♦ /jj^ ^ o^OlsXr* A i THE ALLIED NAVAL COMMISSION AND STAFF, TAKEN ON BOARD "HERCULES" Getting Down to "Work 35 miral Browning got down to business at once by intimating that, since the time which he could re- main in German waters was limited, it would be desirable that the very considerable number of visits of inspection necessary to satisfy the Com- mission that the terms of the armistice had been complied with should begin without delay. The Germans had a formidable array of reasons ready to show why all, or nearly all, of these visits would be practically out of the question. The disturbed state of the country, the uncertain situation in Berlin, the lack of discipline among the men re- maining in the ships and at the air stations, the shortage of petrol, the possibility of the hostility of the people in some sections — such as Hamburg and Bremen — to Allied visitors — these were a few of the reasons advanced why it would be difficult or dangerous to go to this place or that, and why the best and simplest way would be to be content with the assurance of the German Commission that everything, everywhere, was just as the ar- mistice terms had stipulated. Of course, at Wil- helmshaven, where things were quiet at the mo- ment, and where they still had a certain amount of authority, there should be no great difficulty in going over the remaining warships and visiting the air-station; but as for going to Hamburg, or Bremen, or visiting any of the more distant naval 36 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" air stations — that was impossible at the present. Asked bluntly, if the search of the warships could begin that afternoon, Admiral Goette re- plied that it was impossible, for the reason he was not yet in a position to guarantee the personal safety of any parties landing even at the dock- yard. Moreover, he would not be in position to give such a guarantee until the matter had been discussed with the Workmen ^s and Soldiers' Coun- cil. Of course, if the party cared to take the chance of landing without a guarantee of safety — That was really just about as far as that first conference got in the way of definite arrange- ments, or even assurances. Admiral Goette was given very plainly to understand, however, that it was the intention of the Allied Commission to visit and inspect, in accordance with the terms laid down in the armistice, not only all of the remain- ing German warships, but also all interned British merchantmen, irrespective of where they were, and all naval airship and seaplane stations, on the Baltic as well as the North Sea side. Also, that full and complete guarantee of the safety of every party landed must be given before the first visit was made. Failing this, it would be necessary for the Commission to return to England and report that the assistance promised by Germany in carry- ing out the armistice terms had not been given. Getting Down to Work 37 The deep corrugation in Admiral Goette 's brow grew deeper still when he heard this plain warn- ing, and the corners of his hard cynical mouth drew down at the corners as the thin lips were compressed in his effort at self-control. Shuffling uneasily in his chair, he leaned over as though to speak to the sardonic Hinzman on his right, but thought better of it, and straightened up again. Then his deep-set eyes wandered to the large-scale map of the Western Front which occupied most of the wall of the cabin toward which he faced. The row of pins, which had marked the line of the Front at the moment of the armistice, but had now been moved up and over the Ehine in three pro- tuberant bridgeheads, evidently brought home to him the futility of any further circumlocutions for the present. The muscles of the aggressively squared shoulders relaxed, the combative lines of the face melted into furrows of deepest depres- sion, and the pugnacious jaw was drawn in as the iron-grey head was bowed in submission. His throaty '^It shall be done as you say, sir," told that the first lesson had sunk home. An undertaking on the part of the German Com- mission to secure, and to send off at an as early hour as practicable the following morning, the required **safe conduct,'' brought the first con- ference to a close. The kinema man, who endeav- 38 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" oured to take a picture of the departure from cover, in order not to offend the sensibilities of his distinguished subjects, spoiled a film as a con- sequence of his consideration. Observing that the galley scuttle opened out upon the quarter- deck, but not (in his haste) that the pots of beans simmering on the range were filling the air with clouds of steam as thick as fragrant, set up his machine just inside. Engrossed in turning the crank as one Hun after another went through his heel-clicking round of salutes, he failed to notice the translucent mask of moisture condensing on his lens. The natural result was that this particular reel of film, when it came to be developed, had very little to differentiate it from another reel he ex- posed the following morning on the men * * doubling round, ' ' the latter having been taken with the cap over the lens. The situation as it presented itself that evening was far from encouraging. Having no informa- tion whatever of our own as to conditions ashore, we had, perforce, to take the word of the Ger- mans that many of the projected visits of inspec- tion could only be undertaken subject to much difficulty and delay, if at all. There was not even positive assurance that a safe conduct would be forthcoming for the landing in Wilhelmshaven,, where the headquarters of the German Naval Com- Getting Down to Work 39 mand were located at the moment, and where there had been a minimum of disorder. The wireless caught ominous fragments pointing to an immi- nent coup d'etat in Berlin, while rioting was al- ready taking place in Hamburg and Bremen, and Kiel was completely under the control of the work- men and soldiers. It certainly looked as though, the armistice agreement notwithstanding, we had struck Northern Germany in the closed season for touring. A ray of light in the gloom which hung over the ship that night came in the form of two British prisoners of war who managed to induce a Ger- man launch they had found at the quay to bring them off to the Hercules. Cheery souls they were, after all their two years of starvation and rough treatment in one of the worst prison camps in Germany. When the armistice was signed, they said, they had been released, given a ticket which was made out to carry them in the Fourth or ** Military'' class on any German railway, and told they were free to go home. This appears to have been done at a good many prison camps, and where these were within a few days ' march of the West- ern Front, or of Holland, it probably saved a good deal of time over waiting for regular transport by the demoralized and congested railway sys- tems. The cruelty of this criminal evasion of re- 40 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" sponsibility was most felt in the parts of the coun- try more remote from the Western Front, where many hundreds of miles had to be covered before the prisoners had any chance of getting in touch with friends. In the cases of most of these un- fortunate derelicts long delays were inevitable, and, not infrequently, much hardship. There was little interference, apparently, with the exercise of the travel privilege, but the almost total ab- sence of authoritative information concerning the departure of ships from Baltic ports, by which considerable numbers of British were repatriated via Denmark and Sweden, resulted in an almost interminable series of wanderings. The case of the two men I have mentioned was typical of the experiences undergone by prisoners from camps in northern or central Germany. Re- leased, as I have described, when the armistice was signed, they had broken away from their fellows, the bulk of whom were starting to drift toward the Western Front, and struck out for the North Sea coast, acting on the theory that navigation would be opened up at once, and that this route, there- fore, would offer the easiest and quickest way of getting home. Well off for money and fairly con- siderately treated on the food score, they found travelling simple enough, but extremely tedious and full of delays. Arriving at Emden, they Xfl W o m l-H w a; 03 p > I— ( 03 03 >^ w H a :z; H O 03 H w O w 03 Q < Pui W W H Getting Down to Work 41 learned that there had been no provision whatever made for dispatching ships with prisoners from there, and that— both on account of the lack of shipping and the danger of navigating the still un- swept minejfields — there was no prospect of any- thing of the kind in the near future. Instead of crossing over the neighbouring frontier of Hol- land, as they might easily have done,, they pushed north to Bremen and Hamburg on the chance that there might be ships from one of these formerly busy ports by which they could find their way back to England. Disappointed again, they were about to go on to Kiel, when they read in a newspaper of the arrival of a British battleship at Wilhelms- haven. Eightly conjecturing that they were at last on the ^^home trail,'' they effected the best series of connections possible to the once great naval base, where no obstacles were placed in the way of their getting put off to the Hercules with- out delay. As the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council had been endeavouring to establish touch with the Commission ever since the arrival of the Hercules in German waters, and as the way the ** authori- ties" had co-operated in getting these men put off to the ship looked just a bit suspicious, it was only natural that the latter should be put through a very thorough examination calculated to establish 42 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" their identity as British prisoners beyond a donbt. This was being proceeded with by the Commander and the Major of Marines in a room of the after superstructure, when a steward came up from the galley to ask what the new arrivals would like to have for supper. There was quite a list to choose from, it appears. They could have roast beef, said the steward, or sausage and *^ mashed," or steak and kidney pie, or — **Stop right there, mytey," cut in one of the men, raising his hand with the gesture of a crossings policeman halting the flow of the traffic. **No use goin' any fur- ther. ' Styke an ' kidney ' f er mine. ' ' Then, turn- ing to the Commander apologetically, ** Begging your pardon, sir, but wot was it you was askin' 'bout wot engagement we wus captured inf **I don't think we need trouble any further about that, my man,'' replied the Commander with a grin. **That * styke an' kidney' marks you for British all right, and if you '11 vouch for your mate here, we'll take your word that he's on the level too. We'll send you home by the first mail destroyer, and be glad of the chance to do it. That won't be for a couple of days yet, but I dare say you'll be able to make yourself at home in the Hercules until then." As the first of the hundred or more prisoners for whom the Hercules ultimately acted as a Getting Down to Work 43 ** clearing house'* in passing home to England, these two men were very welcome on their own ac- count, but especially so for the news they brought of conditions ashore. It was quiet everywhere they had been in Northern Germany, they said. Nobody was starving, and where the people took any notice of them at all, it was — since the armis- tice — invariably of a friendly character. *^W'y> 'pon my word, sir,'' said one of them, where I found him that night in a warm corner of one of the mess decks, the centre of an admiring circle of matelots, who were crowding in with offerings of everything from mugs of bitter beer to cakes of chocolate ; * ' 'pon my word, all you 'avc to do is to tyke a kyke o' perfumed soap to the beach when you land, an' they'll all come an' eat right out o' yer 'and. Wy, the gurls — " Although the Allied Naval Armistice Commis- sion could hardly be expected to smooth its way with **kykes o' perfumed soap," yet all these men had to tell, in that it went to prove how greatly the officers of the German Commission had (to use a charitable term) exaggerated the difficulties to be encountered in getting about ashore, was distinctly encouraging. Indeed, it left those of us who talked with them quite prepared to expect the ^* guarantee of safety," which came off in the morning, with word that arrangements had been 44 To Kiel in the ** Hercules" made for parties to land at once for the inspection of warships and the seaplane station. It even forecasted the message received in the course of the afternoon, to the effect that conditions now ap- peared to be favourable to the arranging of visits to Norderney, Borkhum, Nordholz, and the other seaplane and Zeppelin stations which the Allied Commission had expressed a desire to see. The Hamburg visit was still in the air, pending the re- ceipt of guarantees of safety, but there was no longer any doubt that it would be arranged, and, moreover, as promptly as the Commission saw fit to insist upon. For the purpose of the search of warships, and the inspection of merchant ships and air stations, the staff of the Allied Commission had been di- vided into several parties. The senior party, which was to confine its work entirely to warships and land fortifications, had at least one member of each of the Allied nationalities represented in the Commission. The head of it was the Flag Commander of the Hercules, and the technical duties in connection with its work devolved prin- cipally upon the British and American naval gunnery experts which it always included, and at least one engineer officer. There were two **air" parties, one for the in- spection of seaplane stations, and the other for Getting Down to Work 45 that of airship stations. The senior flying officer was Brigadier-General Masterman, E.A.F., who was one of England's pioneers in the development of lighter-than-air machines, his experience dating back to the experiments with the ill-fated Mayfly, His interest was in Zeppelins, and he had the leadership of the party formed for the inspection of airship stations. This party included one other British officer and two Americans. Colonel Clark-Hall was the head of the second **air'' party, which had charge of the inspection of seaplane stations. He had flown in a seaplane in the first year of the war at Gallipoli, and more recently had directed flying operations from the Furious, with the Grand Fleet. Having sent oif . the aeroplanes whose bombs had practically wiped out the Zeppelin station at Tondern, near the Danish border, the previous summer, he had an especial interest in seeing at first hand the effects of that raid, though otherwise his interest was centred in seaplane stations. Two American fly- ing officers, and one British, completed the **sea-. plane station'' party. The Shipping Board, which had in hand the matter of the return to England of the two score and more of British ships in German harbours, was headed by Commodore George P. Be van, B.N., the Naval Adviser of the Minister of Ship- 46 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" ping, who had distinguished himself earlier in the war as commander of the British trawler patrol in the Mediterranean. With him were associated Commander John Leighton, E.N.E., who had achieved notable success in effecting the return to England of the numerous British merchant ships in Baltic ports at the outbreak of the war, and Mr. Percy Turner, a prominent shipbuilder and Secretary to the Minister of Shippiag. The ac- tual inspection of the ships in German harbours was to be done by Commander Leighton, with such assistance as was needed from officers of the Hercules. It fell to the lot of the senior of the warship- searching party to make the first landing. As this party, with at least one member from each nationality, was more or less a ** microcosm '^ of the Commission itself,, it was decreed that it should make its visits in state, in the full pomp and panoply of — peace. This meant, one sup- posed, frock coats, cocked hats, and swords, but as all the former had been sent ashore, by order, early in the war, and as none of the Americans had even the latter, it was evident at once that there was no use competing in a dress parade with the Germans, who were operating at their own base, so to speak. The best that could be done was to borrow swords — from any of the ward- Getting Down to Work 47 room officers chancing to have theirs along — for the Americans, and let it go at that. The ** Inter- national'' members, whose principal duty, in con- nection with the searches, was to walk about the upper decks and look dignified, managed to wear their swords from the time they left the Hercules to their return ; the others, who had really to look for things, and, therefore, to clamber up and down steel ladders of boiler rooms and the ^* trunks'* of turrets, after numerous annoying trippings up, had finally to * * stack arms ' ' in order to get on with their search. Although none of the officers of the Commission had taken part in the search of the German ships interned at Scapa, they had heard enough of their filthiness and lack of discipline to be prepared to encounter the same things when the inspection of the ships still remaining in home waters was un- dertaken. In spite of this, the conditions — the dirtiness, the slothfulness, the apparent utter dis- regard of the men for such few of their officers as still remained — were everywhere much worse than had been anticipated. This may well be ac- counted for by the fact that the surrendered ships were manned entirely by volunteers, and these, naturally, being the men less revolutionary in spirit and more amenable to discipline, had taken better care of themselves and their quarters than 48 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" those who remained behind. At any rate, every one of the ships remaining to the German Navy was an offence to the eye, and most of them to the nose as well. If it was true, as had been said, that sloth and filth are the high hand-maidens of Bol- shevism, there is little doubt that these twin trol- lops were in a position to hand the dregs of the ex-Kaiser's fleet over to their mistress any day- she wanted it. We had, as yet, no definite hint of what attitude the men of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council were going to take toward parties landed to carry out the work of the Allied Commission, and that was one of the things which it was expected this first search of the warships in the Wilhelmshaven dockyard would reveal. The beginning was not auspicious, for in the very first ship visited the whole of the remaining crew were found loitering indolently about the decks, in direct contravention of the clause in the armistice which provided that all men should be sent ashore during the visits of Allied searching parties. The captain, on being appealed to, shrugged his shoulders and said that he was quite helpless. *^I ordered them to leave half an hour ago," he explained to the inter- preter, *^and here they are still. I have no au- thority over them, as you see; so what is there to do? I am sorry, but you see the position I am in. Getting Down to Work 49 I trust you will understand how humiliating a one it is for an officer of the Imperial' ' — he checked himself at the word KaiserlicJie, and added merely, ** German Navy.*' **And, believe me, it was humiliating," said one of the American officers in telling of the incident later. *^I had to keep reminding myself that the man was a brother officer of the swine that sank the Lusitania, and so many hospital ships, to stop myself from telling him how gol darned sorry I was for any one that had got let in for a mess like that." The situation was scarcely less embarrassing for the officer at the head of the Allied party than for the Germans. Fortunately the Flag Com- mander was fully equal to the emergency. **If these men are not out on the dock in ten minutes, ' ' he said to the captain, * * I shall have no alternative but to return at once to the Hercules and report that the facilities for search stipulated in the armistice have not been granted me." Glancing at his wrist-watch, he sauntered over to the other side of the deck. The effect of the words (which appeared to have been understood by some of the men standing near even in English) was galvanic. Blue- jackets were streaming down the gangways before the orders had been passed on to them by their officers, and 50 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" the ship, save for a few cooks in the galley, was emptied well within the time-limit assigned. It had evidently been an attempt npon the part of the men to show contempt for their officers, and was not intended to interfere with the work of the searching party. Although we observed countless instances of indiscipline in one form or another, on no subsequent occasion did it appear in a way calculated to annoy or delay one of the Allied par- ties. On the contrary, indeed, the men — and espe- cially the representatives of the Workmen *s and Soldiers' Council — were almost invariably more than willing to do anything to help. This spirit, it is needless to say, made progress much faster and easier, and a continuance of it boded hope- fully for the completion of the Commission's pro- gram within the limit of the original period of armistice. It seems to have been the strong — and, I have no doubt, entirely sincere — desire of both the Ger- man naval officers and the members of the Work- men's and Soldiers' Council to get the inspection over and the Allied Commission out of the way that led to a co-operation between the two which I can hardly conceive as existing in connection with their other relations. The representatives of the Workmen and Soldiers appeared quite rec- onciled to the ruling of the Commission that the Getting Down to Work 51 latter was to have no direct dealings with them^ and they exhibited no evidences of ill-feeling over the failure of their attempts to establish such rela- tions. The Naval authorities and the Council had evidently come to an agreement by which the lat- ter were to be allowed to have a representative — * ^ watching ' ' but not * * talking ' ' — with every Allied party landing, in return for which privilege the Council undertook to prevent any interference from the men remaining in ships or air stations visited. Later, when journeys by railway were undertaken, and a guarantee of freedom from molestation by the civilian population was re- quired, a second Workmen's and Soldiers' repre- sentative — a sort of a ** plain clothes" detective — was added. Both white-banded men were there to help, not to interfere. Indeed, the men seemed fully to realize the need of a higher mentality than their own in the conduct of the more or less com- plicated negotiations with the Allied representa- tives, and were therefore content to support their officers in an attempt to make the best of what was a sorry situation for both. A slight hitch which occurred in the arrange- ments of the ^^ seaplane station" party one morn- ing, when the officer who was to have accompanied it failed to turn up on the landing at the appointed hour, showed how slender was the thread by which 52 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" the authority of the once proud and domineering German naval officer hung. After cooling their heels in the slush of the dockyard for half an hour, the party returned to the Hercules to await an explanation. This came an hour later, when the officer in question, very red in the face, came bumping up to the gangway in a madly driven mo- tor-boat, and clambered up to the quarter-deck to make his apologies. **I am very sorry, '^ he ejaculated volubly, ^^but it was not understood by the Arheiten und Sol- datenrat that it was I who was to go with you to- day. In consequence, the permit to wear my sword and epaulettes and other markings of an officer was not sent to me, and so I could not be allowed to travel by the tramway until I had made known the trouble by telephone and had the per- mit sent. It was even very difficult for me to be allowed to speak over the telephone. You must see how very hard life is for us officers as things are now." It appears that even the officers going about with the Allied naval sub-commissions were only allowed to wear their designating marks for the occasion, and that, unless a special permit from the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council was shown, these had to be removed as soon as they went ashore. The constant ** self-pity'' which the offi- Getting Down to Work 53 cers kept showing in the matter of their humili- ating predicament was the one thing needed to extinguish the sparks of sympathy which would keep flaring up in one 's breast unless one stopped to think how thoroughly deserved — how poetically just — it all was. With one or two exceptions, all the best of Ger- many's capital ships were known to have been surrendered, and this applied to light cruisers and destroyers as well. The U-boat situation was somewhat obscure, but it