we doubtless would desire to get the inspection over as quickly
as possible, started off into the darkness at a brisk pace, the
rest--British, Americans, and Germans--stumbling along in pursuit as
best they could. Entering the shed by a side door near which the
train had stopped, we found it so poorly lighted that the opposite
wall showed but dimly, while the ends and the soaring arches of the
roof were lost in dusky obscurity. At that first glimpse--probably the
fresh smell of the cement under foot and the palpable newness of the
pressed asbestos siding under one of the lights had something to do
with it--the shed gave one the impression of being just on the point of
completion. The description of the station furnished to us mentioned no
such structure, so that we were rather at a loss. No explanation was
volunteered, however, and our guide pushed on straight across, with the
evident intention of passing out through the opposite door. But the
senior Allied officer, an American, of commander's rank, stopped him
with a request for more light. Half a dozen switches were then thrown
over, and flooded the great structure with the brilliant radiance of
countless incandescent globes. At once the huge building was revealed as
a double Zeppelin shed of the largest size, just at the end of a long
spell of restoration after being badly damaged. Fragments of duraluminum
and charred pieces of wood and fabric, swept together in great heaps at
the sides, told more of the story, and great fresh patches at several
points in the roof the rest of it. This was the shed in which the two
Zeppelins, which the Germans admitted losing when the station was bombed
by the planes from the _Furious_, had been destroyed. It was the least
damaged of the sheds bombed, said the German commander, and it had
been rebuilt with materials from two other sheds both of which were in
process of demolition.
I saw the Yankee officer's eyes glistening as the picture those words
conjured up flashed before them, and heard his muttered "Some raid that,
by cripes!"
"If you are zatisfied, ve vill now go on to der oder sheds," the German
commander said presently, and we followed him out into the deepening
twilight.
Tondern had nothing of the regularity of plan of Nordholz, nor, luckily,
the latter's magnificent distances. We found the two remaining sheds,
or what was left of them, at less than half a mile from the first.
One was nothing but a foundation, with prostrate steel pillars and
girders scattered about over it, and numerous deep pools of water. I
say deep, because it took two of his colleagues to fish out one of the
party who stumbled into it, and he, by the irony of fate, was a stout
German officer, with a deep bass voice and a magnificent vocabulary. We
had to take the German's word for it that this shed had been a small
one, which they were demolishing because it had been obsolete, and not
because it had been damaged by bombs.
Men were at work pulling down a section of the next shed as we came up,
but they shambled away at a word from one of their officers. This one,
said the station commander, was much the worst damaged of the two bombed
in the raid, but, by good luck, there had been no airships in it at
the time. The reason that it was more badly knocked to pieces than the
other, in spite of the fact that, in the latter, the explosion of the
Zeppelins was added to that of the bombs, was due to its doors having
been tightly closed. This had caused the full force of the exploding
bombs to be exerted against the walls and roof of the shed, whereas, in
the first one, much of that force had been dissipated through the open
front of the structure.
Save a flare or two by which the men had been working, there was no
lights in this shed, but, picking our way over heaps of broken glass and
asbestos sheeting, we managed to find a point from which the tangled
and twisted girders of a still undemolished section of the roof were
silhouetted against a stratum of western clouds, yet bright in the last
of the sunset glow. For the most part they bulged outward, where the
up-gush of the explosion had exerted its force against the roof, but in
two places they bent sharply inward, and ended in jagged bars of torn
metal. These were the places, the Germans told us, where two of the
bombs burst through. One of them explained the remarkable fact of the
great holes being almost exactly in a line down the middle of the roof
by saying: "Poof! they fly so low they could not miss. Any airman could
do that. But they did miss with one bomb, though," he said, brightening.
"Come mit me. I show you," and he led the way to a spot forty or fifty
feet in front of the wrecked building, where his electric torch revealed
a round hole in the earth about five feet in diameter by four feet deep.
