The Conquest of America Part 29

"We'll run our seaplanes pretty close up," answered the inventor, "so as to take no chance of missing. I guess we'll begin discharging torpedoes at about 1,200 yards."

"But your seaplanes will be shot to pieces by the fire of our battleships."

"Some will be, but not many. Our attack will be too swift and sudden.

It's hard to hit an aeroplane going a mile in a minute and, before your gunners can get the ranges, the thing will be over."

"Besides," put in General Wood, "every man in our fleet is an American who has volunteered for duty involving extreme risk. Every man will give his life gladly."

About ten o'clock in the morning on February 3rd our front line flyers, miles ahead of us, wirelessed back word that they had sighted the German fleet, and, a few minutes later, we saw smoke columns rising on the far eastern horizon. I shall never forget the air of quiet authority with which General Wood addressed his prisoner at this critical moment.

"I must inform Your Imperial Highness that I have sent a wireless message to the admiral of the German fleet informing him of your presence here as a voluntary pa.s.senger. This seaplane is identified by its signal flags and by the fact that it carries no torpedo. We shall do everything to protect Your Imperial Highness from danger."

"I thank you, sir," the prince answered stiffly.

General Wood withdrew to his place in the observation chamber beside Mr.

Edison.

Swiftly we flew nearer to the enemy's battleships, which were advancing in two columns, led by two super-dreadnoughts, the _Kaiser Friedrich_ and the _Moltke_, with the admiral's flag at her forepeak and flanked by lines of destroyers that belched black smoke from their squat funnels.

With our binoculars we saw that there was much confusion on the German decks as they hastily cleared for action. Our attack had evidently taken them completely by surprise and they had no flyers ready to dispute our mastery of the air.

Presently General Wood re-entered the cabin.

"I have a wireless from Commodore Tower saying that everything is ready.

Before it is too late I appeal to Your Imperial Highness to prevent the destruction of these splendid ships and a horrible loss of life. Will Your Highness say the word?"

"No!" answered the Crown Prince harshly.

General Wood turned to the cabin window and nodded to the a.s.sistant pilot, who dropped overboard a signal smoke ball that left behind, as it fell, a greenish spiral trail. Straightway, the Commodore's seaplane, a mile distant, broke out a line of flags whereupon six flyers from six different points leaped ahead like sky hounds on the scent, shooting forward and downward towards their mighty prey. The remainder of the sky fleet circled away at safe distances of three, four or five miles, waiting the result of this first blow, confident that the _Moltke_ was doomed.

Doomed she was. In vain the great battleship turned her guns, big and little, against these snarling, swooping creatures of the air that came at her like darting vultures all at once from many sides, but swerved at the twelve hundred yard line and took her broadside on with their torpedoes, fired them and were gone.

Six white paths streaked the ocean beneath us marking the course of six torpedoes and three of them found their target. Three of them missed, but that was because the gunners were excited. There is no more excuse for a torpedo missing a dreadnought at a thousand yards than there is for a pistol missing a barn door at twenty feet!

The _Moltke_ began to sink almost immediately. Through our gla.s.ses we watched her putting off life boats and we saw that scarcely half of them had been launched when she lurched violently to starboard and went down by the head. Her boats, led by one flying the admiral's flag, made for the sister dreadnought, but had not covered a hundred yards when Commodore Tower signalled again and six other seaplanes darted into action and, by the same swift manosuvres, sank the _Kaiser Friedrich_.

In this action we lost two seaplanes.

Now General Wood, white-faced, re-entered the cabin.

"Has Your Imperial Highness anything to say?" asked the American commander.

Silent and rigid sat the heir to the German throne, his hands clenched, his nostrils dilating, his lips hard shut.

"If not," continued General Wood, "I shall, with great regret, signal Commodore Tower to sink that transport, which means, I fear, the loss of many thousands of German lives." He pointed to an immense dark grey vessel of about the tonnage of the _Vaterland_.

The Crown Prince neither answered nor stirred and again the American Commander nodded to the a.s.sistant pilot. Once more the smoke ball fell, the signal of attack was given and a third group of seaplanes sped forward on their deadly mission. The men aboard this enormous transport equalled in numbers the entire male population of fighting age in a city like New Haven and of these not twenty were saved. And we lost two more seaplanes.

We had now used eighteen of our hundred available torpedoes and had sunk three ships of the enemy.

At this moment the sun's glory burst through a rift in the dull sky, whereupon our fleet, welcoming the omen, threw forth the stars and stripes from every flyer and sailed nearer the stricken fleet hungry for further victories. I counted twenty transports and half a dozen battleships. Proudly we circled over them, knowing that our power of destruction meant safety and honour for America.

In the observation chamber General Wood watched, frowning while the wireless crackled out another message from Commodore Tower. Where should we strike next?

In the cabin sat the Crown Prince, his face like marble and the anguish of death in his heart.

Suddenly, a little thing happened that turned Frederick William towards a decision which practically ended the war. The little thing was a burst of music from the _Koenig Albert_, steaming at the head of the nearer battleship column two miles distant. On she came, shouldering great waves from her bows while hundreds of blue-jackets lined her rails as if to salute or defy the tragic fate hanging over them.