was supposed — incor- rectly, as transpired later — that a fairly clean sweep of the best of the under-water craft had also been made. The most interesting ships which the Allied Commission expected to see in German w^aters were the battleship Baden, sister of the surrendered Bayern, and the battle-cruiser Mack- ensen, sister of the surrendered Hindenhurg, The Regenshurg and Konigsherg, which had been left to the Germans to **get about in,*' were also considered worthy of study at close range as ex- amples of the latest type of German light cruiser. The Mackensen, still far from completed, was in a yard on the Elbe at Hamburg. The others were inspected at Wilhelmshaven. I think I am speaking conservatively when I say that all of the Allied officers who saw them from the inside were distinctly disappointed in 54 To Kiel in the *' Hercules" even these most modern examples of German na- val construction. After the extremely good fight that practically every one of them — from the Em- den and Konigsherg and the ships of Von Spec's squadron at the Falklands to the battle-cruisers of Von Hipper at Jutland — had put up when it was once drawn into action, it was only natural to expect that some radical departures in con- struction, armament, and gunnery control would be revealed on closer acquaintance. This did not prove to be the case, though it is only fair to say that, in the matter of gunnery control, there was little opportunity to pass judgment, owing to the fact that, in every instance, the Germans — as they had a perfect right to do — had removed all the in- struments and gear calculated to give any indica- tion of the character of the installation. The German ships were found to be extremely well built, especially in the solidity of construction of their hulls, the fact that they were not intended to be lived in by a full ship's company all of the time making it easy to multiply bulkheads and dis- pense with doors. But there was nothing new in this fact to those who knew the amount of ham- mering the Seydlitz and Derfftinger had survived at Dogger Bank and Jutland. Even so, however, there was nothing to indicate that these latest of German ships would stand more punishment than Getting Down to Work 55 any unit of the Grand Fleet after the stiffening all British capital ships received as a consequence of what was learned at Jutland. In several respects it was evident that the Ger- mans had merely become tardy converts to Brit- ish practice. The tripod mast, which dates back something like a decade in British capital ships, and which has, since the war, been built in light cruisers and even destroyer leaders, was only adopted by the Germans with the laying down of the Bayern and Hindenhurg. Similarly, the armament^ — both main and secondary — of the re- spective classes of battleship and battle-cruiser to which these two ships give the name, is a frank admission on the part of the Germans that the British were five years ahead of them in the mat- ter of guns. Gunnery control, the one thing above all others which the British Navy was interested in when it came to an intimate study of the German ships, is, unfortunately, one of the things upon which the least light has been shed. The German, since he had to disarm, did the job with characteristic Teu- tonic thoroughness. The transmitting stations in all of the modern ships — the one point where there would have been a great concentration of special instruments of control — looked like unfurnished rooms in their emptiness. So, too, the foretops 56 To Kiel in the '' Hercules" and what must have been the director towers. One moot point may, however, be regarded as set- tled. There have been many who maintained that, since the German fire was almost ii^ivariably ex- tremely accurate in the opening stages of an ac- tion, and tended to fall off rapidly after the ship came under fire herself, the enemy gunnery con- trol involved the use of a very elaborate and highly complicated installation of special instru- ments, many of which were too delicate to stand the stress of continued action. The British and American officers who went over the latest of the enemy's ships, however, are agreed that all the evidence available points to this not being the case — that the German gunnery control, on the contrary, was undoubtedly as simple as it was efficient, and that the fact that it had not stood up well in action was probably more due to human than mechanical failure. It is considered as by no means improbable that the good shooting of the German ships was largely traceable to the excellence of their range-finders and the special training of those who used them. Whether it is true or not that France and Eng- land have succeeded since the war in making opti- cal glass equal to that of Jena, there is no doubt that the latter was superior in the first years of the war. The German ships unquestionably had Getting Down to Work 57 more accurate range-finders than did the British, and it is also known now that the Germans took great care in testing the eyesight of the men em- ployed to handle these instruments, and that much attention was given to their training. It is be- lieved that upon these simple points alone, rather than upon the use of a highly complicated system of control, the admitted excellence of German gun- nery was based. There is no reason to believe that they had anything better than the British for laying down the **rate of change,'' and keeping the enemy under fire once he had been straddled. Although it was known to the British sailor in a general sort of way that the Germans only spent a comparatively small part of their time aboard their ships, the tangible evidence of this remark- able state of affairs — in the vast blocks of bar- racks at Wilhelmshaven and the very crude, in- adequate living quarters in even the most modern of the ships searched — gave him only less of a shock, and aroused in him only less contempt, than did the filth and indiscipline of the German sailors. The German officer who assured one of the search- ing parties that their ships were made **to fight in, not to live in, ' ' told the literal truth, and it only accentuates the bitter irony of the fact that, when finally they refused to fight, they had to begin to be lived in willy-nilly. 58 To Kiel in the '' Hercules" **You can't tell me there isn't a God in Israel, now that weVe got the Huns at Scapa living in their own ships,'' said an officer on coming off to the Hercules one night after his first day spent in going over some of the remnants of the German Navy at Wilhelmshaven. That same thought is awakening no end of comfort in the breast of many a British naval officer this winter, who would oth- erwise have been down on his luck for having still to stand to his guns after the war was over. In a previous chapter I have told how we intercepted a wireless from Admiral Von Eeuter, saying that he had *'gone sick" at Scapa and asking to be relieved. That was not the last by any means that we were to hear of the *^ hardships" of life in those German ** fighting ships" at good old Scapa. The veritable howls of protest rising from the Orkneys were echoing in Wilhelmshaven and Kiel during all the time the Commission spent in German waters. Some mention of the **sad plight" of the German sailors there was made at every conference, and it was at the final one, I be- lieve, that Admiral Goette said that the ** cruel conditions" under which the men in the interned ships were being compelled to live at Scapa Flow was alone responsible for the fact that it had been so far impossible to find a crew to man the Baden, which he had agreed some days previously Getting Down to Work 59 should be delivered in place of the uncompleted Machensen. Except for the several modern ships I have mentioned, the search of the naval units remaia- mg in German ports resolved itself into a more or less monotonous clambering over a lot of ob- solete hulks — from many of which even the guns had been removed — to see that no munitions re- mained in their magazines. There was always the same inevitable filth to be waded through, always the same gloweringly sullen — or, worse still by way of variation, cringingly obsequious — officers to be endured. The sullen ones usually improved when they found that no ** indignities'' were to be heaped upon them, and that they had only to an- swer a few questions and show the way round; but you had to keep a weather eye lifting for the obsequious ones to prevent their helping you up ladders by steadying your elbow, rubbing imag- inary spots of grease off your monkey jacket, and — the invariable finale — offering you a limp, moist hand to shake at parting. The latter, like the ruthless U-boat warfare, was dangerous princi- pally on account of its unexpectedness. When adequate ** counter measures'' were devised against it, it became less threatening, but had always to be looked out for. I don't recall, though, hearing any one confess to having been 60 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules'' ** surprised^' into shaking hands after the first day or two. The search of the warships at Wilhelmshaven was finished in a couple of days, while the few old cruisers and destroyers at Emden were inspected in the three hours between going and returning railway journeys, taking about the same length of time. At Hamburg and Bremen there were prin- cipally merchant ships and U-boats, and the search of — and for — ^both of these is a story of its own. The remainder of the work on the North Sea side consisted in journeys — ^by train, motor, destroyer, or launch — to, and the inspection of, Grermany's principal seaplane and airship stations, and of these highly interesting visits I shall write in later chapters. ni FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF *' STARVING GERMANY '* Our visit to the island of Norderney was a me- morable one for two reasons — first, because we inspected there what is not only the largest of Germany's seaplane stations, but also probably the largest and best equipped in all Europe ; and second, because the journey there gave us, all in the course of a few hours, our first after-the-war glimpse of a German city, German countryside, a German railway, and what had once been a Ger- man summer resort. The couple of days spent in the search of the German warships had given no opportunity whatever to see anything more than an interminable succession of dirty mess decks, empty magazines, disgruntled officers, slo- venly sailors, and cluttered docks. Steeples and factory chimneys and the loom of lofty barracks located Wilhelmshaven without revealing it. The steady dribble of pedestrians along the water- front road might have been made up of Esquimaux or Kanakas, for all that we could see. One won- dered if their emaciated frames were dressed in paper suits, and if their tottering feet clumped along in wooden clogs. The excellence of the ma- 61 62 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" terial of the untidy garb of the sailors, and the well-fed appearance of the latter, seemed to point to the contrary. But still one couldn't be sure. We knew that Germany had never made the mis- take of under-feeding or under-clothing her sol- diers and sailors, and that where any one had to go without it was always the civilians who suffered. We wanted to see how those civilians had stood the ** starvation blockade'' against which they had protested so loudly, and now — ^through our visits to the various naval air stations — the veil was about to be lifted. The fog — ^the interminable fog which never lifted for more than a few hours at a time during the whole of our three weeks in German waters — banked thick above the green stream of the swift- running tide as our picket boat shoved off from the Hercules at eight o'clock that morning, and there was just sufficient visibility to pick up the successive buoys marking the course to the en- trance to the basin. Eunning in just ahead of an antique torpedo-boat with the usual indolent sail- ors slouching along its narrow decks, we stepped out upon the longest pontoon landing I have ever seen. Twenty yards wide, and over a hundred in length, it was constructed so as to rise and fall with flow and ebb of what must have been a very considerable tide. Impressions of ^ ^ Starving Germany ' ' 63 No one being on the landing to receive the party, we started walking in toward its shore- ward end. The men on the torpedo-boats stared at US with insolent curiosity, without the sugges- tion of the shuffle of a foot toward standing at attention as even the ** brassiest*' of our several ** brass-hats" passed by; but from the galley of a tug moored on the opposite side the cook grinned wide-mouthed welcome. She was a fine, upstand- ing, double-braided blonde of generous propor- tions, and the bulging bulk of her overflowed the narrow companion-way into which she was wedged as the raw red flesh of her arm swelled over the line of its rolled-up sleeve. **No traces of under-feeding in that figure,'' said a British flying officer, with the critically im- personal glance he would have given to the wings of a machine he was about to take the air in. **No," acquiesced one of the Americans; '*and there's no fear of scJirecJclichkeit in that face, either. Pipe that ^welcome-to-our-f air-city' grin, won't you. Could you beat it for a display of ivories ? ' ' And so we came to ' * starving Germany. ' ' A bustling young flying lieutenant came hurry- ing to meet us at the shore end of the landing, apologizing for his tardiness by saying that it was due to * ^ trouble about the cars. ' ' After seeing the 64 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" motley collection of motors which awaited us out- side the gate, one had no difficulty in believing him; indeed, it was hard to see how there could be anything but *^ trouble about the cars.'' The best of them was an ancient Mercedes, the pneu- matic tyres of which, worn down to the treads, looked as though they would puncture on the smooth face of a paving stone. Two others— one of them looked like a sort of *^ perpetuation'' of a collision between a Daimler lorry and a Benz runabout, and the other was an out-and-out mon- grel with no visible marks of ancestry — had the remains of what had once been solid tyres of ersatz rubber bound to the rims with bits of tarred rope. The fourth and last was ersatz throughout. That is to say, it seemed to be made — from its paper upholstery to its steel-spring tyres — of ** other things" than those from which the normal cars one has always known are made of. I had heard much of those spring tyres, so, taking advantage of the general rush for the pneu- matically tyred Mercedes and the ** rheumatic ally" tyred nondescripts, I lifted an oiled-paper curtain and plumped down on the woven paper cushion of old '^Ersatz.'' As the other cars were quite filled up with the remainder of our party, the escorting German officer came in with me. **The imitation rubber," he began slowly and Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 65 precisely, ** makes many good things, but not the good motor tyres. It is resilient, but not elastic. It will stand the pushing but not the pulling. It is not strong, not tough, like the rubber from the tree. Ah, the English were very lucky always to have the real rubber. If that had been so with Germany — '' Just to what extent a continuous supply of real rubber would have modified the situation for Ger- many I did not learn, for we started up just then, and the rest of the sentence was lost in the mighty whirl of sound in which we were engulfed. The best comparison I can make of the noise that car made — as heard from within — is to a sustained crescendo of a super-Jazz band, the cymbals of which were represented by the clankity-clank of the component parts of the steel tyres banging against each other and the pavement, and the drums of which were the rhythmic thud-thud of the ersatz body on the lifeless springs. Although the other cars were rattling heavily on their own account, the ear-rending racket of the steel-tyres dominated the situation completely, and at the first turn I caught an impressionistic blend of blue and khaki uniforms as their occupants leaned out to see what was in pursuit of them. *^It was unlike any sound I ever heard before,'^ said one of them in describing it later. *^It was 66 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" positively Bolshevik !'* All in all, I think ** Bol- shevik'' is more fittingly descriptive than ^* Jazz- band-ic." It carries a suggestion of ^^savage- ness'' quite lacking in the latter, and *^ savage" that raucous tornado of sound surely was. I could never allow myself to contemplate the pri- mal chaos one of the American officers tried to conjure up by asking what it would be like to hear two motor convoys of steel-tyred trucks pass- ing each other during a bombardment. The only sensible comment I heard on that question was from the officer who cut in with, ** Please tell me how you'd know there was a bombardment?" There was one thing that steel-tyred car did well, though, and that was to respond to its emer- gency brake. The occasion for the use of the lat- ter arose when a turning bridge was suddenly opened fifteen or twenty yards ahead of the lead- ing car, imposing upon the latter the necessity of stopping dead inside that distance or taking a header into a canal. The Mercedes, skating airily along on its wobbly tyres, managed it by inches •after streaking the pavement with two broad belts of the last *^real tree rubber" left in Germany. The leading nondescript — ^the Benz-Daimler blend — gave the Mercedes a sharp bump before losing the last of its momentum, and all but the last of its fluttering *^rope-er5a^^-rubber" tyres, while Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 67 its mate only came to a standstill after skidding sideways on its rims. But my steel- tyred chariot, the instant its emergency brake was thrown on, simply set its teeth into the red brick pavement, and, spitting sparks like a dragon, stopped as dead as though it had run against a stone wall. My companion and I, having nothing to set our teeth into, simply kept going right on. I, luckily, only butted the chauffeur, who — evidently because the same thing had happened to him before — took it all in good part ; but the dapper young officer, who planted the back of his head squarely between the shoulder blades of the august Workmen 's and Soldiers' representative riding beside the driver, got a good swearing at for not aiming lower and allowing the back of the seat to absorb his inertia. Quite apart from the sparks kicked up by the tyres, and the stars shaken down by my jolt, it was a highly illuminating little incident. We ran more slowly after we crossed the bridge — which also meant more quietly, or rather, less noisily — and for the first time I noticed what a new world we seemed to have come into since we left the immediate vicinity of the docks. It was not so much that we were now passing down a street of small shops, where before we had been among warehouses and factories, as the difference in appearance and spirit of the people. No one — 68 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" not even the lahourer going to his morning work — had anything of the slovenly hang-dog air of the sailors we had seen in the ships and abont the dockyard. The streets and the shops were clean, and even the meanest of the people neatly and comfortably dressed. We had come out of the atmosphere of revolution into that of ordinary work-a-day Germany. As we rounded a corner and came clattering into the main street of the city, the change was even more marked. At first blush there was hardly a suggestion of war, or of war 's aftermath. The big shop-windows were full of goods, with here and there the forerunning red-and-green decorations of the coming holidays. Here was an art shop 's display of etchings and coloured prints, there a haberdasher's stock of scarves and shirts and gloves. Even a passing glance, it is true, re- vealed a prominently displayed line of false shirt fronts; but, then, your German always was par- tial to ^ * dickeys. ' ' A florist 's window, in which a fountain plashed above a basin of water-lilies, was golden with splendid chrysanthemums, and in the milliner's window hard by a saffron-plumed con- fection of ultra-marine held high revel with a riotous thing of royal purple plush. Noting my eager interest in the gay window panorama, my companion, leaning close to my Impressions of *' Starving Germany" 69 ear to make himself heard above the clatter of the tyres, shouted jerkily with the jolt of the car, **We are fond of the bright colours, we Germans, and we make the very good dyes. I think you have missed very much the German dyes since the war, and will now be very glad of the chance to have them again. We have learned much during the war, and they are now better than ever before. We laugh very much when we capture the French soldier with the faded blue uniform, for then we know that the French cannot make the dye that will hold its colour. But the German — '' ** Waiting with the goods," I said to myself as I drew away from the dissertation to watch a tramcar disgorging its load at a crossing. We were now runniug through the heart of Wilhelmshaven, and it was the early office crowd that was thronging the streets. How well they were dressed, and how well fed they looked! There were no hollow eyes or emaciated forms in that crowd. One who has seen famines in China and India knows the hunger look, the hunger pal- lor, the hunger apathy. There is no mistaking them. But we had not seen any of them in the German ships or dockyards, we did not see them that day in Wilhelmshaven, and we were not des- tined to see them in Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, or anywhere else we went in the course of our many 70 To Kiel in the ^'Hercules" hundreds of miles of travel in Northern Germany. So far as Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, and Schleswig- Holstein were concerned, I have no hesitation in saying that the starvation whine, which arose from the moment the ink was dry upon the armistice agreement and which still persists, was sheer — to be charitable, let us say — panic. Presently, as we began to pass some huge masses of buildings which, four or five stories in height, appeared to run on through two or three blocks of the not unattractive park-like grounds with which they were surrounded, my companion, indicating them with a proud wave of his hand, started speaking again. I could not hear him distinctly — for we were speeding up faster now, and consequently making more noise — ^but I thought I caught the drift of what he was trying to say. **Ja, ja," I roared back. *^Ich verstehe sehr gut. Der naval barracks. Der German High Sea Fleet Base. ' ' I think that was hardly the way he was trying to put it, but his vigorous nod of assent showed that I had at least gathered the sense of his observations. As we slowed down at the next corner he put me completely right by saying, ' * Not for the ships themselves, the big barracks, but for the men when the ships were here. I think you make a joke.'' I admitted the shrewd impeach- Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 71 ment with, a grin, but hardly thought it necessary to add that I was afraid he had still missed the best part of the joke. He was a diverting lad, that young flying officer, and he told me many interest- ing things in the course of the day. Some of them were true, as subsequent events or observations proved ; but one of them at least was a calculated and deliberate lie, told with the purpose of in- ducing one of the **air'' parties to give up the plan it had formed of visiting a certain station. I will set down that significant little incident in its proper place. Although, as we learned later, the fact that a party from the Allied Commission was to land and pass through the city that day had been carefully withheld from the people, the latter exhibited very little surprise at the appearance of officers in uni- forms which they seemed to recognize at once as foreign. They had been instructed that they were to make no demonstration of any kind when Allied officers were encountered in the streets, and, do- cile as ever, they carried out the order to the letter. A mild, unresentful curiosity would per- haps best describe the attitude of all the people who saw us that day, both in Wilhelmshaven and at the country stations. The fact that many of the streets were dressed with flags and greenery, and that all of the chil- 72 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" dren, both boys and girls, trudging along to school carried the red, white, and black emblem in their hands, suggested to me at first that it was part of a patriotic display, a sort of flaunting the new- found freedom in the face of the ^ ' invader. ' ' But my companion assured me that the decorations were in honour of the expected arrival home of two regiments of Wilhelmshaven Marines from the Front. ^*We have been en fete for a week now in hourly expectation of their coming, and every day the children have put on their best clothes and carried flags in their hands. But the railway service is very bad, and always are they disappointed. You will see the arch of welcome at the railway station. Wilhelmshaven is very proud of its Marine soldiers.*' The * * arch ' ' at the station turned out to be the evergreen and bunting-decorated entrance to a long shed set with tables, at which refreshments were to be served to the returning warriors. It was surmounted with a shield bearing the words **Willkommen Soldaten," and an eight-line stanza of verse which I did not have time to copy. The gist of it was that the soldiers were welcomed home to * * Work and Liberty. ' ' It was thoroughly bad verse, said one of our interpreters, but the sentiments were — for Germany — *^ restrained and dignified." There was nothing about the *^un- Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 73 beaten soldiers," of whom we had been reading as welcomed home in Berlin and other parts of Ger- many. There was a small crowd at the station entrance as our cars drove up, but it parted quietly and made way for us to pass inside. One or two sailors stood at attention and saluted — ^though whether German or Allied officers it was impossi- ble to tell — and several civilians bowed solemnly and took oif their hats. One of these reached out and made temporary captive an irreverent street gamin who — purely in a spirit of fun, apparently — started *^ goose-stepping'^ along in our wake. A bevy of minxes of the shop-girl type giggled sputteringly, getting much apparent amusement the while out of pretending to keep each other quiet. One gaudily garbed pair, standing easily at gaze in the middle of the waiting-room, stared brazenly and ogled frank invitation. An austere dame — she might have been an opulent naval cap- tain's frau — drew a languid hand from what looked like a real ermine muif to lift a tortoise- shell lorgnette and pass us one by one in critical review. Then the old ticket-puncher, touching his cap as though he had recognized the party as the Board of Directors on a surreptitious tour of in- spection, passed us through the gate and on the platform and our waiting train. 74 To Kiel in the ^^ Hercules" Our special consisted of a luggage van and a passenger coach, drawn by an engine in a very advanced state of what appeared to be neglect. Though all its parts were there, these, except where rubbed clean by friction, were thick with rust and scaled with flaking paint. The worst trouble, however, seemed to come from lack of lubrication, for in the places where every other locomotive I had seen before was dripping with oil, this one showed only caked graphite and hard, dry steel. While there is little doubt that the Germans made a point of turning out their worst engines and motor cars for the use of the Allied sub-commissions in order to give an impression that things were really in a desperate way with them, it is still beyond question that their railway stock deteriorated greatly during the war, and that a shortage of lubricating oils was one of their very worst difficulties. The passenger coach was equally divided be- tween first- and second-class compartments. En- tering at the second-class end, our party distrib- uted itself between the first two compartments reached. By the time one of the several German officers who had now joined us pointed out the big figure **2'' on the windows, we were so com- fortably settled that no one deemed it worth while to move. As a matter of fact, on the Ger- Impressions of '^Starving Germany" 75 man railways, with their four or five classes, there is gentler gradation between class and class than in France or England ; and between first and second — save that the former is upholstered in dark-red plush and the latter in light-green — the diiference is hardly noticeable. The main dif- ference is, I believe, in the price, and the fact that only six are allowed in the first-class against eight in the second. We extracted a good deal of amusement out of the fact that the several Work- men's and Soldiers' representatives made no mis- take, and lost no time, in marking a first-class com- partment for their own. We had been somewhat perplexed on our ar- rival at the station to note that the two uniformed Workmen's and Soldiers' representatives had been joined by two civilians, each wearing the white arm-band of the revolutionary council. But presently one of the latter, hat in hand, came to the door of our compartment to explain. The naval authorities, he said, had requested that the Workmen and Soldiers should guarantee the safety of all Allied parties landing from civilian attack, and in consequence he had been sent along as a *^ hostage." At least the German term he used was one which could be translated as host- age, but after talking it over we came to the con- clusion that the man's role was more analogous to 76 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" that of a ** plain clothes '* special policeman. There was one of these men attached to every party that made a train journey on the North Sea side (all stations in the Baltic littoral were reached by destroyer, so that no ** protection'^ from the civihan population was necessary), and they were neither of any trouble nor — so far as I was ever able to discern — any use. Leaving a handful of morning papers behind him as a propitiatory offering, our ** hostage" bowed himself out of the door and backed off down the corridor — still bowing — to rejoin his colleagues in the first-class section of the car. In the quarter of an hour there was still to wait be- fore the line was clear for the departure of our train, we had our first chance for a peep into Germany through the window of the Press. The four-page sheets turned out to be copies of Vorwdrts, the Kolnische Volkszeitung und Hand els -Blatt, the Weser Zeitung, of Bremen, the Wilhelmshavener Tagehlait, and the Repuhlik, The latter styled itself the Sozialdemohratisches Organ fur Oldenburg und Ostfriesland, and the Mitteilungsblatt der Arheiter und Soldatenrdte. It claimed to be in its thirty-second year, but admitted that all this time, except the fortnight since the revolution, it had borne the name of Oldenhurger Volkshlatt. It had little in the way Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany'' 77 of news from either the outside world or the in- terior, the few columns which it gave up to this purpose being filled with accounts of the formation of republics in various other provinces, and at- tacks upon members of the acting Government in Berlin. Evidently under some sort of orders, it mentioned the arrival of the Hercules at Wil- helmshaven without comment. A socialistic sheet of Hamburg, which turned up the next day, showed less restraint in this connection, for it stated that the Allied Commission had altered its decision not to meet the Workmen's and Soldiers' representa- tives, and that negotiations were now in progress in which the latter were taking a prominent part. Tangible evidence of the truth of this statement, it added, might be found in the fact that dele- gates from the Workmen and Soldiers accom- panied Allied parties whenever they landed. Vorwdrts tried to convey the same false impres- sion to its readers, but rather less brazenly. The Kolnische VolJcszeitung printed a dispatch from London, in which the Daily Mail was quoted as supporting the ^^australischen Premierministers Hughes' " demand of an indemnity of '' acht mil- Harden Pfund Sterling' ' from Germany, and pro- ceeded to prove in the course of an impassioned leader of two columns why the demanding of any indemnity at all was ia direct violation of the 78 To Kiel in the ^^ Hercules" pledged word of the AlHes, to say nothing of Wil- son's Fourteen Points. A significant circum- stance was the inclusion in each paper of a part of a column of comment on the movement of prices of ^ ^ LandesproduJcte' ^ on the American markets. The advertisements, which took up rather more than half of each sheet, proved by long odds more interesting than the news. These were quite in best *^ peace time'' style. The Metropol-Variete {Neu renoviert!) informed all and sundry that '^Vier elegante junge Damen!'^ disported them- selves in its ^'KabareW every evening. The head-line of the great ^^ Spezialitdten Programm^' in the theatre was ^'Die Gross e Sensation: Mar- tini Szenifj genannt der ^ Aushrecher-Konig' !'* A number in the Metropolis program which appealed to us more than all the others, however, was one which was featured further down the list, for there, sandwiched between ^^ Kitty Deanos und Paetner, Kunstschutzen/' and **Hans Eomans, Liedersanger/' appeared *^ Little Willy, Tra- pez-Volant/^ **And all the time we thought he was in Hol- land, ' ' dryly commented the American officer who made the discovery. One could not help wondering respecting the * * etymology " of ^ ^ Little Willy, ' ' and whether that ** Flying Trapezist" knew that he bore the favour- Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 79 ite Allied nickname for His ex-Royal and Imperial Highness, Frederick Wilhelm HohenzoUern, Crown Prince of Germany, etc., etc. Evidence that Hun * * piracy ' ' had not been con- fined to their U-boats was unearthed in the dis- covery that the Adler-Theatre of Bremen adver- tised two performances of **Die Modekne Eva'* for that very day — Heute Sonntag! **I ran across the chap who wrote ^The Modern Eve' somewhere out California way,'* said the same American who had spoken before. * *He was some bore, too, take it from me ; but he never deserved anything as bad as this, for the show itself was pretty nifty," and he began humming, in ex- temporaneously translated German the words of *^ Good-bye Everybody,'' the popular >* song hit" from *^The Modern Eve." It was a Berlin theatre which advertised ^*2 Vorstellungen 2" of '* Hamlet," which ended up the notice with ^ ' Eauchen Stkeng Vekbotei^ ! " in large type. *^If they burn the same stuff in Ber- lin that our Workmen and Soldier friends in the first-class are putting up that smoke barrage in the corridor with," said an airship officer, *4t would have to be a case of ^Rauchen Streng Ver- hoten' or gas masks." A number of booksellers advertised long lists of ^'Neue Werke/' but one searched these in vain 80 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" for any of the notorious polemics directed against the Allies, or yet for the writings of any of the great protagonists of the ^ * Deutschland Ueber Alles'^ movement. Most of them appeared to be ^^ Romances'' or out-and-out *^ Thrillers.'' Bachem, of Koln, described ^^Der Meister'^ as ^^Der Roman eines Spiritisten^\' ^^Wettertannen^' as a ^^Tiroler Roman aus der Gegenwart von Hans SchroW^; ^^Wenn Irland dich rufV^ as ^^Ber Roman eines Fliegers^' ; and ^'Der hlutige Behrpfennig'^ as '^Erzdhlung aus dem Lehen eines Priest ers/' Although one would have thought that the German people had had quite enough of that kind of thing from their late Gov- ernment,, every book I saw advertised in any of these papers was fiction. Perhaps the most optimistic of all these ad- vertisements was that of the *^ Kismet Labora- torium," of Berlin, in the Republik, which claimed to make a preparation for the improvement of the female form divine. Now that the war was over, it read, they no longer felt any hesitation in an- nouncing that their great discovery was based on a certain product which could only be obtained from British India. As their pre-war stock had only been eked out by dilution with an not en- tirely satisfactory substitute, it was with great pleasure that they informed their many customers Impressions of *^ Starving Germany" 81 that they hoped shortly to conclude arrangements by which the famous ^^^Bakatal-Busenwasser'' could again be furnished in all its pristine purity and strength. So here, it appears, was an indirect admission to prove wrong the individual who averred that the German chemists could make out of coal tar anything in the world except a gentleman. It seems that all the time they had been dependent upon British India for even the ^* makings'' of a lady. It would have been interesting to know what the ^ * arrangements ' ' were by which the sup- ply was to be renewed. We were discussing that question when the train started, and a **flaf wheel on the ^^ bogey '' immediately under our com- partment put an end to casual conversation. On the outskirts of the town we passed by a great series of sidings closely packed with oil- tank-cars from all parts of the Central Empires. The most of them were marked in German, but with names which indicated beyond a doubt that they had been employed in serving the Galician fields of Austria. On many more the name of Eumania appeared in one form or another, and several bore the names of the British concerns from which they had been seized when the rich oilfields of that unlucky country fell to Macken- sen's armies. A considerable number of cars 82 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" were marked with Eussian characters, which led to the assumption that they had been seized in Courland or the Ukraine, and that they had orig- inally run to and from the greatest of the world's oilfields at Baku, on the Caspian. There was a persistent report at one time that Germany was constructing an oil-pipe-line from the Galician fields to Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Although quite practicable from an engineering standpoint, this appears never to have been seriously con- sidered, probably on account of the great demand for labour and material it would have made at a time when both could be used to better ad- vantage in other ways. Seeing me standing at the window in the cor- ridor looking at the oil-cars, my young compan- ion of the steel-tyred auto came out of his com- partment and moved up beside me. **As you will see,*' he said with his slow precision, *^we never lacked badly for the oil for our U-boats. The one time that we had the great worry was when the Eussians had the fields of Galicia. That cut otf our only large supply. But luckily we had great stocks in hand when the war started, and these were quite sufficient for our needs until the Eussians had been driven out of Austria. If they had remained there, it is hard to see how we could have kept going after our reserve was Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 83 finished. But they did not stay, the poor Kus- sians, and they did not even have the wits to destroy the wells properly. We had them pro- ducing again at full capacity in a few months. Now, if they had been destroyed like the Eng- lish destroyed the wells in Eumania it would have been different. There, in many places, we found it the cheaper to drill the new wells. Ah, the English are very thorough when they have the time, both in making and un-making." As we passed through the suburbs of Wilhelms- haven we began to get some inkling of where the food came from. All back yards and every spare patch of ground were in vegetables. Nowhere in England or France have I seen the surface of the earth so fully occupied, so thoroughly turned to account. Some thrifty cultivators, after filling up their available ground with rows of cabbages and Brussels sprouts, appeared to have been grow- ing beans and peas in hanging baskets and boxes of earth set up on frames. One genius had erected a forcing bed for what (to judge from the dead stalks) looked like cucumbers or squashes on the thatched roof of his cowshed. The only thing needed to cap the climax of agricultural industry would have been a '* hanging garden'' suspended from captive balloons. As we ran out of the suburban area and into 84 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" the open country the allotments gave place to large and well-tilled farms, or rather to farms which had been well tilled in the season favour- able to cultivation. At the moment work was practically at a standstill on account of the in- cessant rains which had inundated considerable areas and left the ground heavy, water-logged,, and temporarily unfit for the plough. The re- sults of a really bountiful harvest, however, were to be seen in bulging barns and sheds and plethoric haystacks and fodder piles. The surest evidence that there had actually been an over-supply of vegetables was the careless way in which such things as cabbages, swedes, and beets were being handled in transport. A starving people does not leave food of this kind to rot along the road nor in the station J^ards, evidences of which we saw every now and then for the next forty miles. Practically the whole of the North Sea littoral of Germany between the Kiel Canal and the Dutch border — across the central section of which we were now passing — is the same sort of a flat, sea- level expanse, and has the same rich, alluvial soil, as the plains of Flanders. This region, like Den- mark and Holland, had been largely given over to dairying before the war. The conversion of it from a pastoral to an agricultural country, by ploughing up the endless miles of meadows, has Impressions of *^ Starving Germany" 85 resulted in a huge output of foodstuffs, and has put the people inhabiting it well beyond the risk of anything approaching starvation, no matter how long the blockade might be kept up. The offi- cers accompanying us were quite frank in stating that the farmers had prospered and waxed wealthy by selling their surplus in the nearest industrial centres^ such as Bremen and Hamburg. The pinch, they said, would come when the people began trying to restock their dairy farms again, for at least a half of the cattle had been killed off as their pastures had been put under cultivation. Judging by the very few cattle in sight — in comparison with the number one has always seen in the fields in dairying regions — one would be inclined to estimate the reduction of stock at a good deal more than half. The fact that it is the local custom to keep the best of their stock stabled during the most inclement months of the winter doubtless had a good deal to do with the few animals in sight. As a matter of fact, there was really very little grazing left for those that might have been turned out. Sheep were also ex- tremely scarce, but as this was not a region where they were ever found in great numbers one re- marked their absence less than that of cattle. But the most astonishing thing of all was that not a single pig was sighted on either the go- 86 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" ing or returning journey. The sight of what appeared to be a long-empty sty started a com- parison of observations from which it transpired that no one watching from either of our two com- partments had so much as clapped an eye on what the world has long regarded as Germany's favourite species of live stock. After that we all began standing ' ^ pig lookout, ' ' but the only * * View Halloo '' raised was a false one, the ^'scTiwein'' turning out to be a dachshund^ and a very scrawny one at that. Piqued by this astonishing porcine elusiveness, the **air'' parties (upon which most of the land travel devolved) met in the ward-room of the Hercules that evening and contributed to form a *^Pig Pool,'' the whole of which was to go to the first member who could produce incontestable evidence that he had seen a pig upon German soil. Astounding as it may seem, this prize was never awarded. The claim of one aspirant was ruled out because, on cross- questioning, he had to admit that his *^pig" wore a German naval uniform and had tried, by vigor- ous lying, to head him off from a hangar contain- ing a very interesting type of a new seaplane. Another claimant proved that he had actually seen a pig, but only to have the prize withheld when it transpired that he had flushed nothing more lifelike than the plaster image of a pig which, Impressions of *^ Starving Germany" 87 cleaver in hand, stood as a butcher's sign in a village on the island of Eiigen. A third claimant would have won the award had he chanced along five minutes sooner when the villagers were butchering a pig on the occasion when his party visited the Great Belt Islands to inspect the forts. Even in this case, though, we should have had to weigh carefully the evidence of an Irish- Ameri- can officer of the same party, who said that it was **a dead cert that pig had died from hog cholera a good hour before it was killed ! ' ' Although the fact that none of the members of the various Allied sub-commissions saw so much as a single live hog during the course of the many hundred miles travelled by train, motor, carriage, or foot in North-Western Germany, does not mean that the species has become extinct there by any means, there is still no doubt that the numbers of this popular and appropriate sym- bol of the Hun's grossness have been greatly re- duced, and that schweine will be among the top items on their list of * immediate requirements" forwarded to the Allied Belief Committee. Hurried as was this first of our journeys across Oldenburg, I was still able to see endless evi- dence not only of the intensive cultivation, but also the careful and scientific" fertilization, which I had good opportunity to study later at closer 88 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" range in Mecklenburg and Schleswig. Stable manure and mulcbes of sedulously conserved de- caying vegetable matter were being everywhere applied to the land according to the most ap- proved modern practice. This I had expected to see, for I already knew the German as an in- telligent and well-instructed farmer, but what did surprise me was clear proof that the supply of artificial fertilizers — phosphates, nitrates, and lime — was being fairly well maintained. Truck loads of these indispensable adjuncts to sustained production standing in station sidings showed that, and so did the state of the fields themselves ; for the fresh young shoots of winter wheat, which I saw everywhere pushing up and taking full ad- vantage of the almost unprecedentedly mild De- cember weather, showed no traces of the ^'hungri- ness'' I have so often noted during the last year or two in some of the over-cropped and under- fertilized fields of England. What with prisoners and the unremitting labour of women and children, Germany accomplished re- markable things in the way of production. The area of cultivation was not only largely increased, but the production of the old fields was also kept at a high level. In no part of the world have I ever seen fairer farmsteads than those through which the party inspecting the Great Belt forts Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 89 north of Kiel drove for many miles one day. They struck me as combining something of the picturesqueness of a Somerset farm with the prosperous efficiency of a California ranch. And it is as a California rancher myself that I say that I only wish I had soil and outbuildings that would come anywhere nearly up to the average of those throughout this favoured region of Schleswig. It is true that many of the people thereabouts are Danish, and I even saw a Danish flag discreetly displayed behind the neat lace cur- tains of one farmhouse. But, Danish or German, they are producing huge quantities of good food, enough to keep the people of less fertile regions of ^^ starving Deutschland" far from want. It was just before our arrival at Norddeich at the end of this first day's railway journey that I spoke to the German officer who had joined me at the window of the corridor about the very well- fed look of the people we had seen on the streets of Wilhelmshaven and at the stations of the towns and villages through which we had been passing. *^It is true,'' he replied, ^^that we have never suf- fered for food in this part of the country, and that is because it is so largely agricultural. But wait until you go to the industrial centres. In Hamburg and Bremen, it is there that you will see the want and hunger. It is for those poor 90 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" people that the Allies must provide much food without delay. '^ Personally, I did not go either to Hamburg or Bremen, being absent with parties visiting the Zeppelin stations at Nordholz and Tondern at the time the Shipping Board of the Naval Commission was inspecting British merchantmen interned in these once great ports. A member of that board, however, assured me that he had observed no ma- terial difference in the appearance of the people in the streets of Bremen and Hamburg and those of Wilhelmshaven. His party had taken ** pot- luck'' at the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg, where the food had been found ample in quantity and not unappetizing, even on a meatless day. **But what of the poorf I asked. **Did you see anything of the quarters that would corre- spond to the slums of London or Liverpool," ^* Germany,'' he replied, **to her credit, has very few places where the housing is outwardly so bad as in many British industrial cities I could name. We did not see much of the parts of Bremen and Hamburg where the working-classes live; but we did see a good deal of the workers themselves. I know under-feeding when I see it, for I was in Russia but a few months ago. But, so far as I could see, the chief difference be- tween the men in the dockyards and shipbuilding Impressions of ^^ Starving Germany" 91 establishments of Hamburg and those of the Tyne and Clyde was that the former were working harder. They merely glanced up at us as we passed, with little curiosity and no resentment, and went right on with the job in hand. No, everything considered, I should not say that any one is suffering seriously for lack of food in either Bremen or Hamburg.'' *^No one is suffering seriously for lack of food.'' That was the feeling of all of us at the end of our first day in ^* starving Germany," and (if I may anticipate) it was also our verdict when the Hercules sailed for England, three weeks later. IV ACROSS THEI SANDS TO NOEDERNEY The names of ^^Norderney" and **Borkum'' on the list of seaplane stations to be inspected seemed to strike a familiar chord of memory, but it was not until I chanced upon a dog-eared copy of ^^The Riddle of the Sands'' on a table in the ** Commission Room'' of the Hercules that it dawned upon me where I had heard them before. There was no time at the moment to re-turn the pages of this most consummately told yarn of its kind ever written, but, prompted by a happy in- spiration, I slipped the grimy little volume into my pocket. And there (as the clattering special which was to take us to ISTorddeich, e7i route to Norderney, turned off from the Bremen main- line a few miles outside of Wilhelmshaven) I found it again, just as the green water-logged fields and bogs of the ^4and of the seven sieW began to unroll in twin panoramas on either side. Opening the book at random somewhere toward the middle, my eye was drawn to a paragraph beginning near the top of the page facing a much- pencilled chart. 92 Across the Sands to Norderney 93 **. . . The mainland is that district of Prussia that is known as East Friesland/' (I rememher now that it was ^^Carruthers,'^ writing in the Dulcihella, off Wangerogg*, who was describing the * ' lay of the land. ' ^ ) ^ ^ It is a short, flat-topped peninsula, bounded on the west by the Ems estuary and beyond that by Holland, and on the east by the Jade estuary; a low-lying country, con- taining great tracts of miarsh, and few towns of any size; on the north side none. Seven islands lie off the coast. All, except Borkum, which is round, are attenuated strips, slightly crescent- shaped, rarely more than a mile broad, and taper- ing at the ends; in length averaging about six miles, from Norderney and Juist, which are seven and nine respectively, to little Baltrum, which is only two and a half. ' ' As I turned the book sideways to look at the chart the whole fascinating story came back with a rush. What man who has ever knocked about in small boats, tramped roads and poked about generally in places where he had no business to poke could forget it? The East Friesland penin- sula, with its ^* seven little rivers'' and ** seven channels" and ** seven islands,'' was the **take off" for the German army which was to cross the North Sea in barges to land on the sands of **The Wash" for the invasion of England. And this 94 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules'' very line over which our rickety two-car special was clinkety-clanking — I wished that ^^Carruth- ers ' ^ could have seen what a pitiful little old single- track it had become — was the *^ strategic trunk'' over which the invading cohorts were to be shunted in their thousands to the waiting deep-sea-going barges in the canalized siels. There was Essen, which was to have been the ** nodal centre'' of the great embarkation, and scarcely had I located it on the map before its tall spire was stabbing the north-western skyline as we drew in to the station. A raw-boned, red-faced girl, her astonishingly powerful frame clad in a man's greasy overall, lowered the barrier at the high-road crossing, the same barrier, I reflected, which had held up ^^Car- ruthers," Von Brunning, and the two ** cloaked gentlemen" on the night of the great adventure. Four *^land girls," in close-fitting brown cor- duroys, with great baskets of red cabbages on their shoulders, were just trudging off down the road to Dornum, the very ** cobbled causeway flanked with ditches and willows, and running cheek by jowl with the railway track" which ^^Carruthers" had followed by midnight, with ** fleecy clouds and a half moon overhead," in search of the Benser Tief. There was even a string of mighty barges towing down the narrow canal of the **Tief " when Across the Sands to Norderney 95 we crossed its rattling* bridge a few rainutes later. And just as ^^Carruthers'^ described, the road and railway clung closely together all the way to Dornum, and about halfway were joined by a third companion in the shape of a puny stream, the Neues Ticf. ^* Wriggling and doubling like an eel, choked with sedges and reeds,'' it had no more pretensions to being navigable now than then. It still ^'looped away into the fens out of sight, to reappear again close to Dornum in a more dig- nified guise," and it still skirted the town to the east, where there was a towpath and a piled wharf. The only change I was able to note in the momentary halt of the train was that the ** red- brick building with the look of a warehouse, roof- less as yet and with workmen on the scaffolds,'' had now been covered with red tile and filled with red cabbages. It was at Dornum that ^^Carruthers" (who was masquerading as a German sailor on his way to visit a sister living on Baltrum) fell in at a primi- tive Gasthaus with an ex-crimp, drunken with much scJinappsen, who insisted on accompanying him on a detour to Domumersiel, where he had planned to do a hasty bit of spying. From the right-hand window I caught a brief glimpse of the ribbon of the coastward road, down the length of which the oddly-assorted pair — the Foreign 96 To Kiel in the '* Hercules" Office precis writer and the one-time *^ shanghai" artist — had stumbled arm-in-arm, treating each other in every gin-shop on the way. * * Carruthers ' ' ' detonr to the coast carried him out of sight of the railway, so that he missed the little red-brick schoolhouse, close up by the track, where the buxom mistress had her whole brood of young Fritzes and Gretchens lined up along the fence of the right-of-way to wave and cheer our train as it passed. How she received word of the coming of the ** Allied Special^' we could only conjecture, but it was probably through some Workmen's and Soldiers' Council friend in the railway service. But even so, as the schoolhouse was three miles from the nearest station and had nothing suggestive of a telephone line running to it, she must have had her banzai party standing by in readiness a good part of the forenoon ses- sion. Hurriedly dropping a window (they work rather hard on account of the stiffness of the thick paper strap), I was just able to gather that the burden of the greeting was *^Good morning, good morning, sir!" repeated many times in guttural chorus. If any of them were shouting ^^ Wel- come ! ' ' as one or two of our party thought they heard, it escaped my ears. They did the thing so well one was sure it had been rehearsed, and won- Across the Sands to Norderney 97 dered how long it had been since those same throaty trebles had been raised in the *^Hymn of Hate/' If '^Carruthers^' spying visit to Dornumersiel resulted in anything more *^ re- vealing ' ' than the dig in the ribs one of the young- sters got from the mistress for (apparently) not cheering lustily enough, he neglected to set it down in his story. This little incident prepared us for much we were to see later in the way of German *' conciliation" methods. ^^Carruthers/' when he returned to the rail- way again and took train at Hage, made the journey from the latter station to Nor den in ten minutes. The fact that our special took twenty is sufficient commentary on the deterioration of German road-beds and rolling stock. Norden, which is the junction point for Emden, to the south, and Norddeich, to the north, is a good- sized town, and we noticed here that the streets were beflagged and arched with evergreen as at Wilhelmshaven, doubtless in expectation of re- turning troops. While our engines were being changed, a couple of workmen, standing back in the depths of a tool-house, kept waving their hands ingratiatingly every time the armed guard (who always paced up and down the platform while the train was at a station) turned his back. What 98 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" they were driving at — unless co-operating with the children in the general ** conciliation" pro- gram — we were not able to make out. From Norden to Norddeich was a run of but three or four miles, but a bad road-bed and a worse engine made the journey a tedious if fitting finale to our painful progress across the East Frisian peninsula. Halting but a few moments at the main station, the train was shunted to a spur which took it right out to the quay where the great dyke bent inward to form a narrow artificial har- bour. A few steps across the slippery moss- covered stones, where the falling tide had bared the sloping landing, took us to where a small but powerfully engined steam launch was waiting to convey the party to Norderney. Manned by naval ratings, it had the same aspect of neglect which characterized all of the warships we had visited. The men saluted smartly, however, and on our expressing a wish to remain in the open air in preference to the stuify cabin, they tumbled below and brought up cushions and ranged them along the deck-house to sit upon. The Allied officers dangled their legs to port,, the German officers to starboard, while the ex-sailor and the ** plain- clothes'' detective from the Workmen's and Sol- diers' Council disposed themselves authorita- tively in the wheel-house. Across the Sands to Norderney 99 A few minutes' run between heavy stone jetties brought us to the open sea, where the launch be- gan threading a channel which seemed to be marked mostly by buoys, but here and there by close-set rows of saplings, now just beginning to show their scraggly tops above the falling water. It was the sight of these latter marks — so char- acteristic of these waters — that reminded me that we had at last come out into the real hunting ground of the Dulcihella, where ^^Davies'* and ^^Carruthers^' had puzzled out the solution of *^The Riddle of the Sands/' Norderney and Juist and Borkum and the other of the ** seven islands'' strung their attenuated lengths in a broken barrier to seaward, and between them and the mainland we were leaving astern stretched the amazing mazes of the sands, alternately bared and covered by the ebb and flow of the tides. Two- thirds of the area, according to ^'Carruthers," were dry at low water, when the ^ ' remaining third becomes a system of lagoons whose distribution is controlled by the natural drift of the North Sea as it forces its way through the intervals be- tween the islands. Each of these intervals re- sembles the bar of a river, and is obstructed by dangerous banks over which the sea pours at every tide, scooping out a deep pool. This fans out and ramifies to east and west as the pent-up 100 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules'' current frees itself, encircles the islands, and spreads over the intervening flats. But the fur- ther it penetrates the less scouring force it has, and as a result no island is girt completely by a low-water channel. About midway at the back of each of them is a * watershed,' only covered for five or six hours out of the twelve. A boat, even of the lightest draught, navigating behind the islands must choose its moment for passing these." *^I trust we have ^chosen our moment' care- fully," I said to myself after reading those lines and reflecting what a large part of their time the Dulcihella, Kormoran, and all the other craft in the ** Riddle" had spent careened upon sand-spits. To reassure myself, I leaned back and asked one of the German officers if boats didn't run aground pretty often on that run. ^^Oh, yes, most often," was the reply, *^but only at low water or when the fog is very thick. With this much water, and when we can see as far as we can now" — there was about a quarter of a mile of visibility — ^* there is no danger. Our difficulty will come when we try to return this evening on the low water." It may have been my imagination, but I thought he put a shade more accent on that try than a real optimist would have done under similar cir- cumstances. But then, I told myself, it was Across the Sands to Norderney 101 hardly a time when one could expect a German officer to be optimistic about anything. Heading out through the well-marked channel of the Buse Tief, between the sands of the Itzen- dorf Plate to port and Hohe Riff to starboard, twenty minutes found the launch in the opener waters off the west end of Norderney where, with its light draught, it had no longer to thread the winding of the buoyed fairway. Standing on northward until the red roofs and white walls of the town sharpened into ghostly relief on the cur- tain of the mist, course was altered five or six points to starboard, and we skirted a broad stretch of sandy beach, from the upper end of which the even slopes of concreted ^^runs'^ were visi- ble, leading back to where, dimly outlined in their darker opacity, a long row of great hangars loomed fantastically beyond the dunes. Doubling a sharp spit, the launch nosed in and brought up alongside the landing of a slip notched out of the side of the little natural harbour. The Commander of the station — a small man, but wiry and exceedingly well set up — met us as we stepped off the launch. Then, and through- out the visit, his quiet dignity of manner and ready (but not too ready) courtesy struck a wel- come mean between the incongruous blends of suUenness and subserviency we had encountered 102 To Kiel in the ^^ Hercules" in meeting the officers in the German warships. He saluted each member of the party as he landed, but tactfully refrained from offering his hand to any but the attached German officers. It was this attitude on the part of the Commander, to- gether with the uniformly courteous but unef- fusive demeanour of the other officers with whom we were thrown in contact, that made the visit to Norderney perhaps the pleasantest of all the many inspections carried out in Germany. "Walking inland along a brick-paved road, we passed a large canteen or recreation club (with a crowd of curious but quite respectful men lined up along the verandah railings to watch us go by) before turning in to a fine new brick-and- tile building which appeared to be the officers' Casino. Leaving our overcoats in the reception room, we joined the dozen or more officers awaiting us at the entrance and fared on by what had once been flower-bordered walks to the hangars. As we came out upon the ^^ tarmac" — here, as with all German seaplane and airship stations, the runs for the machines in front of the hangars are paved with concrete instead of the tarred macadam which is used so extensively in England and France — the men of the station were seen to be drawn up by companies, as for a review. Each company stood smartly to attention at the order of its offi- Across the Sands to Norderney 103 cers as the party came abreast of it, and we — both Allied and German officers — saluted in re- turn. As we passed on, each company in turn broke rank and quietly dispersed to barracks, their officers following on to join the party in the fur- therest hangar, where the inspection was to be- gin. The discipline appeared to be faultless, and it was soon evident that the men and their offi- cers had arrived at some sort of a *^ working un- derstanding'' to tide them over the period of in- spection, if not longer. The two representatives of the Workmen and Soldiers who had accompanied our party from Wilhelmshaven were allowed to be present during the inspection, and with them two other ** white- banders'' who appeared to have been elected to represent the men of the station. All other men had been cleared out of the sheds in conformity with the stipulations of the armistice. Some un- authorized individual — apparently a mechanic — who, halfway through the inspection, was noticed following the party, was summarily ordered out by the Commander. He obeyed somewhat sullenly, but though we subsequently saw him in gesticula- tive confab with some of his mates on the out- side, he did not venture again into any of the hangars. That was the nearest approach to in- subordination we saw in Norderney. 104 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" The officers of the station — now that we saw them, a score or more in number, all together — were a fine, business-like looking lot. All of them wore some kind of a decoration, most of them several, and among these were two or three of the highly-prized Orders ^^Pour le Merited' As Norderney was the *^star'^ seaplane station, that body of keen-eyed, sqnare-jawed young flying offi- cers undoubtedly included the cleverest naval pilots at Germany's disposal. What their many decorations had been given for there was, of course, no way of learning; nor did we find out whether the presence of so many of them at the inspection was voluntary or by order. Though, like their 'Commander, quiet and reserved, they were invariably courteous and willing in doing anything to facilitate the tedious progress of in- spection. There was an amusing little incident which oc- curred during the course of inspection in con- nection with a very smart young German officer, who, from the moment I first saw him at the door of the Casino, I kept telling myself I had en- countered somewhere before. For half an hour or more — while checking the names and numbers of the machines in my notebook as inspection was completed — my mind was running back through one German colony or foreign settlement after Across the Sands to Norderney 105 another, trying to find the scene into which that florid face (with its warm, wide-set eyes and its full, sensual mouth) fitted. Dar-es-Salaam, Windhoek, Tsingtau, Yap, Apia, Herbertshohe — I scurried back through them all without uncov- ering a clue. Where else had I met Germans! The southern ^ ' panhandle ' ^ of Brazil, the south of Chile,, Bagdad — That was the first name to awaken a sense of '^ nearness.'^ *^ Bagdad, Bag- dad Eailway, Assur, Mosul,'' I rambled on, and just as I began to recall that I had encountered Germans scattered all along the caravan route from the Tigris to Syria, the object of my in- terest turned up those soulful eyes of his to look at one of the American officers clambering into the ^^ house'' of the *^ Giant" monoplane seaboat under inspection at the moment — and I had him. ^^ Aleppo! ^Du Bist Wie Eine Blume!'" I chortled exultantly, my mind going back to a night in June, 1912, when, the day after my arrival from the desert, the American Consul had taken me to a party at the Austrian Consulate in honour of some one or other who was about to depart for home — wherever that was. Young Herr X (I even recalled the name now) and his brother, both on the engineering staff of the Bag- dad Eailway, were among the guests, the former very smitten with a sloe-eyed sylph of a Greek 106 To Kiel in the ^^ Hercules" Levantine, whose mother (so a friendly gossip told me) had been a dancer in a cafe chantant in Beirut before she married the Smyrna hairdresser who afterwards made a fortune buying licorice root from the Arabs. The girl (there was no denying the lissome grace of her serpentine slen- derness) was sipping her pink rose-leaf sherbet in a balcony above the open court when Herr X had been asked to sing along towards mid- night, and the fervid passion of his upturned glances as he sung **Du Bist Wie Eine Blume" as an encore to **Ich Liebe Dich" had made enough of an impression on my mind to need no more than the reminder vouchsafed me to recall it. Evidently (perhaps because I had not furnished him with a similar reason) Herr Eomeo did not trace any connection between my present well- rounded,, ** sea-faring" figure and the sun-dried, fever-wrecked anatomy I had dragged into Aleppo in 1912, for I noted that his eyes had passed over me impersonally twice or thrice without a flicker of recognition. The explosiveness of my exultant chortle, however, must have assailed the ear of the German officer standing a couple of paces in front of me, for he turned round quickly and asked if I had spoken to him. *^No — er — ^not exactly," I stammered, adding, at the promptings of a sudden reckless impulse, Across the Sands to Norderney 107 *^but I would like to ask if you knew when Lieu- tenant X over there left the Bagdad Railway for the flying serviced **He was at the head office in Frankfurt when the war began, and joined shortly afterwards/' the young officer replied promptly, stepping back beside me. Then, as the somewhat surprising nature of the query burst upon him, a look of astonishment flushed his face and a pucker of suspicion drew his bushy brows together in a perturbed frown. ^*But may I ask — *' he be- gan. **And his brother who was with him in Aleppo — the one with the scar on his cheek and the top of one ear sliced off,'' I pressed; *' where is he?" **Died of fever in Nishbin," again came the prompt answer. **But" (blurting it out quickly) ^*how do you know about them?" Being human, and therefore weak,, it was not in me to enlighten him with the truth, and to add that I was merely a second-class Yankee hack writer, temporarily togged out in an E.N.V.R. uniform to regularize my position of ** Keeper of the Records ' ' of the Allied Naval Armistice Com- mission. No, I couldn't do that. Indeed, every- thing considered, I am inclined to think that I rendered a better service to the Allied cause when 108 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" I squared my shoulders importantly and delivered myself oracularly of, ^*It is our business to know'' (impressive pause) **all.'' My reward. was worthy of the effort. ^*Ach, it is but true/' sighed the young officer resignedly. *^The English Intelligence is wonderful, as we have too often found out." **It is not bad," I admitted modestly, as I strolled over to make a note of the fact that the machine-gun mounting of one of the Frederich- hafens had not been removed. I could see that my young friend was burst- ing to impart to Lieutenant X^ the fact that he was a *^ marked man," but it was just as well that no opportunity offered in the course of the inspection. That the ominous news had been broken at luncheon, however, I felt certain from the fact that when, missing X from the group of officers who saluted us from the doorway of the Casino on our departure, I cast a furtive glance at the upper windows, it surprised him in the act of withdrawing behind one of the lace curtains. I only hope he has nothing on his con- science in the way of hospital bombings and the like. If he has, it can hardly have failed to oc- cur to him that his name is inscribed on the Allies ' *' black-list," and that he will have to stand trial in due course. Across the Sands to Norderney 109 It's a strange thing, this cropping up of half- remembered faces in new surroundings. The very next day, in the course of the visit to the Zeppelin station at Nordholz — but I will not an- ticipate. Under the terms of the armistice the Germans agreed to render all naval seaplanes unfit for use by removing their propellers, machine-guns, and bomb-dropping equipment, and dismantling their wireless and ignition systems. To see that this was carried out on a single machine was not much of a task, but multiplied by the several scores in such a station as Norderney, it became a formid- able labour. To equalize the physical work, the sub-commission for seaplane stations arranged that the British and American officers included in it should take turn-and-turn about in active in- spection and checking the result of the latter with the lists furnished in advance by the Germans. At Norderney the ** active service" side of the program fell to the lot of the two American officers to carry out. The swift pace they set at the out- set slowed down materially toward the finish, and it was a pair of very weary officers that dropped limply from the last two Albatrosses and sat down upon a pontoon to recover their breath. It was, I believe, Lieut.