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 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 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 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 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 assured 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 willy-nilly.
"You can't tell me there isn't a God 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
principally 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 principally 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 principal 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 shoreward 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 "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, 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 shore
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 passing 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 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-_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 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--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 passing glance, it is true, revealed a prominently
displayed line of false shirt fronts; but, then, your German always was
partial 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 fête_ 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 pass 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 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 captain's frau--drew
a languid hand from what looked like a real ermine muff 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 inspection,
passed us through the gate and on the platform and our waiting train.