Dennis Wheatley - Duke de Richleau 07 (63 page)

For hours he sat
miserably in his cell, considering his wretched position, but for the life of
him he could not see any way out of it. Since Major Ronge had already made it
clear that he would not allow any messages from the prisoner to be transmitted
to Ilona, Count Tisza or any other of his friends, and had further refused to
let him see a lawyer, there was positively no useful action of any kind that he
could take.

When the lights were put
out he partially undressed, lay down on the truckle bed and endeavoured to
sleep: but sleep would not come to him.

He heard the prison clock
toll midnight. It was a knell of doom, the like of which has rarely sounded
throughout the ages. With the last stroke the final phase of the crisis had
been resolved. The conflict was no longer confined to Europe. The British
Empire was now at war with Germany, and ships were closing to give battle the
world over, in every sea. Five million men under arms were now on the march.
Double that number were to die before peace came again. One thousand nine
hundred and fifty miles of European frontiers were aflame. From them a ghastly
miasma of sorrow, misery and disease was to spread over the whole earth. But
worse, the highest conceptions of freedom, decency and humanity, built up by a
hundred generations of mankind, were, within halt that number of months, now
doomed to perish.

During
his first day in prison the Duke
had some hopes of a speedy release. It seemed certain that his failure to
arrive at the studio would have led Ilona to have inquiries made for him at
Sacher’s, and that on learning of his arrest she would demand an explanation of
the police. But as Wednesday and Thursday passed with no sign of outside
intervention in his case, he was forced to the conclusion that Major Ronge must
have succeeded in hushing up his arrest, and poor Ilona believed that some
accident had prevented him from keeping their last rendezvous.

Meanwhile a series of
interrogations by Ronge had led only to a stalemate. De Richleau took the firm
line that his statement to General von Ostromiecz had, in all essentials, been
the truth; and as Belgrade was now entirely cut off from Vienna by the war, the
Austrian police were in no position to procure any evidence supporting Herr Höller’s
story. However, the Major obviously had complete faith in his subordinate, so
regarded the Duke as a most dangerous character. He continued to refuse him
permission to communicate with the outside world, or even to mix with his
fellow prisoners when taken out for exercise; and evidently still hoped to
unearth some evidence of his activities in Vienna which would enable a charge
of espionage affecting the Dual Monarchy to be brought against him.

Fortunately for the Duke,
the first great war had only just started, and the day was still far distant
when its effects would have so brutalized the Teutonic peoples that thousands
of educated men among them condoned or practised wholesale abominations, the
like of which are recorded only as comparatively rare episodes in the Dark
Ages. The torture of convicted criminals had been abolished throughout Europe,
including Russia, a hundred and fifty years earlier, and it was still
unthinkable that it would ever again be permitted. So De Richleau had nothing
whatever to fear in the way of ill-treatment. On the contrary, he was well fed,
lodged in reasonable comfort, and his belongings—after they had been brought
from Sacher’s and minutely searched—were handed over to him without as much as
a boot-lace missing.

In consequence, although
in no immediate danger of discomfort, the Duke had no alternative but to while
away the first days of the war as best he could; thinking of his beloved Ilona,
cursing Sir Pellinore as the original cause of his predicament, reviewing tho
past and pondering on the future.

He was allowed to have
newspapers, so was able to follow the war news, such as it was; but the closing
of frontiers and the secrecy necessary to conceal projected military operations
had suddenly drawn a series of impenetrable curtains across the European scene,
the like of which had never before been known. Between them could be caught
only faint glimpses of isolated events, and these did not even suggest that
great battles might be in progress; so to the ordinary reader it seemed
impossible to believe that hostilities on a scale previously unequalled in
world history had actually started.

The Austrians were
continuing their bombardment of Belgrade across the Danube and, in consequence,
the Serbian government had removed to Nish; but there was no news of
Austro-Hungarian troops having so far invaded Serbia. When the Germans had
marched into the little independent Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, the beautiful
golden-haired young Grand Duchess had driven to the main bridge in her capital,
had her Rolls Royce halted sideways across it, and forbidden the invaders to
pass. The Germans had politely removed the car from their path and marched on
into Belgium.

King Albert of Belgium
had refused them permission to pass through his territories, and was resisting
them by force of arms. But the ill-prepared Belgians could not stem the mighty
tide, which was flowing on: the key city of Liege had been captured and its
ring of forts was being hammered into submission by the giant Krupp siege guns
that had been brought up.

On 4th August the German
battleship
Goeben,
and her escorting cruiser
Breslau
were in the Adriatic. A powerful British squadron was within range and could
have sunk them that afternoon, but had refrained as Britain’s ultimatum to
Germany did not expire till midnight. Under cover of darkness the fast German
ships had slipped away. An exciting four day hunt had followed, but the Germans
had succeeded in reaching, unharmed, the temporary safety of neutral Turkish
waters.

Thus, in the first week
and more of hostilities, nothing of real importance seemed to have happened.
There was no news at all of the French, Russian and Serbian armies, very little
of those of Germany and Austria, and not a word about the main Fleets of any of
the nations that were engaged. The actions, if any, of all these major forces
remained shrouded in mystery.