-Commander L who, ruefully rubbing down a cramp which persisted in knotting 110 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" Ms left calf, declared that he had just computed that his combined clamberings in the course of the inspection were equal to ascending and de- scending a mountain half a mile high. Practically all of the machines at Norderney were of the tried and proven types — Branden- hurgs,. Albatrosses, Frederichafens, Gothas, etc. — already well-known to the Allies. (It was not un- til the great experimental station at Warnemunde, in the Baltic, was visited a fortnight later that specimens of the latest types were revealed.) The Allied experts of the party were greatly impressed with the excellence of construction of all of the machines, none of them appearing to have suf- fered in the least as a consequence of a shortage of materials. The steel pontoons in particular — a branch of construction to which the Germans had given much attention, and with notable suc- cess — ^came in for especially favourable comment. (The Commander of the station, by the way, showed us one of these pontoons which he had had fitted with an engine and propeller and used in duck-shooting.) The general verdict seemed to be that the Germans had little to learn from any one in the building of seaplanes, and that this was principally due to the fact that they had concentrated upon it for oversea work, where the British had been going in more and more Across the Sands to Norderney 111 for swift ** carrier '' ships launching aeroplanes. It was by aeroplanes launched from the ^* car- rier" Furious that the great Zeppelin station at Tondern was practically destroyed last summer, and there is no doubt that this kind of a combina- tion can accomplish far more effective work — providing, of course, that the power using it has command of the sea — than anything that can be done by seaplanes. It was the fact that Germany did not have control of the sea, rather than any lack of ingenuity or initiative, that pinned her to the seaplane, and, under the circumstances, it has to be admitted that she made very creditable use of the latter. The one new type of machine at Norderney (al- though the existence of it had been known to the Allies for some time) was the ^^ giant" monoplane seaboat, quite the most remarkable machine of the kind in the world at the present time. Though its span of something like 120 feet is less than that of a number of great aeroplanes already in use, its huge breadth of wing gave it a plane area of enormous size. The boat itself was as large — and apparently as seaworthty — as a good-sized steam launch, and so roomy that one could al- most stand erect inside of it. It quite dwarfed anything of the kind I had ever seen before. Nor was the boat, spacious as it was, the only closed-in 112 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" space. Twenty feet or more above the deck of it, between the wings, was a large ^*box^' contain- ing, among other things, a very elaborately equipped sound-proof wireless room. The tech- nical instruments of control and navigation — espe- cially the very compact ^^Gyro" compasses — stirred the Allied experts to an admiration they found difficult to restrain. One of the German officers who had accompanied us from Wilhelmshaven told me something of the history of this greatest of monoplanes. ' ' This flying boat,'* he said, while we waited for the somewhat lengthy inspection to be completed, '^was the last great gift that Count, Zeppelin'' (he spoke the name with an awe that was almost adoration) *^gave to his country before he died. He was terribly disappointed by the failure of the Zeppelin airship as an instrument for bombing, and the last months of his life were spent in de- signing something to take its place. He realized that the size of the mark the airship offered to the constantly improving anti-aircraft artillery, to- gether with the invention of the explosive bullet and the increasing speed and climbing power of aeroplanes, put an end for ever to the use of Zeppelins where they would be exposed to at- tack. He set about to design a heavier-than-air machine that would be powerful enough to carry a Across the Sands to Norderney 113 really great weight of bomhs, and the * Giant' you see here is the result. **As Count Zeppelin did not believe that it would ever be possible to land a machine of this weight and size on the earth, he made it a flying boat. But it was not intended for flights over water at all in the first place — that was to be simply for rising from and landing in. It was to be kept at one of our seaplane stations on the Belgian coast,, as near as possible to the Front, and from here it was to go for bombing flights behind the enemy lines. But before it was completed ex- perience had proved that it was quite practicable to land big machines on the earth, and so the * Giant' found itself superseded as a bomber. It was then that it was brought to the attention of the Naval Flying Service, and we, recognizing in it the possibilities of an ideal machine for long-dis- tance reconnaissance, took it over and completed it. Now, although a few changes have been made in the direction of making it more of a *sea' ma- chine, it does not differ greatly from the original designs of Count Zeppelin." As to how the machine had turned out in prac- tice he was, naturally, rather non-committal. The monoplane, he thought, had the advantage over a biplane for sea use that its wings were much higher above the water, and therefore much less 114 To Kiel in the '* Hercules" likely to get smashed up hy heavy waves. He admitted that this machine had proved extremely difficult to fly — or rather to land — and that it had been employed exclusively for ^^schooP' pur- poses, for the training of pilots to fly the others of the same type that had been building. Now that the war was over, he had some doubts as to whether these would ever be completed. *^We are having to modify so many of our plans, you see,'^ he remarked naively. On the fuselage of several of the machines there were evidences that signs or marks had been scratched out and painted over, and I took it that the words or pictures so recently obliterated had probably been of a character calculated to be offensive to the visiting Allied officers. One little thing had been overlooked, however, or else left because it was in a corner somewhat removed from the ebb and flow of the tide of inspection. I dis- covered it while passing along to the machine shops in the rear of one of the hangars, and later contrived to manoeuvre myself back to it for a confirmatory survey. It was nothing more or less than a map of the United States which some angry pilot had thoroughly strafed by stabbing with a penknife blade. I was not able to study it long enough to be sure just what the method of the madness was, but — from the fact that the Across the Sands to Norderney 115 environs of New York, Pittsburg, Philadelphia and Detroit had been literally pecked to pieces — it seemed possible that it might have been an at- tack on the industrial centres — perhaps because they were turning out so much munitions for the Allies. There were two other maps tacked up on the same wall. One was of Africa, with the ex-Grer- man colonies coloured red, with lighter shaded areas overflowing from them on to British, Bel- gian, French, and Portuguese possessions. This may have been (I have since thought) a copy of the famous map of ** Africa in 1920,'' issued in Germany early in the war, but I had no time to puzzle out the considerable amount of explana- tory lettering on it. So far as I could see, this map was unmarked, not even a black mourning border having been added. The third map was of Asia, and a long, wind- ing and apparently rather carefully made cut run- ning from the north-west corner toward the centre completely defeated me to account for. The fact that it ran through Asia Minor, Northern Syria, and down into Mesopotamia seemed to point to some connection with the Bagdad Eailway — per- haps a strafe at an enterprise which, first and last, had deflected uselessly so huge an amount of German money and material. 116 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules'' The inspection over and the terms of the armis- tice having been found most explicitly carried out, we returned to the reception room of the Casino for lunch. Although the Commander protested that all arrangements had been made for serving us with mittagessen, our senior officer, acting un- der orders, replied that we had brought our own food and that this, with a pitcher of water, would be quite sufficient. The water was sent, and with it two beautiful long, slender bottles of Hock which — as they were never opened — only served to accentuate the flatness of the former. We heard the officers of the station trooping up the stairs as we unrolled our sandwiches, and just as we were pulling up around the table some one threw open a piano in the room above our heads and struck three ringing chords. * * Bang ! ' ' — interval — ^ ^ Bang ! ' ' — interval — * * Bang ! ' * they crashed one after the other, and the throb of them set the windows rattling and the pictures (paint- ings of the station's fallen pilots) swaying on the wall. '^Prelude in G flat," breathed Major N tensely, as he waited with eye alight and ear acock for the next notes. **My word, the chap's a master!" But the next chord was never struck. Instead, there was a gruff order, the scrape of feet on the Across the Sands to Norderney 117 floor, and the slam of a closed piano,, followed by the confused rumble of several angry voices speak- ing at the same time. Then silence. ** Looks like the majority of our hosts don't think ^Inspection Day's' quite the proper occasion for tinkling Rachmaninoff on the ivories," ob- served Lieutenant-Commander L , U.S.N., after which he and Major N began discussing plans for educating the popular taste for ^^good music" and the rest of us fell to on our sand- wiches. The fog — that all-pervading East Frisian fog — which had been thickening steadily during the inspection, settled down in a solid bank while we sat at lunch. With a scant dozen yards of visibil- ity, the Commander rated the prospects of cross- ing to the mainland so unfavourable that he sug- gested our remaining for the night at one of the Norderney hotels still open, and going over to Borkum (which we were planning to reach by de- stroyer) the next morning by launch. It was the difficulty in securing a prompt confirmation of what would have been a time-saving change of schedule which led Captain H to reject the plan and decide in favour of making an attempt to reach Norddeich in, and in spite of, the fog. The Commander shook his head dubiously. *^My men who know the passage best have left^the sta- 118 To Kiel in the ^^ Hercules" tion,'' he said; **but I will do the best I can for you, and perhaps yon will have luck.'' He saw us off at the landing with the same quiet courtesy with which he had received us. He was a very lik- able chap, that Commander; perhaps the one indi- vidual with whom we were thrown into intimate contact in the course of the whole visit to whom one would have thought of applying that term. Noticing that the launch in which we were backing away from the landing was at least double the size of the one in which we had crossed, I asked one of the German officers if the greater draught of it was not likely to increase our chances of running aground. **0f course, '^ he replied; **but the larger cabin will also be much more comfortable if we have to wait for the next tide to get off. ' ' As the launch swung slowly round in the mud- and-sand stained welter of reversed screws, I bethought me of the ^^Eiddle** again, and fished it forth from my pocket. It was disappointing to leave without having had a glimpse of the town where **Dollmann" and his ** rose-brown-cheeked '* daughter Clara had lived, but the fog closed us round in a grey-walled cylinder scarcely more in diameter than the launch was long. But we were right on the course, I reflected, of the dinghy which **Davies'^ piloted with such consummate Across the Sands to Norderney 119 skill through just such a fog (**five yards or so was the radius of our vision,'' wrote **Carruthers") to Memmert to spy on the conference at the salvage plant on that desolate sand-spit. I turned up the chapter headed ** Blindfold to Memmert/' and read how, sounding with a notched boathook in the shallows that masterly young sailor had felt his way across the Buse Tief to the eastern outlet of the Memmert Balje, the only channel deep enough to carry the dinghy through the half -bared sand- banks between Juist and the mainland. Our own problem, it seemed to me, was a very similar one to that which confronted ^* Da vies," only, in our case, it was the entrance of the channel where the Buse Tief narrowed between the Holies Riff and the Itzendorf Plate that had to be located. Failing that, we were destined to roost till the next tide on a sandbank, and that meant we were out for all night, as there would be no chance of keeping to a channel, however well marked, in both fog and darkness. Ten minutes went by — fifteen — twenty — with no sign of the buoy which marked the opening we were trying to strike. Now the engines were eased down to quarter-speed, and she lost way just in time to back off from a shining glacis of steel-grey sand that came creeping out of the fog. For the next ten minutes, with bare steerage 120 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" way on, she nosed cautiously this way and that, like a man groping for a doorway in the dark. Then a hail from the lookout on the bow was echoed by exclamations of relief from the Ger- man officers. *^Here is the outer buoy,'^ one of them called across to us reassuringly; 'Hhe rest of the way is well marked and easy to follow. We will soon be at Norddeich. ' ' Presently a fresh buoy appeared as we nosed on shoreward, then a second, and then a third, continuing the line of the first two. Speed was in- creased to *^half,'* and the intervals of picking up the marks correspondingly cut down. Confident that there was nothing more to worry about, I pulled out * * The Riddle ' ' again, for I had just re- called that it was about halfway to Norddeich, in the Buse Tief, that * * Carruthers ' ' had brought off his crowning exploit, the running aground of the tug anjd * invasion" lighter — with Von Brunning, Boehme, and the mysterious ^^ cloaked passenger *' — as they neared the end of the successful night trial trip in the North Sea. Substituting himself for the man at the wheel by a ruse, he had edged the tug over to starboard and was just thinking **What the Dickens '11 happen to her?*' when the end came; **a euthanasia so mild and gradual (for the sands are fringed with mud) that the disaster was on us before I was aware of it. Across the Sands to Norderney 121 There was just the tiniest premonitory shudder- ing as our keel clove the buttery medium, a cascade of ripples from either beam, and the wheel jammed to rigidity in my hands as the tug nestled up to her final resting-place.'' And very like that it was with us. It was a guttural oath from somewhere forward rather than any perceptible jar that told me the launch had struck, and it was not till after the screw had been churning sand for half a minute that there was any perceptible heel. It had come about through one of the buoys being missing and the next in line out of place, one of the Germans reckoned; but whatever the cause, there we were — stuck fast. Or, at least, we would have been with any less resourceful and energetic a crew. If their very lives had depended on it, those four or five German seamen could not have worked harder, nor to better purpose, to get that launch free. At the end of a quarter of an hour their in- defatigable efforts were rewarded, and a half hour later we were settling ourselves in the warm compartment of our waiting train. The Hun has no proper sense of humour. Eeverse the roles, and any British bluejackets I have ever known would have run a German Armistice Com- mission on to the first sandbank that hove in sight, and damned the consequences. NORDHOLZ, THE DEN OF THE ZEPPELINS I HAVE written in a previous chapter of the great contrast observed between the morale of the men at Norderney, and the other seaplane stations vis- ited by parties from the Allied Naval Commission, and that of those in the remaining German war- ships, accounting for the difference by the fact that the former had been kept busier than the lat- ter, and that they had not suffered the shame of the ** Great Surrender'* which has cast a black, unlifting shadow upon the dregs of the High Sea Fleet. Whether the airships were kept as busy as the seaplanes right up to the end it would be dif- ficult to say, but, whatever may be the reason for it, we found the morale of the great Zeppelin sta- tions suffered very little if at all in comparison with that of the working bases of the naval heav- ier-than-air machines. For all the barbarity of many of their raids, there was splendid stuff in the officers and crews of the Zeppelins which engaged in the campaign of *^frightfulness" against England, and it is idle to deny it. In a better cause, or even in worthier 122 The Den of the Zeppelins 123 work for an indifferent cause, the skill and cour- age repeatedly displayed would have been epic. Considering what these airships faced on every one of their later raids — what their commanders and crews must have known were the odds against them after the night when the destruction of the first Zeppelin over Cuffley, in September, 1916, proved that the British had effectually solved the problem of igniting the hydrogen of the inner bal- lonettes — one cannot but conclude that the morale of the whole personnel must have been very high during even this trying period. If it had not been high, there would undoubtedly have been mutinies at the airship stations, such as are known to have occurred on so many occasions among the subma- rine crews. Even in the light of present knowl- edge, there is nothing to indicate that there had ever been serious trouble in getting Zeppelin crews for the most hazardous of raids. So far as could be gathered from our visits to the great air- ship stations of the North Sea littoral, this very excellent morale prevailed to the last; indeed, practically everything seen indicated that it still prevails. Of the several German naval airship stations visited by parties from the Allied Commission, the most important were Althorn, Nordholz, and Tondern. The interest in the latter was largely 124 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" sentimental, due to tlie fact that it was practically wiped out last summer as the result of a bombing raid by aeroplanes launched from the Furious. It was known that little had been done to rehabili- tate it as a service station since that time, and the Commission's airship experts ' desire to visit what was left of the sheds was actuated by a wish to see what damage had been done rather than by any feeling that the station really counted any longer as a base of Germany's naval air service. Our visit to the ruins of Tondern, and what we learned there of the way it was destroyed, is a story by itself, and I will tell it in a separate chapter. Germany had very ambitious plans for the de- velopment of the Althorn station, and it is prob- able at one time that it was intended that it should supersede even the mighty Nordholz as the pre- mier home of naval Zeppelins. If such were really the intention, however, there is no doubt that it was effectually put an end to by a great fire and explosion which occurred there about the middle of last year, the material destruction from which — in sheds and Zeppelins — was vastly greater even than that from the British raid on Tondern. The Germans speak of this disaster with a good deal of bitterness, usually alluding to the cause as ** mysterious,'' but rather giving the impression that they believe it to have been the work of The Den of the Zeppelins 125 ' 'Allied agents. ' ' If this is true, the job will stand as a fair offset against any single piece of work of the same character that German agents perpe- trated in France, Britain, or America. Only the blowing up of the great Russian national arsenal in the second year of the war is comparable to it for the amount of material damage wrought. Althorn remained a station of some importance down to the end of the war, however, and that the Germans still expected to do important work from there was indicated by the fact that one of its new sheds housed the great '*L-71," the largest airship in the world at the present time. But it was in the great Nordholz station that the airship sub-commission was principally inter- ested, not only for what it was at the moment — incomparably the greatest and most modern of German Zeppelin aerodromes — but also for what had been accomplished from there in the past, and even for what might conceivably be done from there in the future. Nordholz is a name that would have been burned deep into the memories of South and East Coast Britons had it been known three years ago, as it is now, that practi- cally all of the Zeppelin raids over England were launched from there. The popular idea at the time — which even appears to have persisted with most Londoners down to the present — was that 126 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" airship stations had been constructed in Belgium, and that these alternated with those of Germany in dispatching raiders across the North Sea to England. A single glimpse of such a station as Nordholz is enough to show that the huge amount of labour and expense involved in building even a comparatively temporary aerodrome fit for reg- ular Zeppelin work would have been fatal to the idea of establishing such installations in Belgium, or anywhere else where Germany did not feel cer- tain of remaining in fairly permanent control. The station at Jamboli, in Bulgaria, for instance, is known to have been able only to dispose of one or two Zeppelins, and considerable intervals be- tween flights were imperative for keeping them in trim. It would never have been equal to the strain of steady raiding. There were other German airship stations within cruising distance of England, but Nordholz was so much the best equipped, especially in the first years of the war when Zeppelin raiding was the most active, that the most of the work, and by long odds the most effective of it, was done from there. There were grim tales to be told by that band of hard-eyed, straight-mouthed, bull- necked pilots — all that survived some scores of raids over England and some hundreds of recon- naissance flights over the North Sea; — ^who re- The Den of the Zeppelins 127 ceived and conducted round the Naval Commission party, though, unfortunately,, we did not meet upon a footing that made it possible more than to listen to the account of an occasional incident suggested by something we were seeing at the moment. The route which our party traversed from Wil- helmshaven to the Nordholz airship station — the latter lies six or eight miles south of the Elbe estuary in the vicinity of Cuxhaven — was a differ- ent one from any followed on our previous visits, all of which had taken us more to the south or east. It was through the same low-lying, dyked-in country, however, where the water difficulty, un- like most other parts of the world, was one of drainage rather than of irrigation. Great Dutch windmills turned ponderously under the impulse of the light sea-breeze, as they pumped the water oif the flooded land. Cultivation, as in the region traversed to the south, was at a standstill, but overflowing barns — great capacious structures they were, with brick walls and lofty thatched roofs — proved that the harvest had been a gener- ous one. Instead of routing our two-car special over the all-rail route via Bremen, distance and time were saved by leaving it at a small terminus opposite Bremerhaven, crossing to the latter by tug, and 128 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" proceeding north in more or less direct line to our destination. Little time was lost in getting from one train to the other. The tug, which had been held in readiness for our arrival, cast off as soon as the last of the party had clambered over its side, and the short run across the grey-green tide of the estuary was made in less than a quarter of an hour. Four powerful army cars — far better ma- chines, these, than the dirigible junk heaps we had been compelled to use at Wilhelmshaven — were waiting beside the slip, and another ten minutes of what struck me as very fast and reckless driving, considering it was through the main streets of a good-sized city, brought us to the station and an- other two-car special. Both going and returning, it was the best ^^ clicking'* lot of connections any of the parties made in the course of the whole visit, showing illuminatingly what our ** hosts '* could do in that line when they were minded to. Swift as was our passage through the streets of Bremerhaven, there was still opportunity to ob- serve many evidences of the vigorous growth it had made the decade preceding the outbreak of the war, and of the plans that had been made in expectation of a continuation of that growth. Blocks and blocks of imposing new buildings — now but half -tenanted — and the nuclei of what had been budding suburbs were more suggestive of The Den of the Zeppelins 129 the appearance of a Western American mush- room metropohs after the collapse of a boom than a town of Europe. The railway station — a fine example of Germany's so-called * ^ New Arf archi- tecture — in its spacious waiting-rooms, broad sub- ways, and commodious train sheds looked capable of serving the city of half a million or so which it had confidently been expected the empire 's sec- ond port would become at the end of another few years. As things have turned out, Bremerhaven will at least have the consolation of knowing that it is not likely to be troubled with *^ station crushes'' for some decades to come. The astonishingly well-dressed and orderly crowd of a thousand or more waiting outside the portal of the station in expectation of the arrival of a train-load of