Chapter 14

General Cochrane halted again, and again he gazed down the little river, the river of England, the river which he, more than any other, had kept for English folk and their peaceful play-times. I knew I must not hurry him; I waited.

"The thing came to me like lightning," he went on, "and I had only to go from one simple step to another; it seemed all thought out for me. It was something, don't you see, which I'd known all my lifetime, but hadn't once thought of since the war began. I went direct to my bankers and got a box out of the safe and fetched it home in a cab. There I opened it and took out papers and went over them.... This part of the tale is mostly in print," General Cochrane interrupted himself. "Have you read it? I don't want to bore you with repetitions."

I answered hurriedly, trembling for fear I might say the wrong thing: "I've read what's in print, but your telling it puts it in another world. Please go on. Please don't shorten anything."

The shadow of a smile played. "I rather like telling you a story, d'you know," he spoke, half absent-mindedly--his real thoughts were with that huge past. He swept back to it. "You know, of course, about Dundonald's Destroyer--the invention of my great-grandfather's kinsman, Thomas Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald? He was a good bit of an old chap in various ways. He did things to the French fleet that put him as a naval officer in the class with Nelson and Drake. But he's remembered in history by his invention. It was a secret, of course, one of the puzzles of the time and of years after, up to 1917. It was known there was something. He offered it to the government in 1811, and the government appointed a committee to examine into it. The chairman was the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, said to be the ablest administrator of military affairs of that time. Also there were Admirals Lord Keith and Exmouth and the Congreve brothers of the ordnance department. A more competent committee of five could not have been gathered in the world. This board would not recommend the adoption of the scheme. Why? They reported that there was no question that the invention would do all which Dundonald claimed, but it was so unspeakably dreadful as to be impossible for civilized men.

"There was not a shadow of doubt, the committee reported, that Dundonald's device would not merely defeat but annihilate and sweep out of existence any hostile force, whole armies and navies. 'No power on earth could stand against it,' said the old fellow, and the five experts backed him up. But they considered that the devastation would be inhuman beyond permissible warfare. Not war, annihilation. In fact, they shelved it because it was too efficient. There was great need of means for fighting Napoleon just then, so they gave it up reluctantly, but it was a bit too shocking.

"The weak point of the business was, as Dundonald himself declared, that it was so simple--as everybody knows now--that its first use would tell the secret and put it in the hands of other nations. Therefore the committee recommended that this incipient destruction should be stowed away and kept secret, so that no power more unscrupulous than England should get it and use it for the annihilation of England and the conquest of the world. Also the committee persuaded the Earl before he went on his South American adventure to swear formally that he would never disclose his device except in the service of England. He kept that oath.

"Well, the formula for this affair was, of course, in pigeonholes or vaults in the British Admiralty ever since the committee in 1811 had examined and refused it. But there was also, unknown to the public, another copy. The Earl was with my great-grandfather, his kinsman and lifelong friend, shortly before his death, and he gave this copy to him with certain conditions. The old chap had an ungovernable temper, quarreled right and left, don't you know, his life long, and at this time and until he died he was not on speaking terms with his son Thomas, who succeeded him as Earl, or indeed with any of the three other sons. Which accounts for his trusting to my great-grandfather the future of his invention. I found a quaint note with the papers. He said in effect that he had come to believe with the committee that it was quite too shocking for decent folk. Yet, he suggested, the time might come when England was in straits and only a sweeping blow could serve her. If that time should come it would be a joy to him in heaven or in hell--he said--to think that a man of his name had used the work of his brains to save England.

"Therefore, the Earl asked my grandfather to guard this gigantic secret and to see to it that one man in each generation of Cochranes should know it and have it at hand for use in an emergency. My grandfather came into the papers when he came of age, and after him my father; I was due to read them when I should be twenty-one. I was only twenty in 1917. But the papers were mine, and from the moment it flashed to me what Kitchener meant I didn't hesitate. It was this enormous power which was placed suddenly in the hands of a lad of twenty. The Sirdar placed it there.

"I went over the business in an hour--it was simple, like most big things. You know what it was, of course; everybody knows now. Wasn't it extraordinary that in five thousand years of fighting no one ever hit on it before? I rushed to the War Office.

"Well, the thing came off. At first they pooh-poohed me as an unbalanced boy, but they looked up the documents in the Admiralty and there was no question. It isn't often a youngster is called into the councils of the government, and I've wondered since how I held my own. I've come to believe that I was merely a body for Kitchener's spirit. I was conscious of no fatigue, no uncertainty. I did things as the Sirdar might have done them, and it appears to me only decent to realize that he did do them, and not I. You probably know the details."