Yet, in a general sense,
De Richleau’s specialized knowledge enabled him to pierce the veil. He knew
that great armies cannot be concentrated for action overnight. Such secret
preparations as Germany and Austria-Hungary had made during the last three
weeks of July would prove of considerable value to them; but nothing short of
public mobilization could call the great mass of reservists to the colours.
Then, between two and three weeks would be needed to pass them through the
depots, move them up to the frontiers and dispose them in battle array; so no
major clash could be expected before the third week in August. But in his mind’s
eye he could visualize the scenes that were now taking place over thousands of
square miles of territory, much of which must soon become the fiercely contested
ground of battle.

The operations at Liege
were a thing apart. For the carrying out of the Schlieffen plan it was
essential that the Germans should secure the fortress, and the network of
railway that radiated from it across Belgium, at the earliest possible moment;
so they would have attacked in that area with regular formations of shock
troops which had, no doubt, been held in readiness for that purpose for several
weeks. There, every latest device—scouts on motor bicycles, cyclist battalions,
machine guns mounted in motor-cars, siege artillery drawn by tractors, and
still larger guns on railway mountings—would be used for the swift reduction of
the city’s defences. But elsewhere the opening of hostilities would present a
very different picture.

From the southern corner
of Luxemburg down to Belfort on the Swiss frontier; from Memel on the Baltic
down to the northern corner of Rumania; and from the Iron Gates of the Danube
right round to Cattaro on the Adriatic; an unnatural quiet would have
descended.

To a depth of twenty
miles on either side of these three immensely long and fantastically irregular
man-made divisions of territory all normal activities would have ceased. The
trains that had crossed them regularly by a hundred different lines for as long
as men remembered, crossed them no more. The roads were now empty of wagons and
pedestrians. The ferries and river boats lay moored on hostile banks. The
bridges had been seized by advance guards, or blown up. The villages within
rifle shot of the enemy had been evacuated, and strips of territory as long as
the frontiers themselves scaled off, so that no civilians without a permit
could enter them. Even in the fields there was no movement, as the cattle would
have been driven away. To the casual eye it would appear as if a mighty witch
had waved a wand over these areas, paralysing their inhabitants, so that the
countryside lay spell-bound and silent in the summer sun.

Yet that appearance of
desertion and smiling sleep was an illusion. De Richleau knew that each army
would have thrown out its cavalry screen to protect it from surprise and gain
such information as it could about the concentrations of the enemy. Every
coppice would conceal its vedette, every barn contain its picket of troops,
every church tower hold its look-out; and along every hundred yards of river
front a sentry with a loaded rifle would lie hidden, ready to fire at the first
sign of movement on the opposite bank.

Occasionally enemy
patrols would come face to face in a wood or gorge and skirmishes occur, a few
shots be exchanged, a few men fall dead or wounded, and the weaker party beat a
hasty retreat. By night, small bodies of Cossacks, Hussars, Uhlans or
Curassiers would sally from the woods on a foray into enemy territory; but
there would be no major engagements, and except for a few ranging shells to
register targets the artillery would give no sign of its existence.

Further back, out of
sight of the enemy, the scene would again be very different. There, the country
roads would see more traffic in a week than they had done in a generation.
Every route leading towards an enemy frontier would now be in use to its
maximum capacity. Along a thousand roads endless, snake-like processions of men
and vehicles would be crawling. Battalion after battalion of infantry; battery
after battery of guns; train after train of wagons: machine gun units, siege
artillery, signal sections, staff cars, field bakeries, field hospitals, and
the sanitary corps that would dig the graves for the fallen. Still further back,
with almost equal slowness, thousands of trains would be creeping up to
railheads to disgorge tens of thousands more wagons, limbers and guns; hundreds
of thousands more men and horses; and millions of tons of munitions. And every
single individual in these vast ant-like swarms was moving to a destination
unknown to himself, but already decided for him by one of a few directing
brains that had long since worked out this intricate pattern.

Each of the countless
columns winding through the forests of the Ardennes and the Vosges, over the
Bosnian and Carpathian mountains, and across the plains of Prussia, Hungary and
Poland, was advancing to a carefully planned time table. The heads of each
would already have reached their deployment line, but more and more formations
would be piling up behind them in the concentration areas, and those would be
like long chains of lakes, each fed by innumerable rivers. When the lakes were
full, the word would be given and the sluices opened. Heralded by fire and
flashing with steel, the human tides would rush towards one another, to meet
head-on for days, weeks, perhaps months, on end, in a series of such violent
collisions that a slaughter must ensue, the like of which the world had never
seen. But that was not to be—yet; not for another ten or twelve days.

Although the Duke spent
much of his time visualizing such scenes and speculating on their outcome, he
did so only as a grim recreation from trying to think of a way in which he
might regain his freedom.

As he had committed no
crime, he felt sure that if only he could get a message to his friends they
would soon get him out of Major Ronge’s clutches. Of course, now that the
British Empire and the Dual-Monarchy were at war, he was liable to be detained
in an internment camp, and he thought it unlikely that his friends would be
able to do more than arrange for his transfer to one. But that would mean
freedom to mix with other Britons caught by the war in Austria and, for a man
of his resource, plenty of opportunities to escape. Whereas, as long as he
remained confined in a cell and closely guarded by professional warders escape
was next to impossible.

Puzzle his wits as he
would, it was not until his fourth night in prison that an idea came to him
which seemed to offer at least a slender hope of success. So on Saturday the
8th of August he awaited with suppressed eagerness the daily visit that Major
Ronge paid him.

When the fat Secret
Service Chief arrived, he sat down on the Duke’s bed, offered him a cigarette,
and said: