words about it. Alison would have it she wasn't, and I would have it she was." "Why?" " Well, chiefly because you had Alison to wait on her. But I should know something of women, and it was easy to see she was none of your kept madams. If she had been, she'd either have been mock-modest or else brazen, and she was neither. So I guessed." "And guessed rightly. Yes, we were married. More's the pity, I have been thinking these fourteen years; but now it seems just possible I am — was — wrong.

You remember about four months after you and Alison came to us from Suffolk, I was summoned off to the Riviera by my mother's illness. I was nearly two months away, and all that time I never wrote to her, or she to me. You remember that ? " "Of course I do, Sir Charles. You know, even servants can't help being a bit curious. She told AJison she couldn't write English, and that did seem rather strange, considering how well she spoke it ; and I wondered, too, that you, being so well educated, shouldn't have been able to write her language." "Ah, well! — Nearly two months, and then one day I came back." " Yes, and went off again in less than half-an-hour." " True, and never saw her again, and never have seen the child she died in giving birth to. Now, Adam, c KRIEGSPIEL there are some things I want you to tell me.