returning soldiers made no un- friendly demonstration of any character. On the contrary, indeed, as at Wilhelmshaven, a number of children waved their hands as our cars drove up, and a goodly number of men solemnly bared their heads as we filed past. The special which awaited us at a platform reached after walking through a long vaulted subway running beneath the tracks consisted, like the one we had left on the other side of the river, of an engine and two cars. The rolling stock of this one was in better shape than that of the other, however, and with a 130 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" better maintained road-bed to run over, the last leg of our journey was covered at an average speed of over thirty miles an hour, quite the fastest we travelled by train anywhere in Germany. For the most of the way the line continued run- ning through mile after mile of water-logged, sea- level areas crossed by innumerable drainage ca- nals and bricked roadways gridironing possible inundation areas with their raised embankments. At the end of an hour, however, the patches of standing water disappeared, and presently the bulk of the great sheds of Nordholz began to notch the northern skyline, where they stood crowning the crest of the first rising ground in the littoral between the Dutch frontier and the Elbe. With only a minute or two of delay in the Nordholz yards, the train was switched to the airship sta- tion's own spur, and at the end of another mile had pulled up on a siding directly opposite the main entrance. The commander of the station, with two or three other officers, was waiting to receive us as we stepped out on the ground. Eanged up along- side this row of heel-clicking, frock-coated, be- medalled and be-sworded Zeppelin officers was an ancient individual of a type which seemed to re- call the fatherly old Jehus of the piping days of Oberammergau. Every time the officers saluted, The Den of the Zeppelins 131 he raised his hat, howed low from the waist, and exclaimed, ^*Good morning to you, gentlemen.'' When the last of us had been thus greeted, he called out a comprehensive, ^ ^ This way to the car- riages, gentlemen," and trotted off ahead, bell- wether fashion, through the gate. Here we found waiting four small brakes and a diminutive automobile, the sum total of the sta- tion's resources in rapid transit, according to the commander. Getting into the motor to precede us as pilot, he asked the party to dispose itself as best it could in the horse-drawn vehicles. Then, with old **Jehu" holding the reins of the first vehicle and men in air-service uniform — ^utter strangers to horses they were, too — tooling the other three, we started off along a well-paved road. A long row of very attractive red brick-and-tile houses of agreeably varied design were apparently the homes of married officers. Our way led past only the first five or six of them, but a stirring of lace curtains in every one of these told that we were running the gauntlet of hostile glances all the way. One glowering Frau — though in the semi- negligee of a **Made-in-Germany" kimono of pale mauve, her Brunhildian brow was crowned with a ** permanently Marcelled" coiffure of the kind one sees in hairdressers' windows — disdained all cover, and so stepped out upon her veranda just 132 To Kiel in the '* Hercules'' in time to see the elder of her blonde-braided off- spring in the act of waving a Teddy Bear — or it may have been a woolly lamb or a dachshund — at the tail of the procession of invading Eng- Idnders. She was swooping — a mauve-tailed comet with a Gorgon head — on the luckless **fra- ternisatress'' as my brake turned a corner and the loom of a block of barracks shut **The Row*' from sight, but a series of shrill squeals, piercing through the raucous grind of steel tyres on asphalt pavement, told that punishment swift and terrible was being meted out. **More activity there than I saw in all of Bremerhaven, ' ' laconically observed the Yankee Ensign sitting next me. **Who said the German woman was lacking in temperament ? ' ' Driving through the barracks area — where all the men in sight invariably saluted or stood at attention as we passed — and down an avenue be- tween small but thickly set pines, the road de- bouched into the open, and for the first time we saw all the sheds of the great station at compara- tively close range. Then we were in a position to understand with what care the site had been chosen and laid out. Occupying the only rising ground near the coast south of the Kiel Canal, it is quite free from the constant inundations which The Den of the Zeppelins 133 threaten the alluvial plain along the sea. The sheds are visible from a great distance, but it is only when one draws near them that their truly gigantic size becomes evident. Of modern build- ings of utility, such as factories and exhibition structures, I do not recall one that is so impressive as these in sheer immensity. Yet the proportions of the sheds are so good that constant comparison with some familiar object of known size, such as a man, alone puts them in their proper perspec- tive. The sheds are built in pairs, standing side by side, and on a plan which has brought each pair on the circumference of a circle two kilometres in diameter. The chord of the arc drawn from one pair of sheds to the next in sequence is a kilo- metre in length, while the same distance separates each pair on the circumference from the huge re- volving shed in the centre of the circle. The whole plan has something of the mystic symmetry of an ancient temple of the sun. Of the half- dozen pairs of sheds necessary to complete the circle, four had been constructed and were in use. Each ' shed was built to house two airships, or four for the pair. This gave a capacity of sixteen Zeppelins for the four pairs of sheds, while the two housed in the revolving shed in the centre 134 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" brougM the total capacity of the station up to eighteen — a larger number, I believe, than were ever over England at one time. Scarcely less impressive than the immensity of the sheds and the broad conception of the general plan of the station was the solidity of construction. Everything, from the quarters of the men and the officers to the hangars themselves, seemed built for all time, and to play its part in the fulfilment of some far-reaching plan. Costly and scarce as asphalt must have been in Germany, the many miles of roads connecting the various sheds were laid deep with it, and, as I had a chance to see where repairs were going on, on a heavy base of concrete. The sheds were steel-framed, concrete- floored, and with pressed asbestos sheet figuring extensively in their sides. All the daylight ad- mitted (as we saw presently) filtered through great panes of yellow glass in the roof, shutting out the ultra-violet rays of the sun, which had been found to cause airship fabric to deteriorate rapidly. The barracks of the men were of brick and con- crete, and were built with no less regard for ap- pearance than utility. So, too, the officers ' quar- ters and the Casino, and the large and comfort- able-looking houses for married officers I have already mentioned. All had been built very re- The Den of the Zeppelins 135 cently, many in the by no means mieff ective * ^ New Arf style, to the simple solidity of which the Germans seemed to have turned in reaction from the Gothic. Beyond all doubt Germany was plan- ning years ahead with Nordholz, both as to war and peace service. They were quite frank in speaking of the ambitions they still have in re- spect of the latter, and (from casual remarks dropped once or twice by officers) I should be very much surprised if their plans for developing the Zeppelin as a super-war machine have been en- tirely shelved. The road along which we drove to reach the first pair of sheds to be visited ran through ex- tensive plantations of scraggly screw-pine, which appear to have been set — before the site was chosen for an air station — for the purpose of bind- ing together the loose soil and preventing its shifting in the heavy winds. Wherever the trees had encroached too closely upon the hangars, the plantations had been burned off. Over one con- siderable area the accumulations of ash in the de- pressions showed the destruction to have been comparatively recent, and this I learned had been burned over, in the panic which followed the blow- ing up of the Tondern sheds by British bombing machines last summer, in order to minimize the risk from the raid which Nordholz itself never 136 To Kiel in the ^^ Hercules'' ceased to expect right down to the day of the armistice. The staggering size of the great sheds became more and more impressive as we drew nearer, and when the procession finally turned and went clat- tering down the roadway between one of the pairs, the towering walls to left and right blotted out the sky like the cliffs of a rocky canon. Halfway through this great defile the officers of the station were waiting to receive and conduct us round. A hard, fit, capable-looking lot of chaps they were. Every one of them had at least one decoration, most of them many, and among these were two or three Orders Pour de Merite, the German Y.C, One at least of them — the great long-distance pilot, Von Butlar — was famous internationally, and few among the senior of them (as I was as- sured shortly) but had been over England more than once. They were the best of Grermany's sur- viving Zeppelin pilots, and one was interested to compare the type with that of the pick of her sea- pilots as we had seen them at Norderney. Running my eye round their faces as the min- gled parties began moving slowly toward the side door of the first shed to be inspected, I recog- nized at once in these Zeppelin officers the same hard, cold, steady eyes, the same aggressive jaw, and the same wide, thin-lipped mouth that had The Den of the Zeppelins • 137 predominated right through the officers we had met at Norderney. These, I should say, are char- acteristic of the great majority of the outstanding men of both of Germany's air services. The steady eye and the firm jaw are, indeed, charac- teristic of most successful flying men, but it is the *4iardness,'' not to say cruelty, of the mouth which differentiates the German from the high-spirited, devil-may-care air-warrior of England and Amer- ica. These Zeppelin pilots seemed to me to run nearer to the German naval officer type than did the seaplane officers. The latter were nearly al- ways slender of body, wiry and light of foot, where (though there were several exceptions, including the great Von Butlar) the former were mainly of generous girth, with the typical German bull neck corrugating into rolls of fat above the backs of their collars. A Major of the E.A.F., who had been walking at my side and doing a bit of * ^ sizing up ' ' on his own account, put the difference rather well when he said, as we waited our turn to pass in through the small side door of the great grey wall of the shed: **If I was taking temporary refuge in a hospital, convent, or orphan asylum during a German air raid, I'd feel a lot better about it if I knew that it was some of those sea- plane chaps flying overhead rather than some of 138 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" this batch. That thick-set one there, with the cast in his eye and the corded neck, has a face that wouldn't need much make-up for the Hun villain in a Lyceum melodrama. Yes, I'm sure these Zepp. drivers will average a jolly lot *Hunnier' than the run of their seaplane men.'' Up to that moment my experience of German airships had been limited to the view of them as slender silver pencils of light gliding swiftly across the searchlight-slashed skies of London, and three or four inspections of the tangled masses of aluminium and charred wood which re- mained when ill-starred raiders had paid the su- preme penalty. I was indebted' to the Zeppelins for a number of thrills, but only two or three of them (and one was in the form of a bomb which gave me a shower bath of plate glass in Kings- way) were comparable to the sheer wave of amaze- ment which swept over me when, having passed from the cold grey light of the winter morning into the warm golden glow of the interior of the big shed to which we had come, I looked up and beheld the towering loom of the starboard side of **L-68," with the sweeping lines of her, fining to points at both ends, exaggerating monstrously a length which was sufficiently startling even when expressed in figures. The secret of the hold which the Zeppelin had for so long on the imagination of The Den of the Zeppelins 139 the German people was not hard for me to under- stand after that. It was easy to see how they could have heen led to beheve that it could lay Paris and London in ruins, and that the very sight of it would in time cause the enemies of their coun- try to sue for peace. One saw, too, how hard it must have been for them finally to believe that the Zeppelin had been mastered by the aeroplane, and that the high hopes they had built upon it had really crashed with the fallen raiders. There were two Zeppelins in the shed we had entered — **L-68^' and another monster of practi- cally the same size. The former, with great ir- regularly shaped strips of fabric dangling all along its under side, suggested a gigantic shark in process of being ripped up the belly for skin- ning. Being deflated, the weight of its frame was supported by a number of heavy wooden props evenly distributed along either side from end to end. Its mate, on the other hand, being full of hydrogen and practically ready for flight, had to be prevented from rising and bumping against the yellow skylights by a series of light cables, the upper ends of which were attached at regular in- tervals along both sides of the framework, while below they were made fast to heavy steel shoes which ran in grooves set in the concrete floor. The latter contrivance — especially an arrange- 140 To Kiel in the ^^ Hercules" ment for the instant shpping of the cable — was very cleverly devised and greatly interested the Allied experts. There were two or three things the popular mind had credited the modern Zeppelin with em- bodying which we did not find in these latest ex- amples of German airship development. One of these was an ^^ anti-bomb protector'' on the top, something after the style of the steel nets erected over London banks and theatres for the purpose of detonating dropped explosives before they pen- etrated the roof. The fact that attempts to de- stroy Zeppelins by bomb had invariably — with the exception of the one brought down by Warnef ord in Belgium in 1915 — resulted in failure, was doubt- less largely responsible for this belief in the exist- ence of a protecting net, whereas the reason for those failures is probably to be found in the fact that only about one bomb in a hundred will find enough resistance in striking an airship to deto- nate. At any rate, there were no indications that either the earlier or later Zeppelins we saw had ever been protected in this way. Indeed, we did not even seen a single one of the machine-guns, which every one had taken for granted were mounted on top of all Zeppelins to resist aeroplane attack, though these, of course, with their plat- forms, may well have been removed in the course The Den of the Zeppelins 141 of the disarmament imposed by the armistice terms. Nor had these late airships the bright golden colour of those that one saw over London in the earlier raids. That the refulgent tawniness of them was not due entirely to the reflected beams of the searchlights was proved by the uncharred fragments of fabric one had picked up at Cuffley and Potters ' Bar. But the German designers had been giving a good deal of study to invisibility, since that time, with the result that these new airships were coloured over all their exposed sur- faces a dull slaty black that would hardly reflect a beam of bright sunshine. The cars, which were both smaller and lighter than those from the airships brought down in England, were all underslung, and none of them was enclosed in the framework, as had often been stated. Even these were not built entirely of metal, heavy fabric being used to close up all spaces where strength was not required. The bomb-dropping devices had been removed, but the numbered ** switchboard ' ' in the rearmost car, from which they could be released, still remained. The cars, free from every kind of protuberance that could meet the resistance of the air, were ef- fectively and gracefully ^^stream-lined.'' The framework and bodies of the cars were made of 142 To Kiel in the ^'Hercules" the light but strong ^'duraluimnuni" alloy, which the Germans have spent many years in perfecting for this purpose. A small fragment of strut which I picked up under *'L-68'' has proved, on comparison, considerably lighter in specific grav- ity than similar pieces from three of the Zeppelins brought down early in the war. Indeed, in spite of its admixture of heavier metals for ** stiffen- ing, ' ' the latest alloy seems scarcely heavier than aluminum itself. The inspection of an airship to see that it had been disarmed according to the provisions of the armistice was, as may be imagined, rather more of a job than a similar inspection of even a ** giant'* seaplane. In a Zeppelin that is more or less the same size as the Mauretania the dis- tances are magnificent, and while most of the in- spection was confined to the cars, that of the wire- less, with a search for possible concealed machine- gun mountings, involved not a little climbing and clambering. One's first sight of the interior of a deflated Zeppelin — in an inflated one the bulging ballonettes obstruct the view considerably — is quite as impressive in its way as the premier sur- vey of it from the outside. No 'tween decks pros- pect in the largest ship afloat, cut down as it is by bulkheads, offers a fifth of the unbroken sweep of vision that one finds opened before him as he The Den of the Zeppelins 143 climbs up inside the tail of a modern airship. Al- though airy ladders and soaring lengths of frame- work intervene, they are no more than lace-work fretting the vast space, and the eye roams free to where the side-braces of the narrow **walk'^ seem to run together in the nose. Only, so consummate the illusion wrought on the eye and brain by the strange perspective, that *^ meeting poinf seems more like six hundred miles away than six hundred feet. The effect is more like looking to the end of the universe than to the end of a Zeppelin. No illusion ever devised on the stage to give ^* dis- tance" to a scene could be half so convincing. All that was ** cosmic'' in you vibrated in sympa- thy, and it took but a shake of the reins of the imagination to fancy yourself tripping off down that unending '^Eoad to Anywhere'' to the music of the Spheres. You — **Gee, but ain't that a peach of a little *Gyro'?" filtering up through the fabric beneath my feet awakened me to the fact that the inspection of **L-68" having reached the rearmost car, was near its finish. Clambering back to earth, I found the party just reassembling to go to the carriages for the drive to the great revolving shed, which was the next to be visited. Its central revolving shed is perhaps the most arresting feature of the Nordholz station. It is 144 To Kiel in the '^Hercules" built on the lines of a ^^twin'' engine turntable, with each track housed over, and with every di- mension multiplied twenty-five or thirty-fold. The turning track is laid in a bowl-shaped depres- sion about ten feet deep and seven hundred feet in diameter. The floors of both sheds (which stand side by side, with only a few feet between) are flush with the level of the ground, so that the airships they house may be run out and in. with- out a jolt. The turning mechanism, which is in the rear of the sheds and revolves with them, is entirely driven by electricity. The shifting of a lever sets the whole great mass in motion, and stops it to a millimetre of the point desired, the later being indicated on a dial by a needle showing the direction of the wind. The Germans assured us — and on this point the British and American airship experts were in full agreement with them— rthat the revolving shed is absolutely the ideal installation, as it makes it possible to launch or house a ship directly into the wind, and so allows them to be used on days when it would be out of the question to launch them from, or return them to, an ordinary hangar. The one point against it seems to be its almost pro- hibitive cost. This central shed at Nordholz was designed some time before the war, and was com- pleted a year or so after its outbreak. The Ger- The Den of the Zeppelins ^ 145 mans did not tell what it had cost, but they did say that the latter was so great — ^both in money and in steel deflected from other uses — that they had not contemplated the building of another dur- ing the continuance of the war. Another interesting admission of a Zeppelin of- ficer at Nordholz was to the effect that one of their greatest difficulties had arisen through the fact that it had been found practicable and desirable to increase the size of airships far more rapidly than had been contemplated when most of the existing sheds were designed. Thus many hangars — even at Nordholz, where practice was most advanced — had become almost useless for housing the latest Zeppelins. The proof of this was seen at one of the older sheds which we visited, where both of the airships it contained had been cut off fore and aft to reduce their lengths sufficiently to allow them inside. Thirty or forty feet of the framework of the bows and sterns of each, stripped of their covering fabric, were standing in the corners. They assured us that while an airship thus ^* bobbed'' at both ends was not necessarily con- sidered out of commission, it would take several days of rush work to get it ready for flight, and that during most of this time sixty to eighty feet of it — the combined length of the nose and tail which had to be cut off to bring it inside — would 146 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" have to remain sticking out, exposed to the weather. To any one who, like myself, was not an airship expert, but had been *^ among those present'* at a number of the earlier raids on London, the last shed visited was the most interesting of all, for it contained what is in many respects Germany's most historic Zeppelin, the famous **L-14.'' Twenty-four bombing flights over England were claimed for this remarkable veteran, besides many scores of reconnaissance voyages. All of the sur- viving pilots appeared to have an abiding belief in her invulnerability — a not unnatural attitude of the fatalist toward an instrument which has succeeded in defying fate. This is the way one of them expressed it, who came and stood by my side during the quarter-hour in which the inspecting officers were climbing about inside the glistening yellow shell of the historic raider in an endeavour to satisfy themselves, that she was, temporarily at least, incapable of further activities : — **It will sound strange to you to hear me say it,'' he said, **but it is a fact that all of the officers and men at Nordholz firmly believed that L-14 could not be destroyed. Always we gave her the place of honour in starting first away for Eng- land, and most times she was the last to come back — of those that did come back. After a while, no The Den of the Zeppelins 147 matter how long she was late, we always said, * Oh, but it is old L-14; no use to worry about her; she will come home at her own time. ' And come home she always did. All of our greatest pilots flew in her at one time or another and came back safe. Then they were given newer and faster ships, and sometimes they came home, and sometimes they did not. , who was experimenting with one of the smaller swift types of half-rigids when it was brought down north of London — the first to be destroyed over England — had flown L-14 many times, and come home safe, and so had , our greatest pilot, who was also lost north of London, very near where the other was brought down, and where we think you had some kind of trap. L-14 saw these and many other Zeppelins fall in flames and the more times she came home the more was our belief in her strength. The pilot who flew her was supposed to take more chances (because she really ran no risks, you see), and if you have ever read of how one Zeppelin in each raid always swooped low to drop her bombs, you now know that she was that one. Because we had this super- stitious feeling about her we were very careful that, in rebuilding and repairing her, much of her original material should be left, so that whatever gave her her charmed life should not be removed. Although our duraluminum of the present is much 148 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" lighter and stronger than the first we made, L-14 still has most of her original framework ; and, al- though improved technical instruments have been installed, all her cars are much as when she was built. You will see how much clumsier and heav- ier they are than those of the newer types. And now, for some months, we have used L-14 