"I think that bomb miss der top of der shed by one half-metre," he said,
sighting along his outstretched arm at what was evidently reckoned the
angle of a bomb from a low-flying machine. "Yes, it miss der shed by
half a metre; but it kills five men chust der same. Not so bad after
all, perhapds." Your Hun officer is ever a cold-blooded reckoner, and
one of the reasons he is so useful is that he never lets sentiment blur
his perspective.
From various things heard and seen in the course of that hurried night
visit of inspection to Tondern it would have been possible to piece out
a fairly accurate picture of how the great raid must have appeared to
the Germans stationed there at the time. It will be better, however, to
set down a brief _résumé_ of the connected account I heard at Nordholz
from Von Butlar, Germany's most famous surviving airship pilot, who
had, as will be seen, good reason for remembering what occurred on that
eventful morning.
[Illustration: BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF KIEL]
[Illustration: IN KIEL DOCKYARD]
Von Butlar's[2] chief claim to distinction is his notable long-distance
flights, the most remarkable of which was in connection with an attempt
to carry medical supplies to General Von Letow in German East Africa.
The German European forces there were being decimated by malaria at
the time, and Von Letow had sent word by wireless that unless a supply
of quinine reached him by a certain date he would be unable to carry
on. As this campaign was diverting far too much British effort for the
Germans to let it come to an end while any card still remained to be
played, it was decided to make an attempt to send relief by Zeppelin.
A rendezvous was arranged, and after some delay an airship, under Von
Butlar's command, was dispatched from a station in Bulgaria, the nearest
practicable point from which a start could be made. The delay alone
caused the failure of the boldly conceived project, for, flying without
a hitch of any kind, Von Butlar had already crossed the Mediterranean,
Lower and Upper Egypt, and was well over the Sudan when Von Letow
informed him by wireless that the British had occupied the point where
he was to have landed, and that, as it was not practicable to rendezvous
with him in a sufficiently open region elsewhere, it would be best for
him to return home. This remarkable feat was successfully accomplished,
Von Butlar bringing his airship safely to earth at a point on the
Turkish shores of the Black Sea.
[2] Since returning to England I have received information
which, while confirming the fact that he commanded "L-59"
when it was commissioned, makes it probable that Von
Butlar was transferred to another Zeppelin before the
East African flight was attempted. A pilot by the name
of Bugholz is believed to have been in command on that
occasion. Although Von Butlar's representation of himself
as the hero of the remarkable African flight appears to
have been a case of pure "swank," there is every reason
to believe that his account of the Tondern raid is
substantially correct.--L. R. F.
A scarcely less remarkable flight was one in which Von Butlar claimed
to have crossed the North Sea to near the Yorkshire coast, to have
passed north in sight of Rosyth, Invergordon, and Scapa Flow, to have
flown across to Norway, gaining useful information respecting convoy
and patrol movements, and back to his home station at Tondern or
Nordholz. The Admiralty, which had some information about this latter
flight, had credited Von Butlar with having been in the air 104 hours,
but he assured several members of the Commission that the actual time
was little short of six days. He also claimed to have taken a useful
photograph of the Grand Fleet at anchor at Scapa Flow.
At the time of the Tondern raid, Von Butlar was flying from there,
one of the two Zeppelins destroyed being that which he commanded. As
he speaks little, if any, English, the following account is a free
translation of the story he related to us in German of what occurred on
that occasion. "We always recognized," he said, "from the time that we
learned that the British were developing swift flying-machine carriers,
that Tondern was especially vulnerable to an attack of this kind, and we
prepared against it as best we could. We had expected, however, that it
would come in the form of a raid by seaplanes, which would, of course,
have been comparatively heavy and slow, and which would have had to
return to the sea to land, and against these our defence would probably
have been effective. Where we deceived ourselves was in underrating the
risks that your men were willing to take, such as, for instance, that
of landing in the sea in an ordinary aeroplane on the chance of being
picked up in the comparatively short time such a machine will float."
