h of
Dollmann spying for English plans in the event of war with Germany,
and there he left the matter; but what sort of plans? Obviously (if
he was on the right track) plans of attack on the German coast as
opposed to those of strategy on the high seas. But what sort of an
attack? Obviously again, if his railway-ring meant anything, an
attack by invasion on that remote and desolate littoral which he had
so often himself declared to be impregnably secure behind its web of
sands and shallows. My mind went back to my question at Bensersiel,
'Can this coast be invaded?' to his denial and our fruitless survey
of the dykes and polders. Was he now reverting to a fancy we had both
rejected, while shrinking from giving it explicit utterance? The
doubt was tantalizing.

A brief digression here about the phases of my journey. At Rheine I
changed trains, turned due north and became a German seaman. There
was little risk in a defective accent--sailors are so polyglot; while
an English sailor straying about Esens might excite curiosity.
Yesterday I had paid no heed to the landscape; to-day I neglected
nothing that could conceivably supply a hint.

From Rheine to Emden we descended the valley of the Ems; at first
through a land of thriving towns and fat pastures, degenerating
farther north to spaces of heathery bog and moorland--a sad country,
but looking at its best, such as that was, for I should mention here
that the weather, which in the early morning had been as cold and
misty as ever, grew steadily milder and brighter as the day advanced;
while my newspaper stated that the glass was falling and the
anticyclone giving way to pressure from the Atlantic.

At Emden, where we entered Friesland proper, the train crossed a big
canal, and for the twentieth time that day (for we had passed numbers
of them in Holland, and not a few in Germany), I said to myself,
'Canals, canals. Where does Boehme come in?' It was dusk, but light
enough to see an unfamiliar craft, a torpedo-boat in fact, moored to
stakes at one side. In a moment I remembered that page in the North
Sea Pilot where the Ems-Jade Canal is referred to as deep enough to
carry gun-boats, and as used for that strategic purpose between
Wilhelmshaven and Emden, along the base, that is, of the Frisian
peninsula. I asked a peasant opposite; yes, that was the Ems-Jade
Canal. Had Davies forgotten it? It would have greatly strengthened
his halting sketch.

At the bookstall at Emden