as a ^school' ship, in which to train our young pilots. You see, her great traditions must prove a won- derful inspiration to them.'' A few minutes later I had a hint of one type of this * inspiration, ' ' when a pilot (who had fallen into step with me as we took a turn across the fields on foot to see the hangars of the ** protect- ing flight" of aeroplanes) mentioned that he had taken part in a number of the 1916 raids over the Midland industrial centres. Knowing the Stygian blackness in which this region was wrapped dur- ing all of the Zeppelin raiding time, I asked him if he had not found it difficult to locate his objec- tives in a country which was plunged in complete darkness. **Not so difficult as you might think,'' was the reply. *^ There were always the rivers and ca- nals, which we knew perfectly from careful study. Besides, a town is a very large mark, and you seem to * sense' the nearness of great masses of people, anyhow. Perhaps the great anxiety they The Den of the Zeppelins 149 are in estabhshes a sort of mental contact with you, whose brain is very tense and receptive. Effective bombing is very largely a matter of psy- chology, you see." I saw. Indeed, I think I saw rather more than he intended to convey. The inspection over and everything having been found as stipulated in. the armistice, we were con- ducted to the Officers^ Casino for lunch. Each member of the party, as had been the practice from the outset, having brought a package of sandwiches from the ship in his pocket, it was intimated to the Commander of the station that we would not need to trouble him to have the luncheon served, which he said had been pre- pared for us. The same situation had arisen at Norderney and several other of the stations pre- viously visited, and in each of these instances our ** hosts'' of the day had acquiesced in the plainly expressed desire of the senior officer of the party that we should confine our menu to what we car- ried in our own ** nose-bags.'' Nordholz, how- ever — quite possibly with no more than an en- larged idea of what were its duties under the cir- cumstances — was not to be denied. A couple of plates of very appetizing German red-cabbage sauerkraut, with slices of ham and blood sausage, were waiting upon a large sidetable as we entered 150 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" the reception-room, and to these, as fast as a very nervous waiter could bring them in, were added the following: a large loaf of pumpernickel, a pitcher of chicken consomme, sl huge beefsteak, with a fried egg sitting in the middle of it, for each member of the party, two dishes of apple sauce, and eight bottles of wine — four of white and four of red. The steaks — an inch thick, six inches in diameter, and grilled to a turn — ^were quite the largest pieces of meat I had seen served outside of Ireland since the war. The hock bore the label ^^Durkheimer,^' and the other bottles, which were of non-German origin, ^ ^ Ungarischer Rotwein/^ ** Although I'd hate to hurt their feelings," said the senior officer of the party, surveying the Gar- gantuan repast with a perplexed smile, *^I should like to confine myself to my sandwiches and leave a note asking them to forward this to some of our starving prisoners. Since weVe been feeding their pilots and commissioners in the Hercules, however, I suppose there's no valid reason why we should hesitate to partake of this banquet. I'll leave you free to decide for yourselves what you want to do on that score." We did. It was the American Ensign who, smacking his lips over the last of his steak, pronounced it the best **hunk of cow" he had had since he was at a Mexican The Den of the Zeppelins 151 barbecue at Coronado ; but it was the General who had a second helping of apple sauce, and won- dered how they made it so * * smooth and free from lumps/' and what it was they put in it to give that < he was extremely well in- formed on naval matters, both those of his own country and — so far as German information went — the Allies. Harbouring a very natural bitter- ness against the revolution, and especially against the mutinous sailors of the navy, he spoke the more freely because he felt that he had no future to look forward to in Germany, which (as he told me on a number of occasions) he intended to leave as soon as the way was open for him to go to South America or the Far East. Also, where he con- fined himself to statements of fact rather than Jutland as a German Saw It 263 opinion or conjecture, lie spoke truly. I liave yet to find an instance in which he made an intentional endeavour to create a false impression. It was in the course of our lengthy and some- what tedious railway journey to the Zeppelin sta- tion at Nordholz that Korvettenkapitan C first alluded to his life in the High Sea Fleet. **I was the gunnery officer of the DeutscMand during the first two years of the war/' he volunteered as he joined me at the window of the corridor of our special car, from which I was trying to catch a glimpse of the suburban area of stagnant Bremer- haven; ^^but I transferred to the Zeppelin service as soon as I could after the battle of Horn Eeef because I felt certain — from the depression of the men, which seemed to get worse rather than better as time went on — that there would never be an- other naval battle. Although we lost few ships (less than you did by a considerable margin, I think I am correct in saying), yet the terrible battering we received from only a part of the English fleet, and especially the way in which we were utterly smothered during the short period your main battle fleet was in action, convinced the men that they were very lucky to have got away at all, and seemed to make them determined never to take chances against such odds again. I knew that if we ever got them into action again, it would 264 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" have to be by tricking them — making them think they were going out for something else — and that is why I felt sure the day of our surface navy was over, and why I went into the Zeppelin service to get beyond contact with the terrible dry-rot that began eating at the hearts of the High Sea Fleet from the day they came home from the battle of Horn Eeef. What has happened since then has proved my fears were well founded, for the men, becoming more and more suspicious every time preparations were made to go to sea, finally re- fused to go out at all. And that was the end." Commander C (to give his equivalent Brit- ish rank) volunteered a good deal more about Jut- land on this occasion, as well as of the strategy in connection with those final plans which went awry through the failure of men, but it will be best, perhaps, to let this appear in its proper se- quence in a connected account of what he told, in the course of the several days we were thrown together, of the German naval problems gener- ally, and his own experiences and observations at Horn Eeef in particular. *^We were greatly disappointed when England came into the war," he said, '^but hardly dis- mayed. We had built all our ships on the theory that it was the English fleet they were to fight iagainst, and we felt confident that we had plans Jutland as a Grerman Saw It 265 that had a good chance of ultimately proving suc- cessful. But those plans did not contemplate — either at the outset, or at any subsequent stage of the war down to the very end — a gunnery battle to a finish. The best proof of that fact is the way the guns were mounted in our capital ships, with four aft and only two forward. That meant that their role was to inflict what damage they could in swift attacks, and that they were expected to do their heaviest fighting while being chased back to har- bour. Since the British fleet had something like a three-to-two advantage over us in modem cap- ital ships, and about two-to-one in weight of broadside, I think you will agree that this was not only the best plan for us to follow, but prac- tically the only one. **I think it will hardly surprise you when I say that, up to the outbreak of the war, we knew a great deal more about your navy than you did about ours. To offset that — and of much greater importance — is the fact that your knowledge of our navy and its plans during the war was far better than ours of yours. You always seem to score in the end. But at the outset, as I have said, we were the better informed, and, among other things, we knew that we had better mines than you had, and (as I think was fully demon- strated during the first two years) we had a far 266 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" better conception in advance of the possibilities of using them — ^both offensively and defensively — than you had. During the first two years and a half your mines turned out to be even worse than we had expected, and it is an actual fact that some of the more reckless of our U-boat com- manders used to fish them up and tow them back to base to make punchbowls of. In the last twenty months you not only had two or three types of mine (one of them American, I think) that were better than anything we ever had, but you were also using them on a scale, and with an effective- ness, we had never dreamed of. *^We also thought we had a better torpedo than you had — that it would run farther, straighter, keep depth better, and do more damage when it struck. I still think we have something of the best of it on that score, though at no time was our superiority so great as we reckoned. Your tor- pedoes ran better than they detonated, and — es- pecially in the first two years — a very large num- ber of fair hits on all classes of our lighter craft were spoiled by ^duds.^ This, I am sorry to say, was not reported nearly so frequently during the last year and a half. **But it was on the torpedo that we counted to wear down the British margin of strength in capital ships to a point where the High Sea Fleet 'HERCULES," WITH THREE V-CLASS DESTROYERS IN KIEL HARBOR Jutland as a German Saw It 267 would have a fair chance of success in opposing it. We expected that our submarines would take a large and steady toll of any warships you en- deavoured to blockade us with, and that they would even make the risk of patrol greater than you would think it worth while to take. Although we made an encouraging beginning by sinking three cruisers, we were doomed to heavy disap- pointment over the U-boat as a destroyer of war- ships. We failed to reckon on the almost com- plete immunity the speed of destroyers, light cruisers, battle-cruisers, and even battleships would give them from submarine attack, and we never dreamed how terrible an enemy of the U-boat the destroyer — especially after the inven- tion of the depth-charge — ^would develop into. As for the use of the submarine against merchant shipping, to our eternal regret we never saw what it could do until after we had tried it. If any German had had the imagination to have realized this in advance, so that we could have had a fleet of a hundred and fifty U-boats ready to launch on an unrestricted campaign against merchant ship- ping the day war was declared, I think you will not deny that England would have had to sur- render within two months. *'We also made the torpedo a relatively more important feature of the armament of all of our 268 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" ships — from destroyers to battleships — than you did. They were to be our *4ast ditch '^ defence in the event of our being drawn into a general fleet action — just such an action, in fact, as the battle of Horn Reef was. We knew all about your gunnery up to the outbreak of the war, and the fact that the big-gun target practices were only at moderate ranges — mostly under 16,000 metres — told us that you were not expecting to engage us at greater ranges. But all the time we were meeting with good success in shooting at ranges up to, and even a good deal over, 20,000 metres, and so we felt sure of having all the best of a fight at such ranges. We knew that our 11-inch guns would greatly out- range your 12-inch (perhaps you already know that even the 8.2-inch guns of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau out-ranged the 12-inch guns of the Invincible and Indefatig- able at the Falkland battle), and we hoped they might even have the best of your 13.5 's. We also knew that our ships were better built than yours to withstand the plunging fall of long-distance shots, and we felt sure that our explosive was more powerful than your lyddite. I am not sure that this proved to be the case, though there is no question that our hits generally did more harm than yours because more of them penetrated decks and armour. Jutland as a German Saw It 269 * * Feeling confident, then, of having the best of a long-range action, our plan was, as I have said, to use the torpedo as a *last ditch' defence in case the English fleet tried to reduce the range to one at which it could be sure of securing a higher percentage of hits and thus making the greater weight of its broadside decisively felt. In such a contingency we planned to literally fill the sea with torpedoes, on the theory that enough of them must find their targets to damage the enemy fleet suffi- ciently to force it to open out the range again, and perhaps to cripple it to an extent that would open the way for us to win a decisive victory. Theo- retically, this plan was quite sound, for it was based on the generally recognized fact that from three to five torpedoes — the number varying ac- cording to the range and the interval between the targets — launched one after the other at a line of ships cannot fail to hit at least one of them, pro- viding, of course, that they all run properly. ^^Well, almost the identical conditions under which we had planned and practised to run our torpedo barrage were reproduced at Horn Eeef when the British battle fleet came into action near the end of the day, but it failed because the Eng- lish Admiral anticipated it — probably because he knew in advance, as you always seemed to know everything we were doing or intended to do, what 270 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" to expect — ^by turning away while still at the ex- treme hmit of effective torpedo range. Most of our spare torpedoes went for almost nothing, so far as damage to the enemy was concerned, in that * barrage,' and it would have gone hard with us had there been enough daylight remaining for the English fleet to have continued the action. Its superior speed would have allowed it to make the range whatever its commander desired, and — even before half of the battleships of it were tiring — ^we were absolutely crushed by sheer weight of metal, and it would not have been long before every one of our ships would have been incapable of reply- ing. You will see, then, that, in the sense that it postponed the brunt of the attack of the English battle fleet attack until it was too late for it to be effective, our torpedo barrage undoubtedly saved the High Sea Fleet from complete destruction. **Our lavish expenditure of torpedoes at that juncture, though, compelled us to forgo the great opportunity which was now presented to us to do your fleet heavy damage in a night action. Dark- ness, as you know, goes far to equalize the differ- ence in numbers of opposing fleets, and makes an action very largely a series of disjointed duels be- tween ship and ship. In these duels the odds are all in favour of the ship with the best system of recognition, the most pow:erful searchlights, and Jutland as a German Saw It 271 the most effective searcliliglit control. We be- lieved that we had much the best of you in all of these particulars, and (although it was our plan to avoid contact as far as possible on account of our shortage of torpedoes) such encounters as could not be avoided proved this to be true beyond any doubt. You seemed to have no star shells at all (so far as any of our ships reported), and our searchlights were not only more powerful than yours, but seemed also to be controlled in a way to bring them on to the target quicker. It may be that the fact that our special night-glasses were better than anything of the kind you had contributed to this result. In any case, in almost every clash in the darkness it was the German's guns which opened fire first. Practically every one of our surviving ships reported this to have been the case, but with those that were lost, of course, it is likely the English opened up first. Another way in which we scored decisively in this phase of the action was through solving the reply to your night recognition signal, or at least a part of it. One of our cruisers managed to bluff one of your destroyers into revealing this, and then passed it on to as many of our own ships as she could get in touch with. We only had the first two or three letters of the reply to your challenge, but the showing of even these is known to have 272 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" been enough to make more than one of your de- stroyer commanders hesitate a few seconds in launching a torpedo, only to realize his mistake after he had been swept with a broadside from the secondary armament of a cruiser or battleship which left him in a sinking condition. It was an EngHsh destroyer that hesitated at torpedoing the Deutschland until I almost blew it out of the water with my guns, that afterwards launched a torpedo, even while it was just about to go down, that finished the Pommerny the flagship of my squad- ron. ' ' Commander C 's account of his personal observations at Jutland threw light on a number of points that the Allied public — and even those to whom the best information on the ^subject was available — ^were never able to make up their mind upon. **The English people,'' he said, **to judge from what I read in your papers, always deceived themselves about two things in connection with the battle you call Jutland. One of them was that the High Sea Fleet came out with the purpose of offering battle to the English fleet, or at least en- deavouring to cut off and destroy its battle-cruiser squadron. This is not the case. Quite to the con- trary, indeed; it was the English fleet that went out to catch us. We had been planning for some Jutland as a German Saw It 273 time a cruiser raid on the shipping between Eng- land and Norway — ^which was not so well protected then, or even for a year and a half more, as it was the last year — and the High Sea Fleet and Von Hipper *s battle-cruisers were out to back up the raiding craft. As usual, your Intelligence Bureau learned of this plan, and the English fleet came out to spoil it. It was Von Hipper, not Beatty, who was surprised when the battle-cruisers sighted each other. Beatty 's surprise came a few minutes later, when two of his ships were blown up almost before they had fired a shot. That seemed to vin- dicate, right then and there, our belief in our superior gunnery and the inferior construction of the English ships. Unfortunately, there was nothing quite so striking occurred after that to support that vindication. The other English battle-cruiser, and the several armoured cruisers, sunk were destroyed as a consequence of exposing themselves to overwhelming fire. It was the chance of finishing off all the English battle- cruisers before the battle fleet came to their rescue that tempted Von Scheer to follow Beatty north, and as a consequence he was all but drawn into the general action that it was his desire to avoid above anything else. ^ * The other thing that the English naval critics (although I think your Intelligence Bureau must 274 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" have had the real facts before very long) deceived themselves and the public about was in tbe matter of Zeppelin reconnaissance during, and previous to, the Horn Reef battle. They have continued to state from that day right down to the end of the war that it was the German airships which warned Von Scheer of the approach of Jellicoe, and so enabled the High Sea Fleet to escape. Perhaps the most conclusive evidence that we did not have airship reconnaissance was the fact that Von Scheer was not only drawn into action with Jellicoe, but that he even got into a position where he could not prevent the English ships from pass- ing to the east of him — ^that is, between him and his bases. I will hardly need to tell you that neither of these things would have happened if we had had airships to keep us advised of the whereabouts of your battle fleet. It was our in- tention to have had Zeppelin scouts preceding us into the North Sea on this occasion — as we always have done when practicable — but the weather con- ditions were not favourable. We did have Zeppe- lins out on the following day, and these, I have read, were sighted by the English. But if any were reported on the day of the battle, I can only say it was a mistake. It is very easy to mistake a small round cloud, moving with the wind, for a foreshortened Zeppelin, especially if you are ex- Jutland as a German Saw It 275 pecting an airship to appear in that quarter of the sky/' Of the opening phases of the Jutland battle Commander C did not see a great deal per- sonally. *^We were steaming at a moderate speed,'' he said, **when Von Hipper 's signal was received stating he was engaging enemy battle- cruisers and leading them south — that is, in the direction from which we were approaching. As there were a number of pre-dreadnoughts in the fleet, its speed — as long as it kept together — was limited to the speed of these. In knots we were doing perhaps sixteen when the first signal was received, and even after forming battle line this speed was not materially in- creased for some time. I understood the rea- son for this when I heard that the engine-room had been ordered to make no more smoke than was positively necessary. We had given much attention to regulating draught, and on this oc- casion it was only a few minutes before there was hardly more than a light grey cloud issuing from every funnel the whole length of the line. The idea, of course, was to prevent the English ships from finding out any sooner than could be helped that they were being led into an * ambush.' As long as we did not increase speed it was easy to keep down the smoke, and I am sure that the 276 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" first evidence the enemy had of the presence of the High Sea Fleet was when they saw our masts and funnels. But we saw them before that — we saw the two great towers of smoke that went high up into the sky when two of them blew up, and we saw the smoke from their funnels half an hour before their topmasts came above the horizon. At this time, although all of the ships of the High Sea Fleet were coal burners, they were making less smoke than the four oil-burning ships of the Queen Elizabeth class, which we sighted not long after the English battle-cruisers. As soon as we began to increase speed, of course, we made more smoke than they did. '^The four remaining English battle-cruisers turned north as soon as they sighted us, and I do not think the fire of the High Sea Fleet did them much harm. They drew away from us very rapidly, of course, so that pur 'ambush' plan did not come to anything after all. A squadron of English light cruisers, which were leading the battle-cruisers when we first sighted them, almost fell into the trap, though, or, at any rate, their very brave (or very foolish) action in standing on until they were but little over 10,000 metres from the head of our line gave us the best kind of a chance to sink the lot of them. That we did not Jutland as a German Saw It 277 do this was partly due to the fact that most of the ships of our line were still endeavouring to reach the English battle-cruisers with long-range fire, and partly (I must admit it, though my own guns were among those that failed to find their mark) to poor shooting. These light cruisers did not turn until we opened fire at something over 10,000 metres; but although all our squadron concen- trated upon them during the hour and more be- fore the great speed they put on took them out of range, none of them were sunk, and I am not even sure that any was badly hit. *^When the four ships of the Queen Elizabeth class came into action there was a while when they were receiving the concentrated fire of prac- tically the whole High Sea Fleet, and possibly some of that of our battle-cruisers as well. Yet it did not appear that — ^beyond putting one of them (which we later learned was the War spite) out of control for a while — ^we did them much dam- age. The weight of our fire seemed to affect theirs a good deal, though, and at this stage of the fight they did not score many hits upon those of our ships — it was upon the squadron of Konigs that they seemed trying to concentrate — ^that they gave their attention to. Later, when the effort to destroy several of the newly arrived squadron of 278 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" English battle-cruisers and armoured cruisers drew a part of our fire, their heavy shells did much damage. **The High Sea Fleet's line became consider- ably broken and extended in the course of the pur- suit of the English battle-cruisers and the Queen Elisabeths, the