"We were not prepared for such a raid at any time, but especially at
the moment at which it occurred. We had had a protecting flight of
light fighting aeroplanes at Tondern, but the landing ground had never
been properly levelled. There had been many accidents, and a number of
the machines were always disabled. This trouble became so bad toward
the middle of last summer that it was finally decided to withdraw the
protecting flight, which was badly needed at the moment elsewhere, until
the landing ground had been improved. As usual, your Admiralty seem to
have learned of this within a few hours and to have decided to take
advantage of it at once. From the way your machines were flying when
they appeared, I am practically certain that they felt sure of being
opposed by nothing worse than gun-fire.
"We received warning, of course, when the raiding planes were still
over the sea, but, unless some of the machines at once sent up from the
coastal stations could stop them, there was nothing for us to do but to
give them the warmest reception we could with the anti-aircraft guns, in
which we were fairly strong. Our gunners were well trained, and if your
planes had kept high, as they would have done if they had been expecting
a strong attack by a superior force of protecting machines, they would
most probably have been prevented from doing much harm, instead of just
about wiping the station off the map, as they did.
"When we had the warning, most of those without special duties went to
the _abri_, which had been provided at all stations for use in case of
raids. But I was so concerned over the danger to my own ship that I
remained outside. It was quite light by the time they appeared. At first
they were flying high, but while they were still small specks I saw
them begin to plane down, as though following a pre-arranged plan. It
was all over in a minute or two after that. Part of them headed for one
shed and part for the other. Diving with their engines all out--or so it
seemed--they came over with the combined speed from their drop and the
pull of their propellers. Down they came, till they seemed to be going
to ram the sheds. Then, one after another, they flattened out and passed
lengthwise over their targets at a height of about forty metres, kicking
loose bombs as they went.
"Our guns simply had no chance at all with them. In fact, one of the
guns came pretty near to getting knocked out itself. It was so reckless
a piece of work that I couldn't help noticing it, even while my own
airship was beginning to burst into flames. One of the pilots, it seems,
must have found that he had a bomb or two left at about the same time he
spotted the position of one of the guns that was firing at him. Banking
steeply, round he came, dived straight at the battery, letting go a bomb
as his sight came on when he was no more than fifteen metres above it.
Then he waved his hand and dashed off after the other machines, which
were already scattering to avoid the German planes beginning to converge
on them from all directions. It was one of the finest examples of nerve
I ever saw.
"The precaution we had taken of opening the doors of the main shed saved
it from total destruction, for the airships, instead of exploding,
only burned comparatively slowly; but Tondern, as an air station, had
practically ceased to exist from that moment."
VIII
THROUGH THE CANAL TO THE BALTIC
The _Hercules_ and her four escorting destroyers (the latter having been
scattered during the last few days to various ports and air stations in
connection with the inspection being pushed all along the German North
Sea coast) were to have rendezvoused at Brunsbüttel by dark of the 10th,
in order to be ready to start through the Kiel Canal at daybreak the
following morning. At the appointed time, however, only the _Viceroy_,
which had pushed through that morning with the "air" party en route to
the Zeppelin station at Tondern, was on hand. The _Hercules_, which had
got under weigh from Wilhelmshaven during the forenoon, reported that
she had been compelled to anchor off the Elbe estuary on account of
the thickness of the fog, and the _Verdun_, coming on from her visit
to Borkum and Heligoland, had been delayed from a similar cause. The
_Vidette_ and _Venetia_, which were helping the "shipping" and "warship"
parties get around the harbours of Bremen and Hamburg, signalled that
their work was still uncompleted and that they would have to proceed
later to Kiel "on their own."
Returning to Brunsbüttel from the Tondern visit well along toward
midnight, the absence of the _Hercules_ compelled the four of us who
had made that arduous journey in the _Viceroy_ (the accommodations in
the "V's" appear to be as elastic as the good nature of their officers
is boundless), to spend the night aboard, and the impossibility of
rejoining our own ships in the morning was responsible for the fact
that we continued with her--the first British destroyer to pass through
the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal--on to Kiel. It was a passage as memorable as
historic.