I waited, hoping that he would not stop. Then I said: "I know that the government asked for twenty-five volunteers for a service which would destroy the German fleet, but which would mean almost certain death to the volunteers. I know that you headed the list and that thousands offered." My voice shook and I spoke with difficulty as I realized to whom I was speaking. "I know that you were the only one who came back alive, and that you were barely saved."

General Cochrane seemed not to hear me. He was living over enormous events.

"It was a bright morning in the North Sea," he talked on, but not to me now. "Nobody but ourselves knew just what was to be done, but everybody hoped--they didn't know what. It was a desperate England from which we sailed away. We hadn't long to wait--the second morning. There were their ships, the triumphant long lines of the invader. There were their crowded transports, the soldiers coming to crucify England as they had crucified Belgium--thousands and tens of thousands of them. Then--we did it. German power was wiped off the face of the earth. German arrogance was ended for all time. And that was the last I knew," said General Cochrane. "I was conscious till it was known that the trick had worked. Of course it couldn't be otherwise, yet it was so beyond anything which mankind had dreamed that I couldn't believe it till I knew. Then, naturally, I didn't much care if I lived or died. I'd done the turn as the Sirdar told me, and one life was a small thing to pay. I dropped into blackness quite happily, and when I woke up to this good earth I was glad. England was right. The Sirdar had saved her."

"And the Sirdar?" I asked him. "Was it--himself?"

"Himself? Most certainly."

"I mean--well--" I stammered. And then I plunged in. "I must know," I said. "Was it Lord Kitchener in flesh and blood? Had he been a prisoner in Germany and escaped? Or was it--his ghost?"

The old lion rubbed his cheek consideringly. "Ah, there you have me," and he smiled. "Didn't I tell you this was a tale which could be told to few people?" he demanded. "'Flesh and blood'--ah, that's what I can't tell you. But--himself? Those people, the immense crowd which saw him and recognized him, they knew. Afterwards they begged the question. The papers were full of a remarkable speech made by an unknown officer who strikingly resembled Kitchener. That's the way they got out of it. But those people knew, that day. There wasn't any doubt in their minds when that roar of his name went up. They knew! But people are ashamed to own to the supernatural. And yet it's all around us," mused General Cochrane.

"Could it have been--did you ever think--" I began, and dared not go on.

"Did I ever think what, child?" repeated the old officer, with his autocratic friendliness. "Out with it. You and I are having a truth-feast."

"Well, then," I said, "if you won't be angry--"

"I won't. Come along."

"Did you ever think that it might have been that--you were only a boy, and wounded and weak and overstrained--and full of longing for your godfather. Did you ever think that you might have mistaken the likeness of the officer for Kitchener himself? That the thought of Dundonald's Destroyer was working in your mind before, and that it materialized at that moment and you--imagined the words he said. Perhaps imagined them afterwards, as you searched for him over London. The two things might have suggested each other in your feverish boy's brain."

I stopped, frightened, fearful that he might think me not appreciative of the honor he had done me in telling this intimate experience. But General Cochrane was in no wise disturbed.

"Yes, I've thought that," he answered dispassionately. "It may be that was the case. And yet--I can't see it. That thing happened to me. I've not been able to explain it away to my own satisfaction. I've not been able to believe otherwise than that the Sirdar, England's hero, came to save England in her peril, and that he did it by breathing his thought into me. His spirit got across somehow from over there--to me. I was the only available person alive. The copy in the archives was buried, dead and buried and forgotten for seventy years. So he did it--that way. And if your explanation is the right one it isn't so much less wonderful, is it?" he demanded. "In these days psychology dares say more than in 1917. One knows that ghost stories, as they called them in those ignorant times, are not all superstition and imagination. One knows that a soul lives beyond the present, that a soul sometimes struggles back from what we call the hereafter to this little earth--makes the difficult connection between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter, and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter. When the pull is strong enough. And what pull could be stronger than England's danger? To Kitchener?" The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the rift of light through the curtain of eternal silences.

When I spoke again: "It's a story the world ought to own some day," I said. "Love of country, faithfulness that death could not hinder."

"Well," said old General Cochrane, "when I'm gone you may write it for the world if you like, little American. And what I'll do will be to find the Sirdar, the very first instant I'm over the border, and say to him, 'I've known it was your work all along, sir, and however did you get it across?'"

A month ago my cousin sent me some marked newspapers. General Cochrane has gone over the border, and I make no doubt that before now he has found the Sirdar and that the two sons and saviors of a beloved little land on a little planet have talked over that moment, in the leisures and simplicities of eternity, and have wondered perhaps that anyone could wonder how he got it across.