THIRTY-FIVE
The fire had been visible for a hundred miles and across eight counties of England. Soldiers, doctors, nurses and civilians had stood in long, snaking lines on the cliffs of France and watched the flames, blazing like a Saxon beacon from the Viking days. They were unsure what it represented, having no way to know they were witnessing the death throes of a Zeppelin of the German Imperial Navy, fresh from having bombed London. By dawn, the giant leviathan of the air that had beached itself on a Sussex hillside was reduced to a smouldering Duralumin skeleton. By dawn, the first curious visitors began arriving.
Among them was Herbert Cartwright, Boy Scout, whose self-selected task was to monitor the south coast for invasion. Nobody was certain how or why the Zeppelin came down. If it had been intercepted by the planes of the RNAS, it would have exploded in the air over the capital. But then again, the British biplanes could not reach the heights that the dirigibles operated at over London.
It was possible there was a mechanical malfunction or a failure in navigation. Perhaps the skin had been punctured by anti-Zeppelin ground fire, but the beast limped on, its fifteen internal gas cells bleeding out the precious hydrogen, losing height as it desperately tried to cross the Channel to safety.
By the time Bert Cartwright arrived soldiers had been posted to protect the still-glowing wreckage, now stripped to the internal metalwork, from souvenir hunters. Bert was concerned because the machine had come down close to the hollow where he liked to fly his kite.
As he pushed between the onlookers, Bert picked up snippets of information, or at least rumour. The Zeppelin had crash-landed intact. There were no bodies to be found. The crew had torched its own ship – the hydrogen and Blau gas fuel would make this a relatively simple task – to prevent its capture. They had scattered into the countryside but, with no clothes other than their uniforms and no language but their own, they had all been apprehended.
Bert took a notebook from his satchel and began to sketch the enormous cigar-shaped wreckage. He would write a report for his Scout troop. It reminded him of the photographs he had seen of the distorted remains of the Great Yarmouth pavilion, the end-of-the-pier hall burned down in 1914 when the suffragettes were refused leave to hold a meeting there. ‘Mad Witches’ his dad had called them.
As he was sketching, he glanced over and saw a familiar figure among the crowd. It was the Tweedy Man. Bert had first seen him that day, more than a year ago, when he had been flying his kite. Then, he had been arguing with another, shorter man, a soldier, judging by his cap and the epaulets on his coat. He had often glimpsed the taller one since, striding over the Downs whatever the weather, usually dressed in something eccentric, sometimes the scuffed tweed suit he had on now. The man had aged in the interval since that row with the army officer. He appeared more stooped, his movements stiffer, the once impressive stride shorter. Like everyone else, the Tweedy Man was examining the wreckage but, as he stepped around the perimeter, he was also peering intently at the ground.
As Bert watched him, the man saw something at his feet that took his interest. It was as if an electric shock had gone through him. Dropping his stick – a rough-hewn kebbie – the Tweedy Man pulled something from his pocket and fell to his hands and knees, careless to the muddy, trampled grass and its effect on his clothing. He stopped periodically and peered through his magnifying glass until, satisfied, he moved on, scrabbling this way and that.
When he stood, the man had regained his old, erect posture. He looked around, as if for an ally or witness, and his eyes alighted on the boy. Bert quickly went back to his sketching. He was aware, though, that the Tweedy Man was coming across.
He apologized for interrupting in a surprisingly soft, soothing voice. But he required some help. He could tell, he said, that Bert was a Boy Scout and that his mother worked in a munitions factory (the woven bracelet told him about the scouting and a faint yellow lyddite thumb mark on his shirt collar pinpointed the factory, he later confessed) and was certain his father was doing his bit. Indeed, Bert replied, his dad was a quartermaster in France. So would Bert like to assist His Majesty’s Government? He would, he replied, albeit with some nerves. Excellent, said the Tweedy Man, asking his name and then if he could borrow the notebook. On a blank page he sketched a series of what looked like zigzags, with a strange letter P in the centre. It had been written the wrong way around.
