The harassed commandant grinned. “You’ve offended his Lordship, and he is a bad enemy. All those damned Comitadjis are. You would be well advised not to go on to Constantinople.”
“And have that blighter in the red hat loot the trucks on the road? No, thank you. I am going to see them safe at Chataldja, or whatever they call the artillery depot.”
I said a good deal more, but that is an abbreviated translation of my remarks. My word for “blighter” was trottel, but I used some other expressions which would have ravished my young Turk friend to hear. Looking back, it seems pretty ridiculous to have made all this fuss about guns which were going to be used against my own people. But I didn’t see that at the time. My professional pride was up in arms, and I couldn’t bear to have a hand in a crooked deal.
“Well, I advise you to go armed,” said the commandant. “You will have a guard for the trucks, of course, and I will pick you good men. They may hold you up all the same. I can’t help you once you are past the frontier, but I’ll send a wire to Oesterzee and he’ll make trouble if anything goes wrong. I still think you would have been wiser to humour Rasta Bey.”
As I was leaving he gave me a telegram. “Here’s a wire for your Captain Schenk.” I slipped the envelope in my pocket and went out.
Schenk was pretty sick, so I left a note for him. At one o’clock I got the train started, with a couple of German Landwehr in each truck and Peter and I in a horse-box. Presently I remembered Schenk’s telegram, which still reposed in my pocket. I took it out and opened it, meaning to wire it from the first station we stopped at. But I changed my mind when I read it. It was from some official at Regensburg, asking him to put under arrest and send back by the first boat a man called Brandt, who was believed to have come aboard at Absthafen on the 30th of December.
I whistled and showed it to Peter. The sooner we were at Constantinople the better, and I prayed we would get there before the fellow who sent this wire repeated it and got the commandant to send on the message and have us held up at Chataldja. For my back had fairly got stiffened about these munitions, and I was going to take any risk to see them safely delivered to their proper owner. Peter couldn’t understand me at all. He still hankered after a grand destruction of the lot somewhere down the railway. But then, this wasn’t the line of Peter’s profession, and his pride was not at stake. We had a mortally slow journey. It was bad enough in Bulgaria, but when we crossed the frontier at a place called Mustafa Pasha we struck the real supineness of the East. Happily I found a German officer there who had some notion of hustling, and, after all, it was his interest to get the stuff moved. It was the morning of the 16th, after Peter and I had been living like pigs on black bread and condemned tin stuff, that we came in sight of a blue sea on our right hand and knew we couldn’t be very far from the end.
It was jolly near the end in another sense. We stopped at a station and were stretching our legs on the platform when I saw a familiar figure approaching. It was Rasta, with half a dozen Turkish gendarmes.
I called Peter, and we clambered into the truck next our horse-box. I had been half expecting some move like this and had made a plan.
The Turk swaggered up and addressed us. “You can get back to Rustchuk,” he said. “I take over from you here. Hand me the papers.”