The Human Boy and the War

by Eden Phillpotts

"Your papers are chockful of lies," he said. "If you want the truth, those of you who can read German can see it in my papers."

Of course, some of the Sixth could read German, and they borrowed his papers, and were much surprised that Wundt really believed such absolute rot against the evidence of our papers. But he was simply blind, and went so far as to say that he'd sooner believe the pettiest little German rag than all our swaggerest papers, let alone the Merivale Weekly Trumpet, which was fearfully warlike, because the editor had a son who was training for the Front.

But most of all, Wundt hated Punch, and, finding this out, we used to slip the cartoons into his desk, and put them under his pillow, and arrange them elsewhere where he must find them. These made him fairly foam at the mouth, and he said he hoped the first thing the Germans would do, when they got to London, would be to go to Punch and put the men who drew the pictures and made the jokes to the sword.

No doubt it was because they were so jolly true.

The masters were very decent to Wundt, especially Fortescue, who saw how trying it must be for him, living in an enemy's country; and when Wundt told me in secret that he felt his position was becoming unbearable, and that he had written and asked if he could be exchanged for a prisoner, or something. He said in a gloomy sort of voice: "I may tell you I haven't wasted my time here, and perhaps some day Doctor Dunston and you chaps will know it to your cost."

Well, though friendly enough to Wundt, I didn't much like that, and told my own special chum, Manwaring, what he'd said; and Manwaring told me that in his opinion Wundt ought to be neutralised immediately. But I knew enough of Wundt to feel certain he could never be properly neutralised, because he had told me that once a German always a German, and that he'd rather be a dead German than a living King of England, and that if he had to stop in England for a million years, he'd still be as German as ever, if not more so. And he'd also fairly shaken with pride because he'd read somewhere that the Kaiser had said that he would give any doctor a hundred thousand marks if he would draw every drop of English blood out of his veins. And when he said it, Tracey had answered that if the Kaiser came over to England, there were plenty of doctors who would oblige him for half the money.

But now I thought, without any unkind feeling to Wundt, that I ought to tell Travers major, as head of the school, of his dark threats; and I did; and Travers thanked me and said I was quite right to tell him, because war is war, and you never know.

Of course, if Wundt was going to turn out to be a spy, it wasn't possible for me to be his friend, and I told him so. And he saw that. He said he was sorry, if anything, to lose my friendship, but he should always do all that he considered right in the service of his country, and he couldn't let me stand between him and his duty. Which amounted to admitting that he was a spy, or, at any rate, was trying to be one; for, of course, at Merivale a spy was no more use than he would have been at the North Pole. There was simply nothing to spy about, except the photographs of new girls on Brown's mantelpiece.

Then Travers made a move, and he was sorry to do it; but he was going to be a soldier, just as much as Wundt was, and though he never jawed about Woolwich like Wundt did about Potsdam, yet he was quite as military at heart; and though he didn't wear the English colours inside his waistcoat lining, like Wundt wore the German colours, as he admitted to me in a friendly moment, yet Travers felt just as keen about England as Wundt did about Germany, and quite as cast down when we heard about Mons as Wundt was when he heard about the retreat on the Marne. He pretended, of course, it was only strategy, but he knew jolly well it wasn't.

Then Travers major reluctantly decided that, with a spy, certain things must be done. He didn't like doing them, but they had to be done. And the first thing was to prove it.