Now, said the Tweedy Man, being a Boy Scout, Bert would obviously have superior powers of observation and, besides, he was closer to the ground than most. He wanted Bert to walk around and find other evidence of this pattern in the soil, where the grass had been scorched or worn away. Could he do that? And he produced a shilling.
Bert, conscious he was late for school, but even more alert to what a shilling could buy him, set out in an anticlockwise direction, while the Tweedy Man walked the other circumference, bent at the waist, sometimes using his kebbie to squat down, then haul himself back up.
To Bert the ground was little more than a trampled mess. The stream of sightseers didn’t help, jostling to get as close to the downed dirigible as possible and take photographs with their Vest Pocket Kodaks. He had to detour around clumps of these every few yards, and in doing so he almost missed the first of the telltale patterns in the soil.
He gave a shrill whistle, and the Tweedy Man, upon hearing it, hurried around to where Bert stood, doing his best to stop anyone obliterating the marks. He was breathless when he got there, and Bert pointed to the imprint. Tweedy Man was delighted. He then began to look around, examined the terrain, then pointed with his stick and hurried away from the crash site. Bert, now apparently no longer needed, nevertheless tailed him.
They had gone around thirty yards when Tweedy Man stopped dead. For a second the old boy looked dismayed, twisting this way and that, like a bloodhound that had lost the scent, but, having crouched and used his magnifying glass once more, he saw something that spurred him on again.
They crossed over a bluff, and now there was a steep slope, leading down to a beech wood. Again he squatted, with no little huffing and puffing, and rubbed something between finger and thumbs. His eyes were taken by a clump of wind-bent bushes just below the ridge to the left. He motioned for the boy to stay back and began to creep towards the shrubs on his toes, the kebbie now held like a staff. Bert couldn’t help but notice a rather worrying gleam in his eyes when he turned and made a shushing gesture with his finger across his lips.
With a small cry he leaped forward and parted the branches of the small trees, which revealed a small hollow within their embrace. For a second he disappeared as the twigs closed back over him, but a second later he was out again. Sensing the excitement, such as it had been, was over, Bert advanced on the guilty bushes. The Tweedy Man used his staff to move some of the branches, so Bert could see inside.
Lying in the chalky soil, amid the dark roots, was a prone figure, dressed in what Bert, the invasion expert, knew was a dark blue German naval uniform. On his feet was a pair of fine, laced, leather ankle-boots. On the soles was the reverse of the pattern they had been hunting, with the P the right way round. It was also obvious to Bert that the man was quite dead. His face had been badly burned and there was congealed blood on his clothes. It was his first dead body. He determined to note the date.
The Tweedy Man explained patiently that the P and the lightning strikes told him that the boots were from the town of Pirmasens, centre of the German shoe trade, and manufactured by a company called Pessen. Then he sent him off to fetch one of the soldiers.
When he returned, the Tweedy Man ducked out of the hollow, brushed himself down, and told the soldier that this had been the second-in-command of the Zeppelin, that he hailed from Bremen and that his high-quality boots, belt and other leatherwork suggested that he was from a wealthy family, as they were not standard naval issue. Residues and burns on his hands suggested it was he who lit the charge to destroy the stranded craft.
Injured in the subsequent explosion, and fearing he would slow his friends down in their futile attempts to evade capture, he had walked, dragging one foot behind him, away from the burning dirigible, then had fallen on his hands and knees and crawled several hundred yards, leaving telltale tracks, droplets of blood and flakes of burned skin, to hide in this hollow, where he had expired at sometime shortly after midnight.
Having made sure the dumbfounded soldier had all that straight in his head, the Tweedy Man thanked Bert, explained how he had known he was a Boy Scout, and left him with his shilling and a very odd sentiment. ‘It seems, young Bert, that man cannot live by bees alone after all.’ And then he strode off, his legs covering the ground with the speed and spring Bert remembered from his first encounter with the strange man.