As General Wood appeared once more before his tortured prisoner, there floated over the sea the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein," whereupon up on his feet came the Crown Prince and, head bared, stood listening to this great hymn of the Fatherland, while tears streamed down his face.

"I yield," he said in broken tones. "I cannot stand out any longer. I will do as you wish, sir."

"My terms are unconditional surrender," said the American commander, "to be followed by a truce for peace negotiations. Does Your Imperial Highness agree to unconditional surrender?"

"Those are harsh terms. In our talk at Chicago Your Excellency only asked that I prevent this expedition from sailing. I am ready to order the expedition back to Germany."

General Wood shook his head.

"Conditions are different now. Your Imperial Highness refused my Chicago suggestion and chose the issue of battle which has turned in our favour.

To the victors belong the spoils. These battleships are our prizes of war. These German soldiers in the troopships are our prisoners."

"Impossible!" protested the Prince. "Do you think five hundred men in aeroplanes can make prisoners of a hundred and fifty thousand in battleships?"

"I do, sir," declared General Wood with grim finality. "There's a perfectly safe prison--down below." He glanced into the green abyss above which we were soaring. "I must ask Your Imperial Highness to decide quickly. The Commodore is waiting."

Every schoolboy knows what happened then, how the Prince, in this crisis, turned from grief to defiance, how he dared General Wood to do his worst, how the American commander sank the _Koenig Albert_ and two more transports in the next half hour with a loss of five seaplanes, and how, finally, Frederick William, seeing that the entire German expedition would be annihilated, surrendered absolutely and ran up the stars and stripes above German dreadnoughts, transports and destroyers. For the first time in history an insignificant air force had conquered a great fleet. The Widding-Edison invention had made good.

I need not dwell upon details of the German-American Peace Conference which occupied the month of February, 1922. These are matters of familiar record. The country went from one surprise to another as Germany yielded point after point of her original demands. Under no circ.u.mstances would she withdraw her armies from the soil of America unless she received a huge indemnity, but at the end of a week she agreed to withdraw without any indemnity. Firmly she insisted that the United States must abrogate the Monroe Doctrine, but she presently waived this demand and agreed that the Monroe Doctrine might stand. Above all she stood out for the neutralisation of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Here she would not yield, but at the close of the conference she did yield and on February 22nd, 1922, Germany signed the treaty of Pittsburg which gave her only one advantage, namely, the repossession of her captured fleet.

It was not until a fortnight later, after the invading transports had sailed for home and the last German soldier had left America, that we understood why the enemy had dealt with us so graciously. On March 4th, 1922, the news burst upon the world that France and Russia, smarting under the inconclusive results of the Great War, had struck again at the Central Empires, and we saw that Germany had abandoned her invasion of America not because of our air victory, but because she found herself involved in another European war. She was glad to leave the United States on any terms.

A few weeks later in Washington (now happily restored as the national capital) I was privileged to hear General Wood's great speech before a joint committee of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The discussion was on national preparedness and I thrilled as the general rose to answer various Western statesmen who opposed a defence plan calling for large appropriations on the ground that, in the present war with Germany and in her previous wars, America had always managed to get through creditably without a great military establishment and always would.

"Gentlemen," replied General Wood, "let us be honest with ourselves in regard to these American wars that we speak of so complacently, these wars that are presented in our school books as great and glorious. How great were they? How glorious were they? Let us have the truth.

"Take our War of the Revolution. Does any one seriously maintain that this was a great war? It was not a war at all. It was a series of skirmishes. It was the blunder of a stupid English king, who never had the support of the English people. Our revolutionary armies decreased each year and, but for the interposition of the French, our cause, in all probability, would have been lost.

"And the war of 1812? Was that great and glorious? Why did we win?

Because we were isolated by the Atlantic Ocean (which in these days of steam no longer isolates us) and because England was occupied in a death struggle with Napoleon.

"In our Civil War both North and South were totally unprepared. If either side at the start had had an efficient army of 100,000 men that side would have won overwhelmingly in the first six months.

"Our war with Spain in 1898 was a joke, a pitiful exhibition of incompetency and unreadiness in every department. We only won because Spain was more unprepared than we were. And as to our great naval victory, the truth is that the Spanish fleet destroyed itself.

"Gentlemen, we have never had a real war in America. This invasion by Germany was the beginning of a real war, but that has now been marvellously averted. Through extraordinary good fortune we have been delivered from this peril, just as, by extraordinary good fortune, we gained some successes over the Germans, like the battle of the Susquehanna and our recent seaplane victory, successes that were largely accidental and could never be repeated.

"I a.s.sure you, gentlemen, it is madness for us to count upon continued deliverance from the war peril because in the past we have been lucky, because in the past wide seas have guarded us, because in the past our enemies have quarrelled among themselves, or because American resourcefulness and ingenuity have been equal to sudden emergencies. To permanently base our hopes of national safety and integrity upon such grounds is to choose the course adopted by China and to invite for our descendants the humiliating fate that finally overwhelmed China, which nation has now had a practical suzerainty forced upon her by a much smaller power.