Next day was blustering and stormy. Snowflakes fell thick in large globules in the streets, making them almost impassable to traffic; yet a silent and unobtrusive man ploughed his way to the hotel soon after daylight, carrying interesting news.
The German auxiliary fast cruiser Berlin had been seen entering the fjord.
This was indeed important. The news must at any cost be transmitted home, and at the earliest possible moment.
It appeared that the cruiser, a vessel of some 18,000 tons, armed with eight to a dozen quick-firing guns and other equipment, had, under her enormously powerful engines, and after disposing of her cargo of mines, laid a course northwards well into the region of floating ice, thus outwitting the vigilance of the English patrol boats. Taking the fullest advantage of the awful weather and frequent snowstorms, she had slipped unobserved through the tortuous entrances and difficult channels of the Norwegian coast; past the guard fortresses at ——; past the guardships; and finally dropped her anchor unchallenged and unhindered under the windows of the town of ——, which half encircles one of the most coveted harbours in all Europe.
It was a marvellous feat of navigation, but then it is an open secret that members of the German Navy know the ins and outs of the Norwegian fjords even better than Norwegians do themselves. They have also much better charts; both of which facts they proved in a startling manner in their manœuvres before the war.
It is another open secret that at the German War Office, in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin, was kept a complete series of the Ordnance maps of England, brought fully up-to-date by secret surveys, which gave detail and information that our maps do not show and which our War Office is probably quite unacquainted with. I was never more astonished in my life, although I had the sense to conceal it, than when an alleged German commercial traveller with whom I had been travelling somewhere in Finland sketched, in order to illustrate an argument, a correct plan of a remote part of the East Coast of England with which I was very well acquainted. On this sketch the aforesaid traveller proceeded to delineate fords to streams and hidden roadways, the existence of which most of those even who had dwelt all their lives in the parishes affected had either forgotten or never knew about.
To return to the subject. The long-lost Berlin had been run to ground. The burning question of the moment was whether she would face the music and make a bolt for the Fatherland or whether she would remain where she was and become interned. A collection of British cruisers outside probably caused her to elect the latter course. So it was up to me, somehow or other, to try and ferret out all I could relating to her recent voyage. But how?
The chief of the British Secret Service is never interested in detail. To him the most interesting particulars, showing how an objective is attained, are irritating and merely so much waste of time. His requirements and mind centre only round concrete results, congealed into the fewest possible number of words. Whilst interviews in his office are limited almost to grudgingly-given minutes.
It is undoubtedly prudent and wise to draw a bough over my innumerable snow-trails in order to obliterate the footprints of my tortuous wanderings during the days that followed. Suffice to say that, night and day, awake or dreaming, the subject never left my thoughts, whilst I schemed and invented possible and impossible plans, until at last one day chance supplied the missing link.
Meanwhile side issues were not wanting. German agents had traced the hotel proprietor's show-English-spy to his nightly lair in the woodstacks. They naturally attached an unknown importance to what they believed to be his anxiety concerning the safety of these piles of innocent timber. They appeared to assume that this particular wood—worth possibly somewhere about £20,000—was considered of great value to the English Government. Accordingly they planned, by contra espionage, to lure the nightly watcher in another direction. As soon as his presence was thus temporarily removed they promptly fired the pile, which job was so thoroughly well done that hardly a plank could be salved from the flames.