To Kiel in the 'Hercules' Part 12

"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 our '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 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 concentrated upon them during the hour and more before 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_ cla.s.s came into action there was a while when they were receiving the concentrated fire of practically 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 _Warspite_) out of control for a while--we did them much damage. 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 English battle-cruisers and armoured cruisers drew a part of our fire, their heavy sh.e.l.ls did much damage.

"The High Sea Fleet's line became considerably broken and extended in the course of the pursuit of the English battle-cruisers and the _Queen Elizabeths_, 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--princ.i.p.ally 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 'barrage'--in forcing the English fleet to sheer off 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 playing 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 happened, and, what is more, anything would have been better for us than what did come to pa.s.s--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 torpedoes, 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 off by the common desire of both parties. Some of your destroyers persisted in their attacks whenever 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.ses of heavier ships. In fact, our princ.i.p.al 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 previously) and a cruiser, and had two other cruisers badly damaged, one from being rammed by a little fighting-c.o.c.k of a destroyer which must have committed suicide in doing it. We sank two or three of the destroyers by gun-fire, and left two or three 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 Reef, 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 _Lutzow_ 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 been much greater than ours, I am not sure that they were enough greater to offset the loss of _morale_ 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 Reef 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, perhaps as a reaction from its belligerent att.i.tude at the first conference at Kiel, manifested an increasing amenability to reason with every day that pa.s.sed, as a consequence of which the work of the Allied Commission was pushed to a rapid completion. The search of the warships was completed in a couple of days, and the decision to limit the inspection of air stations to those west of Rugen 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 dockyard, ships in the harbour, and the seaplane station of Holtenau, near the entrance to the ca.n.a.l.

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 which had been on the Hamburg-Harwich run before 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 inspection by the Allied Shipping Commission, the statement that the engines had been damaged by anything but use and neglect was proved to be absolutely 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 Shipping 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 destroyers 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 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. Pa.s.sing 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 intonation suggesting that he felt that was sufficient explanation of both changes.

A good deal of rivalry developed between the 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_ reminded 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 coming 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 "quality," for it consisted entirely of non-commissioned officers from a camp near Hamburg.

[Ill.u.s.tration: H. M. S. "HERCULES" AND H. M. S "CONSTANCE" IN KIEL LOCKS]

The same cringing attempts at ingratiation and conciliation which had been so much in evidence in the att.i.tude of the civil population toward parties from the Commission when they met in streets or stations seem also to have been consistently practised in the case of prisoners about to be repatriated. Although the German takes naturally and easily to this kind of thing, just as he did to his _schrecklichkeit_ 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 letters in English which, after pointing out that they had invariably been treated with the greatest courtesy and consideration possible under the very trying circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 cities, theatres, schools, industries, and social inst.i.tutions, 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 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 together 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!"

Rather 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 publication. It was one of the mildest of them--a London c.o.c.kney who seemed never quite to have got back all the blood he lost when his thigh was ripped open with shrapnel at the a.s.sault 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_ f.a.g on you an' 'oped you w'udn't be bearin' 'im any 'ard feelin's in the years to come."

The att.i.tude that German girls and women appear 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 sundry other subst.i.tutes, and then, switched off to the subject by a question regarding a statement a German officer had been heard to make about the relations 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 s.e.xes 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 is not the fault of the girls, for they have pestered us only less in our camp than upon the street. It's princ.i.p.ally 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 cla.s.ses in Hamburg would sell themselves for a cake of toilet soap or a sixpenny packet of biscuits. _Ersatz_ food and _ersatz_ women! By G.o.d, sir, Germany's a country of subst.i.tutes and prost.i.tutes, 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 interesting light on the subject. It was addressed to the "Youth of Wilhelmshaven and Rustringen" 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 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. Remember 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 demand made upon all today.

"We expect, therefore, that you take this warning 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 something very much in the nature of a Baltic Gibraltar or Heligoland. "Number One"

or the "International" sub-commission turned out in full strength in antic.i.p.ation of what had generally been regarded as the crowning, as it was the concluding, 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 Tondern, where there _had_ been something worth seeing. "Look out for surprises in connection with the 'Great Belt' inspection," was the word, and every one in any way ent.i.tled to attach himself to what was to be the last party landed before the return of the Commission to England made arrangements to do so.

Brave with swords, bright with bra.s.s hats, aglitter with aiguillettes was the imposing line of French, British, Italian, American and j.a.panese 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 Hun with 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? Oh, yes, we saw them. They were five 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 the 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 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 a.s.sociates, in striking contrast to their belligerent att.i.tude 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 _Mackensen_--and tentative arrangements were made for future visits of special Allied Commissions whenever 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. Personally, in spite of the severe nervous strain he was under (the effects of which were increasingly noticeable at every succeeding conference), he deported himself with a dignity compatible with his heavy responsibilities. The same may be said of Captain Von Muller, which is perhaps as far down the list as it would be charitable to go in this connection.

Weighing anchor at noon of the 18th, the _Hercules_ was locked through into the ca.n.a.l in good time to see in daylight that section which had been pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage. The ubiquitous Russian prisoner was still much in evidence. An especially pathetic figure was that of a lone _poilu_--still in horizon blue, with the skirts of his bedraggled overcoat b.u.t.toned back in characteristic fashion--whom I sighted just before dark. Leaning dejectedly on his hoe in a beet-field, he watched the _Hercules_ pa.s.s 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 aboard a few days before showed very clearly how a French prisoner would greet a British ship if he knew her nationality.

The _Hercules_ went into her lock at Brunsb.u.t.tel an hour before midnight. The _Regensburg_, which had preceded her through the ca.n.a.l, was already in the adjoining lock, and in attempting to pa.s.s on the light cruiser _Constance_ and three British destroyers at the same operation the ca.n.a.l 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 Brunsb.u.t.tel 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 pa.s.sed, 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 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 att.i.tude.

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 historic 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