"BEYOND DOVER"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 May 1939, Page 10

"BEYOND DOVER"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.

COPYRIGHT.

By

VAL GIELGUD.

(Author of “Death at B

■oadcasting House,” etc.)

CHAPTER XX. (Continued). “Stand over there!" said the tank commander. Nigel took a step towards him. “I give you fair warning." he said. “I don’t know your name " “Dragutin," interrupted the other, clicking his heels. “Mirko Dragutin, Captain in the Styrian Tank Corps/' “Thank you. Captain Dragutin, this young lady and I are British subjects and demand to be placed under the protection of, a British Consul at your earliest convenience."

Dragutin scowled. He had a blatant brutal face, With a jutting nose and chin. He dragged off his beret to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and revealed a narrow receding forehead and a good deal of long black hair, brushed straight back.

“You may as well know," said he, “that I should be within my rights in shooting you both out of hand. That young woman came to this country in the suite of the pretty young’, gentleman who calls himself an Arch-Duke by the grace of God and a few old doddering imbeciles. You are carrying weapons in time of civil upheaval.”

Nigel clutched at his pocket. It was true. He was carrying a small automatic—at Casimir Konski’s suggestion.

“But you can’t do that!” said Sally, finding her voice. “I don’t propose to without trial,” said Dragutin. He moved into the shade, and stood with his long legs crossed while he lit a thin cigarette in a cardboard holder and blew smoke through his nostrils, watching Sally’s cheeks whiten in the concentrated heat of the courtyard, and the sweat trickling down Nigel Craven’s cheeks. The two of them stood, leaning against each other fixed Dragutin with their .eyes, and said nothing. Below them in Bratza the sound of firing broke out again, and the smoke rose curling skyward from some burning building. Dragutin was evidently enjoying himself. He leaned back against a buttress of the wall, lit a second cigarette from the stump of the first, and narrowed his eyes as if to focus them more comfortably. “I’m afraid old von 1 Auffenburg is not an up-to-date soldier,” he remarked, as if to the world at large. “Cavalry looks very pretty as the centrepiece of a ceremonial procession, or an escort for transparencies. They don’t show up so well, attacking dismounted up hill with carbines. And I don’t envy him his job when he gets to the Capital.” Outside the little patch of shade where he stood, the courtyard was like an oven. There was not a breath of air moving. The glare was terrific. To Sally it seemed that. Dragutin’s voice was coming from strangely far away; that Nigel’s shoulder against which she had been leaning had grown somehow without substance. The burning blue of the sky above the shatttered wall, the dusty sunlight, Dragutin’s sneering features, swirled and dissolved into a cold blackness that hurt her head. CHAPTER XXI.

Mirko Dragutin was typical of the generation and the period to which he belonged, but it was a type more common to highly industrialised nations than among the people of Styria, w*io for the most part were peasants and agriculturists. Dragutin had been taken to England immediately after the War, as a very small boy; spent two years there; returned with the belief insufficiently founded, that as a country it was overrated; and went as an apprentice into one of the few engineering shops in the port of Blint. He had a remarkable mechanical aptitute. But he also had the disadvantage—it was hardly his own fault —of being given an education, which taught him that a smattering of biology and chemistry was the equivalent of the Law and the Prophets. An intelligence naturally limited, and strong animal tastes, were encouraged accordingly without qualification to speak of. Like so many young men all over Europe belonging to the immediate post-war generation, he was taught that the old beliefs were either humbug or folly, without being given anything better or even adequate to put in their place. Being completely selfmade, he had the inferiority complex so common to his kind, expressing hatred and contempt for what in his heart he envied and wished he knew how to emulate.

He was brave, cunning, rather than clever, glib with his speech, vigorous of body and personality. In an army recruited almost entirely from among peasants, he had had little difficulty in rising swiftly from the ranks of the small Tank unit, and achieving a great and well-deserved reputation as an officer of ability and promise. But. like so many rankers in peacetime, he was unable to break down the caste barrier. Most of the Styrian officers were still commissioned from the Military College at Bratza. which, was reserved almost exclusively for cadets of recognised aristocratic families. They did not take kindly to Dragutin. The Tank unit was unpopular and absurdly despised.

Dragutin himself was only too quick to see offence where none existed. Tn particular he had taken a special and personal dislike to General von Auffenburg. He detested him personally as an aristicrat. He loathed him in the abstract for his persistent belief, expressed so clearly and frequently in his divisional addresses, that mechanisation was being overdone, and that there was still plenty of scope for cavalry and the arme blance in modern warfare. Politically Mirko Dragutin inclined Io the Communist Party. Ils idealism ot the mechanisation of industry appealed to him. Its absence of political humbug seemed to him an admirable saving of time.' Like other ruthlessly ambitious men, lie believed in the efficacy of short cuts to Utopia. Von Auffenburg’s adherence to the royalist attempt gave Dragutin, in his opinion, his great opportunity. He did not care two pence for the Republican Government. It seemed to him flabby, and without significance. But he was quite sure that a royalist restoration would be shatteringly worse from his own persona] point of view. Besides he saw the chance of proving upon vpn Auffenburg’s own person that his theories of modern war were absurd.'

