man in the German navy
who never ceased to urge its Admiralty to sink everything. He loathed
every fiber of the English people. We had all sorts of testimony to
that. The trawlers and freightboat captains brought it in. He staged
his piracies to a theatrical frightfulness. 'Old England!' he would say,
when he climbed up out of the sea onto the deck of a British ship and
looked about him at the sailors, 'Old, is right, old and rotten!' Then
he would smite his big chest and quote the diatribes of Treitschke.
'But in a world that the Prussian inhabits a nation, old and rotten, may
endure for a time, but it shall not endure forever!'

"Plutonburg didn't let St. Alban and the transport go ahead out of the
promptings of a noble nature. He did it because he hated England, and
he wanted St. Alban to live on in the hell he had trapped him into. He
counted on his keeping silent. But the Hun made a mistake.

"St. Alban didn't measure up to the standard of Prussian egoism by which
Plutonburg estimated him."

Sir Henry continued in the same even voice. The levels of emotion in his
narrative did not move him.

"Did you ever see the picture of Plutonburg, in Munich? He had a face
like Chemosh. And he dressed the part. Other under-boat commanders wore
the conventional naval cap, but Plutonburg always wore a steel helmet
with a corrugated earpiece. Some artist under the frightfulness dogma
must have designed it for him. It framed his face down to the jaw. The
face looked like it was set in iron, and it was a thick-lidded, heavy,
menacing face; the sort of face that a broad-line cartoonist gives to a
threatening war-joss. At any rate, that's how the picture presents him.
One thinks of Attila under his ox head. You can hardly imagine anything
human in it, except a cruel satanic humor.

"He must have looked like Beelzebub that morning, on the transport, when
he let St. Alban go on."

The Baronet looked down at me.

"Now, that's the truth about the fine conduct of Plutonburg that England
applauded as an act of chivalry. It was a piece of sheer, hellish
malignity, if there ever was an instance."

Sir Henry took a turn across the terrace, for a moment silent. Then he
went on:

"And in fact, everything in the heroic event on the deck of the
transport was a pretense. The Hun didn't intend to shoot St. Alban. As I
have said, Plutonburg had him in just the sort of hell he wanted him in,
and he didn't propose to let him out with a bull