swifter Konigs steaming out well in advance in an effort to destroy some of the English ships before their battle fleet came into action, and my own squadron dropping a good way astern. That was the reason that my ship neither gave nor received much punishment in the daylight action. It was our battle-cruisers and the more modern battleships of the High Sea Fleet — principally the latter — ^which, tricked by the bad visibility, suddenly found themselves well inside the range of the deployed battleships of the main English fleet. I can only say that I am thankful that I did not have to experience at first hand the example they received of what it meant to face the full fire of that fleet. The English shooting, which opened a little wild on account of the mists, soon steadied down, and I have heard officers of four or five of our ships say that it was becoming impossible to make reply with their guns when darkness broke off the action. I have already told you how our torpedo * bar- rage' — in forcing the English fleet to sheer off Jutland as a German Saw It 279 until it was too late for decisive action — saved a large part, if not all, of our fleet from destruction. What would have happened in the event that the attack had been pressed, no one can say. It would all have depended upon the extent of the damage inflicted by our torpedoes. I can only say that — as it was a contingency we had prepared for by long practice — Jellicoe would only have been play- ing into our hands in taking his whole fleet inside effective torpedo range, and I have confidence enough in the plan to wish that he had tried it. It would have meant a shorter war whatever hap- pened, and, what is more, anything would have been better for us than what did come to pass — two years of gradual paralysis of the German navy, with a disgraceful surrender at the end. **As I have said, we were anxious to avoid a night action on account of our shortage of tor- pedoes, however much such an action would have been to our advantage had not our supply of these been so nearly exhausted. So we were a good deal relieved when it became apparent that the enemy were not making any special effort to get in touch with us again after darkness fell. As a consequence of this disinclination of both sides to seek an engagement, such clashes as did occur were the sequel to chance encounters in the dark, and in most cases they seem to have been broken 280 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" off by the common desire of both parties. Some of your destroyers persisted in their attacks when- ever they got in touch with one of our ships, but we usually made them pay a very heavy price for the damage inflicted. **Von Scheer took the High Sea Fleet back to harbour by passing astern of the English battle fleet, which had continued on to the south. I think I am correct in saying that none of the capital ships of either fleet were in action with those of the other after dark. There were two or three brushes between cruisers and a good many between destroyers and various classes of heavier ships. In fact, our principal difficulties arose through running into several flotillas of destroyers which seemed to have straggled from the squadrons to which they had been attached. My squadron, with a division of cruisers, ran right through a flotilla of about a dozen large English destroyers, and it would be hard to say which had the worst of it. We lost the Pommern (it would have been my ship, the Deutschland, had not the line been reversed a few minutes pre- viously) and a cruiser, and had two other cruisers badly damaged, one from being rammed by a little fighting-cock of a destroyer which must have com- mitted suicide in doing it. We sank two or three of the destroyers by gun-fire, and left two or three Jutland as a Grerman Saw It 281 more stopped and looking about to blow up. Two of them were seen to be in collision, and there was also a report that they were firing at each other in the melee, but that was not corroborated. This fight only lasted a few minutes, and we saw no more English ships of any kind on our way back to harbour. **In the matter of the losses at Horn Eeef, we have never had any doubt that those of the English were much heavier than ours, even on your own admissions. And since we inflicted those losses with a fleet of not much over half the size of yours, we have always felt justified in claiming the battle to have been a German victory. The Liitzow was our only really serious loss, though the other battle-cruisers — especially the Derfflinger and Seydlitz — were of little use for many months, so badly had they been battered by gun-fire. The battleship and cruisers sunk were out of date, and we lost only one modern light cruiser. We may have lost as many destroyers as you did, though yours would have footed up to a greater tonnage, as they average larger than ours. We made a great mistake in concealing the loss of the Lutzow for several days, for, after that, the people never stopped thinking that there were other and greater losses not announced. *^But although the English losses must have 282 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" been much greater than ours, I am not sure that they were enough greater to offset the loss of mo- rale in the men of the German fleet. As I have said, I do not think — ^unless we had tricked them into it, as we tried so hard to do at the end — that we could ever again have got them to take their ships out in the full knowledge that they were in for a fight to a finish with the English battle fleet. It would have been better that they had all been lost fighting at Horn Eeef than that they should have survived to bring upon themselves and their officers a disgrace the like of which has never been known in naval history. ' ' XI BACK TO BASE The German Naval Armistice Commission, per- haps as a reaction from its belligerent attitude at the first conference at Kiel, manifested an in- creasing amenability to reason with every day that passed, as a consequence of which the work of the Allied Commission was pushed to a rapid completion. The search of the warships was com- pleted in a couple of days, and the decision to limit the inspection of air stations to those west of Eiigen reduced the visits of this character to three, all easily reached by destroyers. Of the town of Kiel, nothing was seen at close quarters, visits in that vicinity being limited to the dock- yard, ships in the harbour, and the seaplane sta- tion of Holtenau, near the entrance to the canal. Although the Allied ships under embargo hardly arrived at Kiel for inspection at the rate promised, there was little to indicate that the Germans were endeavouring to evade their promise of doing everything possible to facilitate the return of these to the Tyne at the earliest possible moment. The City of Leeds, a powerfully engined little packet 283 284 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules'' which had been on the Hamburg-Harwich run be- fore the war, furnished the only glaring instance of deliberate bad faith. The German Shipping Commission, declaring that her crew had ruined her engines and boilers by pouring tar into them when she was seized, claimed that she had been quite useless since that time, and disclaimed any responsibility for reconditioning her. On inspec- tion by the Allied Shipping Commission, the state- ment that the engines had been damaged by any- thing but use and neglect was proved to be abso- lutely false. Why the Germans should have told so futile a lie was not fully explained, though as a possible reason it was suggested that some private party, desiring to keep the ship in his hands, had made a false report of her condition to the Ship- ping Commission. The arrival and departure of Allied prisoners of war was one of the most interesting features of the week in Kiel. The most of these were British — picked up by one or another of the de- stroyers at this or that port touched at — but there was one large party of French, from a camp near Kiel, and several Belgians, Serbs, and Italians from heaven knows where. These were all made as comfortable as possible in the Hercules, and dispatched to England in the next mail destroyer. Except for a man now and then who was suffering Back to Base 285 from a neglected. wound, they were in fairly good condition, a fact, however, which did not lessen their almost rapturous enjoyment of the heaping pannikins of ^^good greasy grub'^ (as one of them put it) that was theirs for the asking at any hour of the day they cared to slip up to the galley. Their delight in the band, in the ship 's kinema, in *^ doubling round'' for exercise in the morning, in anything and everything in the life in this their halfway station on the road home was a joy to watch. Some of the British prisoners came from the same towns or counties as did men of the ship's company, and the exchange of reminiscences often went on far into the night. Passing across the flat between the ward-room and the commission- room late one evening, I heard a Lancastrian voice from a roll of blankets on the deck protesting to a bluejacket in the hammock above that ^^ Jinny X " of Wigan didn't have yellow hair when he (the owner of the voice) used to know her, and that, in fact, he'd always thought her rather a *^shy 'un." **Thot was afore she worked in a *T.N.T.' fact'ry," replied the ^^ hammock," with an into- nation suggesting that he felt that was sufficient explanation of both changes. A good deal of rivalry developed between the 286 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" four escorting destroyers in the matter of picking up prisoners, and to hear their officers discussing their **bags'' or ^ ^hauls'' when they foregathered at night in the ward-room of the Hercules re- minded one of campers drifting in at the end of the day and yarning of the ducks they had shot and the fish they had caught. * ^ If we could have waited another half -hour twenty more were com- ing with us/' claims Venetia. **But even with those,'' replies Vidette, **you would not have been anywhere near our sixty-nine. ' ' It was this latter *^bag," indeed, which proved the record one of the ** season," both in numbers and * Equality," for it consisted entirely of non-commissioned officers from a camp near Hamburg. The same cringing attempts at ingratiation and conciliation which had been so much in evidence in the attitude of the civil population toward parties from the Commission when they met in streets or stations seem also to have been consistently prac- tised in the case of prisoners about to be repatri- ated. Although the German takes naturally and easily to this kind of thing, just as he did to his schrecMichkeit and general brutalities, there was much in the way he went about making himself pleasant to returning prisoners that bore the marks of official inspiration. Several men who came to the Hercules brought copies of circular O O O Back to Base 287 letters in English which, after pointing out that they had invariably been treated with the greatest courtesy and consideration possible under the very trying circumstances Germany found herself in on account of the blockade, hoped that they would bear no ill will away with them, and that the years to come might bring them back to Germany under happier circumstances. The screeds really had much the tone of an apologetic country host's farewell to guests whom he has had to keep on short commons on account of being snowed in or a breakdown on the line. One of the best of them was addressed to ^ ^ English Gentlemen, ' ' and went on as follows : — **You are about to leave the newest, and what we intend to make the freest, republic in the world. We very much regret that you saw so little of what aroused our pride in the former Germany — her arts, sciences, model cites, theatres, schools, industries, and social institutions, as well as the beauties of our scenery and the real soul of our people, akin in so many things to your own. *^But these things will remain a part of the new Germany. Once the barriers of artificial hatred and misunderstanding have fallen, we hope that you will learn to know, in happier times, these grander features of the land whose unwilling guests you have been. A barbed wire enclosure 288 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" is not the proper place from which to survey or judge a great nation. There will be no barbed wire enclosure in the Germany to which you will return a few months hence. In the meantime we feel that we can count upon you, forgetting the unpleasanter features of your enforced sojourn with us, to exert your influence to reunite the bonds of friendship and commerce which were bringing our countries ever closer and closer to- gether before their unfortunate severance by the sword of war, and upon the knitting up again of which the future of both so greatly depends. ** Three cheers for peace and good will to all mankind ! ' ' Eather a delicate little touch, that ** bonds of commerce" one! Unfortunately, the language in which most of the prisoners described the state of mind which this kind of thing left them in is not quite suited for pubUcation. It was one of the mildest of them — a London cockney who seemed never quite to have got back all the blood he lost when his thigh was ripped open with shrapnel at the assault on Thiepval — ^who said that *^ Jerry'' never would get over being surprised when ' ' a bloke called 'im a b ^y blighter arter 'e 'd tried to shove a ersatz fag on you an' 'oped you w'udn't be bearin' 'im any 'ard feeHn's in the years to come." Back to Base^ 289 The attitude tliat German girls and women ap- pear to have adopted toward Allied, and especially British, prisoners from the time the armistice went into force is not a pleasant thing to write of, and I confine myself to a single observation which an old sergeant of the ^^Contemptibles'' — one of the sixty-nine that the Vidette brought from Hamburg — made on the subject. It was one of the most witheringly biting characterizations of a nation I have ever heard fall from the lips of any man. He had been telling me in a humorous sort of way of *' raspberry leaf tea,'' ersatz coffee of various kinds, paper sheets, and various and sun- dry other substitutes, and then, switched off to the subject by a question regarding a statement a Ger- man officer had been heard to make about the rela- tions of prisoners and women of the country, he spoke of the ways of the girls of Hamburg since the armistice. ^^ There is no doubt,'' he said, **that the young of both sexes have been getting more and more shameless in their morals ever since the beginning of the war, but it is only since we were practically set free by the armistice that the state of things has come home to prisoners. I don't think that there are very many British prisoners — certainly no man that I know personally — who have had anything to do with these young hussies ; but that 290 To Kiel in the ^'Hercules" is not the fault of the girls, for they have pestered us only less in our camp than upon the street. It^s principally because we have a bit of money now, and sometimes a bit of food that isn't ersatz. I don't think I'm exaggerating very much, sir, when I say that fifty per cent, of the girls of the lower classes in Hamburg would sell themselves for a cake of toilet soap or a sixpenny packet of biscuits. Ersatz food and ersatz women! By Grod, sir, Germany's a country of substitutes and prostitutes, and it's glad I am to be seeing the last of it!" • I have yet to hear the Germany of today summed up more scathingly than that. Speaking of the moral degeneracy of Germany, a poster found by a member of the Commission in a train by which he was travelling sheds an inter- esting light on the subject. It was addressed to the ^^ Youth of Wilhelmshaven and Eiistringen" by the Council of Workmen and Soldiers, and the following is a rough translation. **The German youth has been a witness of the great liberating act of the German Revolution. It has witnessed how the fetters of the old regime were burst and Freedom made her entry into the stronghold of reaction, the Prussian military state. And it is the youth of today which will reap the fruits of this great change. It will one Back to Base 291 day find as an accomplished fact all that for which the best of the people have sacrificed themselves. ** Therefore the most serious duties are laid upon the youth of today, to which it is becoming increasingly necessary to draw their attention. Complaints are unfortunately increasing of late that the youth is lapsing more and more into moral anarchy, which carries with it the most serious dangers for the future. Revolution does not mean disorder, but a new order. Eemember that the whole future of Germany depends upon you ; you are the trustees of the future. Be conscious of the great responsibility which rests today upon your young shoulders. . . . You must now learn to be equal to the task which awaits you. Obey your teachers and leaders. That is the first de- mand made upon all today. *^We expect, therefore, that you take this warn- ing to heart, and that we may not be forced to take stronger measures against those among you who either cannot or will not submit ! ' * # # # # # There was a suggestion of power and strength in the name itself, and in setting out to inspect the Great Belt Forts there were few in the party who had not visions of uncovering the secrets of some- thing very much in the nature of a Baltic Gibraltar or Heligoland. *^ Number One'' or the ^^ Inter- 292 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" nationar' sub-commission turned out in full strength in anticipation of what had generally been regarded as the crowning, as it was the con- cluding, event of the visit. The very protestations of the Germans only whetted their interest the keener, for it was a precisely similar line to one they had taken in the matter of the visit to Ton- dern, where there had been something worth see- ing. **Look out for surprises in connection with the * Great Belt' inspection,*' was the word, and every one in any way entitled to attach himself to what was to be the last party landed before the return of the Commission to England made ar- rangements to do so. Brave with swords, bright with brass hats, aglitter with aiguillettes was the imposing line of French, British, Italian, American and Japanese officers who filed across from the Hercules to the Verdun an hour before dawn on the morning of December 16. An hour after darkness descended, wet with rain, bespattered with mud, ashiver with cold, those same officers straggled back to the Hercules again. This is the order in which one of them summed up the day's observation : * ^ The most notable event of the inspection," he said as he warmed his chilled frame before the ward-room fire, **was the sight of the first pig we have clapped eyes on in Germany; the next so was meeting a Back to Base 293 Hun witli enough of a sense of humour to take us three miles round by a muddy road and over ploughed fields and deep ditches to a point he could have reached by a mile of comparatively dry railway track ; and the third was a drive through ten miles of Schleswig countryside that was beautiful beyond words, even in the pelting rain. The Great Belt Forts I Oh, yes, we saw them. They were ^ye holes in the ground on top of one hill, four holes in the ground on the top of another fifteen miles away, and a dozen or so ancient guns dumped into the hold of a tug. But — let^s talk about the pig. ^ ' There is not much that I can add to ths succinct summary of the inspection of the forts of the *^ Baltic Gibraltar.'' What the sub-commission saw — or rather failed to see — there went a long way toward confirming the impression (which had been growing stronger ever since the arrival of the Hercules at Wilhelmshaven) that Germany had depended upon mines rather than guns for the defence of her coasts. The porker mentioned was the one I alluded to in an earlier chapter as just failing to win the officer sighting it the pool which was to go to the first man who saw a pig in Germany, because an Irish-American member of the party had testified that it had * * died from hog cholera an hour before it had been killed. ' ' The 294 To Kiel in the '^ Hercules" lovely stretch of farming country driven through showed many signs of its Danish character, and at several windows I even saw the red-and-white flag of the mother country discreetly displayed. This region, of course, falls well north of the line that is expected to form the new Danish boundary. ***** At the final conference with the German Naval Armistice Commission, which was held in the Hercules on the morning of the 17th, Admiral Goette and his associates, in striking contrast to their belligerent attitude at the first meeting in Kiel, proved thoroughly docile and conciliatory. All of the important points at issue were conceded — including the surrender of submarines building and the delivery of the Baden in place of Macken- sen — and tentative arrangements were made for future visits of special Allied Commissions when- ever these should be deemed necessary to insure the enforcement of the provisions of the armistice. Work on the reconditioning of all Allied merchant ships was to be given precedence over everything else. Considering that he had no trumps either in his hands or up his sleeve. Admiral Goette played his end of the game with considerable skill. Such futile attempts at *^ bluffing'' as he made were invariably traceable to pressure exerted upon him from the *' outside,'' probably Berlin. Per- Back to Base 295 sonally, in spite of the severe nervous strain he was nnder (the effects of which were increasingly noticeable at every succeeding conference), he de- ported himself with a dignity compatible with his heavy responsibilities. The same may be said of Captain Von Miiller, which is perhaps as far down the list as it would be charitable to go in this connection. 'tF ^F ^F 'fF ^F Weighing anchor at noon of the 18th, the Hercules was locked through into the canal in good time to see in daylight that section which had been passed in darkness in coming through from the North Sea. A rain, which turned into soft snow as the afternoon lengthened, was responsible for rather less frequent and numerous crowds of spectators than on the previous passage. The ubiquitous Eussian prisoner was still much in evi- dence. An especially pathetic figure was that of a lone poilu — still in horizon blue, with the skirts of his bedraggled overcoat buttoned back in char- acteristic fashion — ^whom I sighted just before dark. Leaning dejectedly on his hoe in a beet- field, he watched the Hercules pass without so much as lifting a finger. Most likely the unlucky chap took her for a German, for the rapturous demonstrations with which a score of his comrades signalized their arrival aiboard a few days before 296 To Kiel in the ''Hercules" showed very clearly how a French prisoner would greet a British ship if he knew her nationality. The Hercules went into her lock at Brunsbiittel an hour before midnight. The Regensburg, which had preceded her through the canal, was already in the adjoining lock, and in attempting to pass on the light cruiser Constance and three British destroyers at the same operation the canal people made rather a mess of things. There was a savage crashing and tearing of metal at one stage, followed by a considerable flow of profanity in two languages. When, the next morning in the Bight, a signal of condolence was made by the Hercules to one of the destroyers following in her wake on the ** messy" state of its nose, the reply came back. ** Don't worry about my nose. You ought to see the Regensburg. I've got a piece of her side-plating on my forecastle!" That was the second time the unlucky Regensburg had come to grief in locking through at Brunsbuttel with the ships of the Allied Naval Commission. Owing to the fog, the Germans were unable, or unwilling, to send a ship to take off their pilots from the Hercules and escorting destroyers after the outer limits of the mine-fields had been passed, and it became necessary as a consequence to carry them on to Rosyth. The change of air and food incidental to their personally conducted tour to Back to Base 297 Scapa (to await the next German transport home) was evidently a by no means disagreeable prospect to them, judging by the way they took the news. The steward who reported that the pilot he was looking after had been ^^ stowing away grub like he expected a long continuance of the blockade/' may have stumbled upon the reason for their philosophic attitude. We found the Firth of Forth as we left it — wrapped in fog. There was just enough visibility to make it possible to find the gates in the booms and the main channel under the bridge. The his- toric voyage came to an end when the Hercules, after tying up to the Queen Elizabeth^ s buoy for a few hours, went into the dry dock at two-thirty in the afternoon of the 20th. The Commission left for London the same evening in a special train provided by the Admiralty. THE END 9^h'^ '4 • # t <» v^.: i5°-. • •• ^^V o A Oft • ^•*^ • •« 6^ ^^ -ot:^' lO-7\ "^ ..4- lO'tS O/ • « HECKMAN A\ BINDERY INC. *4 ^ JUN 89 N. MANCHESTER, ■^0^ ,<«?«.