To Kiel in the 'Hercules' Part 2

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 pa.s.sed on to them by their officers, and the ship, save for a few cooks in the galley, was emptied well within the time-limit a.s.signed. It had evidently been an attempt upon 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 parties.

On the contrary, indeed, the men--and especially 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 hopefully for the completion of the Commission's program 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 German naval officers and the members of the Workmen'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 reconciled to the ruling of the Commission that the 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 relations. The Naval authorities and the Council had evidently come to an agreement by which the latter 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 required, a second Workmen's and Soldiers' representative--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 complicated negotiations with the Allied representatives, 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 arrangements of the "seaplane station" party one morning, 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 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 b.u.mping up to the gangway in a madly driven motor-boat, and clambered up to the quarter-deck to make his apologies.

"I am very sorry," he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed volubly, "but it was not understood by the _Arbeiter und Soldatenrat_ that it was I who was to go with you today. 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 permit 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 ash.o.r.e. The constant "self-pity" which the officers kept showing in the matter of their humiliating 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 Germany'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--incorrectly, 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 waters were the battleship _Baden_, sister of the surrendered _Bayern_, and the battle-cruiser _Mackensen_, sister of the surrendered _Hindenburg_. The _Regensburg_ and _Konigsberg_, which had been left to the Germans to "get about in," were also considered worthy of study at close range as examples 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 even these most modern examples of German naval construction. After the extremely good fight that practically every one of them--from the _Emden_ and _Konigsberg_ and the ships of Von Spee'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 construction, 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 pa.s.s judgment, owing to the fact that, in every instance, the Germans--as they had a perfect right to do--had removed all the instruments and gear calculated to give any indication 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 dispense with doors. But there was nothing new in this fact to those who knew the amount of hammering the _Seydlitz_ and _Derfflinger_ 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 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 Germans had merely become tardy converts to British 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 _Hindenburg_. Similarly, the armament--both main and secondary--of the respective cla.s.ses 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 matter 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 Teutonic 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 and what must have been the director towers. One moot point may, however, be regarded as settled. There have been many who maintained that, since the German fire was almost invariably extremely accurate in the opening stages of an action, and tended to fall off rapidly after the ship came under fire herself, the enemy gunnery control involved the use of a very elaborate and highly complicated installation of special instruments, 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 England have succeeded since the war in making optical gla.s.s 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 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 employed to handle these instruments, and that much attention was given to their training. It is believed that upon these simple points alone, rather than upon the use of a highly complicated system of control, the admitted excellence of German gunnery 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 remarkable state of affairs--in the vast blocks of barracks at Wilhelmshaven and the very crude, inadequate 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 a.s.sured one of the searching 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 w.i.l.l.y-nilly.

"You can't tell me there isn't a G.o.d in Israel, now that we've 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 otherwise 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 Reuter, 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 believe, 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 should be delivered in place of the uncompleted _Mackensen_.

Except for the several modern ships I have mentioned, the search of the naval units remaining in German ports resolved itself into a more or less monotonous clambering over a lot of obsolete hulks--from many of which even the guns had been removed--to see that no munitions remained 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 answer 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 imaginary 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 "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 princ.i.p.ally 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, Germany's princ.i.p.al seaplane and airship stations, and of these highly interesting visits I shall write in later chapters.

III

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF "STARVING GERMANY"

Our visit to the island of Norderney was a memorable 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 German 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, slovenly 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 waterfront road might have been made up of Esquimaux or Kanakas, for all that we could see. One wondered if their emaciated frames were dressed in paper suits, and if their tottering feet clumped along in wooden clogs. The excellence of the material 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 mistake of under-feeding or under-clothing her soldiers 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 entrance to the basin.

Running in just ahead of an antique torpedo-boat with the usual indolent sailors 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.

No one being on the landing to receive the party, we started walking in toward its sh.o.r.eward end. The men on the torpedo-boats stared at us with insolent curiosity, without the suggestion of the shuffle of a foot toward standing at attention as even the "bra.s.siest" of our several "bra.s.s-hats" pa.s.sed by; but from the galley of a tug moored on the opposite side the cook grinned wide-mouthed welcome. She was a fine, upstanding, double-braided blonde of generous proportions, 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 impersonal 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 _schrecklichkeit_ in that face, either. Pipe that 'welcome-to-our-fair-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 hurrying to meet us at the sh.o.r.e end of the landing, apologizing for his tardiness by saying that it was due to "trouble about the cars." After seeing the motley collection of motors which awaited us outside 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 pneumatic 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 mongrel 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 pneumatically tyred Mercedes and the "rheumatically" 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 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 Germany 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 positively Bolshevik!" All in all, I think "Bolshevik" is more fittingly descriptive than "Jazz-band-ic." It carries a suggestion of "savageness" quite lacking in the latter, and "savage" that raucous tornado of sound surely was. I could never allow myself to contemplate the primal 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 pa.s.sing 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 emergency brake. The occasion for the use of the latter arose when a turning bridge was suddenly opened fifteen or twenty yards ahead of the leading car, imposing upon the latter the necessity of stopping dead inside that distance or taking a header into a ca.n.a.l. 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 b.u.mp before losing the last of its momentum, and all but the last of its fluttering "rope-_ersatz_-rubber" tyres, while 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 b.u.t.ted 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 pa.s.sing 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--not even the labourer going to his morning work--had anything of the slovenly hang-dog air of the sailors we had seen in the ships and about 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 pa.s.sing glance, it is true, revealed a prominently displayed line of false shirt fronts; but, then, your German always was partial to "d.i.c.keys." 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 confection 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 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 running 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 pallor, 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 destined to see them in Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, or anywhere else we went in the course of our many 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 pa.s.s some huge ma.s.ses 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 a.s.sent 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 impeachment 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 interesting 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 inducing 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 pa.s.s through the city that day had been carefully withheld from the people, the latter exhibited very little surprise at the appearance of officers in uniforms 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, docile as ever, they carried out the order to the letter. A mild, unresentful curiosity would perhaps best describe the att.i.tude 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 children, 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 a.s.sured 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 "unbeaten soldiers," of whom we had been reading as welcomed home in Berlin and other parts of Germany.

There was a small crowd at the station entrance as our cars drove up, but it parted quietly and made way for us to pa.s.s inside. One or two sailors stood at attention and saluted--though whether German or Allied officers it was impossible to tell--and several civilians bowed solemnly and took off 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 captain's frau--drew a languid hand from what looked like a real ermine m.u.f.f to lift a tortoise-sh.e.l.l lorgnette and pa.s.s 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 surrept.i.tious tour of inspection, pa.s.sed us through the gate and on the platform and our waiting train.