Many of the Tank Corps personnel had been seconded from the Navy, or camo from the neval ports, Blint and Krusak. Dragutin sounded them cautiously. He found them distinctly apathetic to the suggestions thrown out by von Auffenburg’s officers. The latter, having received admirable and unanimous support from the cavalry regiments, paid little attention to the Tank unit and its grubby-faced mechanics. But even the General admitted that in the event of trouble in the Capital—barricades or street fighting of any kind —the tanks would be in 7 valuable. They were ordered accordly to follow the column in rear, when it started out on its march.

Hugo Brandon’s mad gallop into the blue along the Bratza Road had indeed put the fat in the fire. Telegraphic communication between Duyornik and von Auffenburg was re-established within a quarter of an hour. But that quarter of an hours was just fifteen minutes too long. Hugo had given no orders, and y was now—God knew where. Von Auffenburg hesitated, and swore, and looked to Casimir Konski for some sort of guidance. The latter, with Sally safely under lock and key, had difficulty in concealing his satisfaction on hearing of Hugo’s reaction to his telegram. It had not been easy to arrange the putting of the telegraph out of action during those critical fifteen minutes.

He had already made up his mind, but he spoke slowly, as if with great deliberation, to the General. “I think you should march,” he said. “The Capital taken and held the rest follows.”

Von Auffenburg nodded. “I agree,” h’e said. “You remain here, Casimir?

“For the moment, yes. I must try and regain touch with his Highness.” 1 The General went out and issued his orders. From the window of his office Casimiy looked out, and watched the force parade; two infantry battalions, a full cavalry brigade, with its horsed batteries; in the background th Tank battalion, of which Mirko Dragutin was second in command. Casimir had already had a word with that young man. The significant factors in a situation had a habit of crystallising into contact with him. Casimir Konski, in brief, convinced that the coup was more than likely to fail —a conviction formed coolly and certainly during his few days in the company of Hugo Brandon —was taking steps to “double cross” his royalist associates, and make it so. It .remained to make certain of his own line of retreat.

Von Auffenburg rode out on to the parade ground with his staff behind him; delivered a brief soldierly speech, which was received with cheers, formed his men into column of route, and trotted off at the head of the leading cavalry squadron.

“Exactly as I anticipated,” thought Casimir at his window, and Dragutin climbing into his tank. “The old hussar touch —forward and at cm! Never mind about keeping control, or lookiing after the rear—He’s played smack into my hands!” And so it proved. As the Tank battalion lumbered down the steep narrow street to the city gate at the rear of the column, the leading tank—Dragutin’s— suddenly swerved across the road and stopped, completely blocking it. The whole of the battalion was checked. An anxious subaltern rode back from the lancer squadron immediately ahead to find out what was the matter.

Dragutin thrust his head out of his tank with a furious expression on his face.

“Why are we stopping, you damned young fool?” he yelled. “Why do you think Tell your people to, get on! It’s only a small breakdown. I can attend to it, if you’ll leave me alone!”

The subaltern, who was recently joined and proportionately nervous reported according. The Tank Battalion was left to follow in its own time; and within half an hour Dragutin had swung his machines in their tracks, battered in the citadel gate with his guns, received the surrender of the half battalion of infantry who had been left in garrison, made telephonic touch with the Government, and in return for his prompt action received the appointment of People’s Special Representative commanding all republican forces in Bratza. So far so good. The only fly in the ointment was that the captain of the lancer squadron less trusting than his subaltern, and seeing no sign of the tanks coming up in his rear, turned back to find them, and blundered into the close of Dragutin’s attack on the citadel.

It was the dismounted troopers of this squadron who were still engaged in a desultory fire fight from the lower quarters of the town with some of Dragutin’s men. But the latter had little cause for anxiety, as the infantry, on their surrender, had been only too willing to change ideas, and fight for the republic after all. He had plenty of time to make the most of his recently acquired authority by dealing with these two young lunatics from England who had so unwisely thrust their fingers into the intricate machinery of Styrian affairs. Meanwhile, Hugo Brandon had been riding towards Bratza through the August sunshine. Mortally slow progress, 100, he felt, he had made after that splendid flying start, when the road had reeled out under his charger's galloping hooves, and the wind had stung his face, and he had been able to forget everything else in the marvellous exhilaration of feeling himself one with a good horse moving at speed. But out of Duvornik the road surface changed hideously for the worse. He did not want to knock the chargers loot to pieces, and in any event he had to nurse it in the heat—-it would do no one any good for him to be stranded by the roadside with a founded beast. As he slowed down, and the road began to climb out of the plain, through the foothills, curving and winding, sometimes bounded by walls of rough uncemented stone, sometimes by belts of pines, that gave a grateful shade and a sweet prickling scene. Hugo thought what an ironical sequel was this ride to his radio speech. (To be Continued.)