An improving visibility toward morning enabled the _Hercules_ to get
under weigh again before daybreak, and in the first grey light of the
winter dawn she came nosing past us and on up to the entrance of the
canal. At each end of the latter there are two locks--lying side by
side--for both "outgoing" and "incoming" ships. The right-side one of
the "incoming" pair was reserved for the _Hercules_, while the other was
kept clear for the _Regensburg_--flying Admiral Goette's flag--and the
two British destroyers. The difference in level between the canal and
the waters of the Elbe, varying considerably with the tide, is only a
few feet at most, and the locking through, as a consequence, only the
matter of minutes.
The _Hercules_ and _Regensburg_ were already in their respective locks
as the _Viceroy_, with the _Verdun_ half a cable's length astern, came
gliding up out of the fog, the former already beginning to show her
great bulk above the side as she lifted with the in-pouring water. The
attention of the score or so of Germans standing on the wall between
the locks was centred, not on the _Hercules_, as one might have
expected, but on the _Regensburg_, the most of them being gathered in a
gesticulative group abreast the latter's bow. The reason for this we saw
presently.
[Illustration: H. M. S. "VICEROY" ENTERING KIEL CANAL LOCK AT
BRUNSBÜTTEL]
The handling of the British destroyers on this occasion was one of the
smartest things of the kind I ever saw. Indeed, under the circumstances,
"spectacular" is a fitter word to describe it than "smart." Without
reducing the speed of her engines by a revolution, the _Viceroy_
continued right on into the narrow water-lane of the lock at the same
pace as she had approached its entrance. Certainly she was doing ten
knots, and probably a good bit over that. On into the still more
restricted space between the _Regensburg_ and the right side of the
dock she drove, while the waterside loafers--scenting a smash--grinned
broadly in anticipation of the humiliation of the Englanders. Straight
at the loftily looming lock gate she drove, and I remember distinctly
seeing men who were crossing the canal on the bridge made by the folded
flaps break into a run to avoid the imminent crash. And she never did
slow down; she _stopped_. While there was still a score of yards to
go the captain threw the engine-room telegraph over to "Stop!" and
"Half-Speed Astern!" and, straining like a dog in leash as the reversed
propellers killed her headway, stop she did. The superlative _finesse_
of the thing (for they had seen something before of the handling of
ships in narrow places) fairly swept the gathering dock-side vultures
off their feet with astonishment, and one little knot of sailors all but
broke into a cheer. Then the _Verdun_ came dashing up and repeated the
same spectacular manoeuvre in our wake; only, instead of bringing up a
few feet short of the lock gates, it was the stern of the _Viceroy_,
with its festoon of poised depth-charges, that her axe-like bow backed
away from after nosing up close enough to sniff, if not to scratch, the
paint.
"You've impressed the Huns right enough, sir," I remarked to the captain
as he rang down, "Finished with the Engines," and turned to descend the
ladder of the bridge; "but wasn't it just a bit--"
"Yes, it was rather slow," he cut in apologetically in answer to what
he thought I was going to say; "but I didn't dare to take any chances
of coming a cropper in strange waters. Now, if it had been the 'Pen' at
Rosyth, we might have shown them what one of the little old 'V's' can do
when it comes to a pinch."
At the time I thought he was joking--that I had seen the extreme limit
that morning of the "handiness" of the modern destroyer. But the
_Viceroy_, astonishing as that performance had been, still had something
up her sleeve. A week later, in the fog-shrouded entrance to Kiel Fiord,
where a slip would have been a good deal more serious matter than the
telescoping of a bow on a lock gate, I saw how much.
From the vantage of the bridge I saw, just before descending for
breakfast, what it had been that had deflected the attention of the
lock-side loafers from the _Hercules_ to the _Regensburg_. That most
graceful of light cruisers had paid the penalty of being left with a
most disgraceful crew. _She_ had rammed the lock gate full and square,
and--from the look of her bows--while she still had a good deal of way
on. We had remarked especially the trim lissomeness of those bows when
she met us off the Jade on the day the _Hercules_ arrived in German
waters. And now the sharp stem was bent several feet to port, while
all back along her "flare" the buckled plating heaved in undulant
corrugations like the hide on the neck of an old bull rhino. As it was
the kind of repair that would take a month or more in dock to effect,
there was nothing for the Germans to do but go on using her as she was.
Luckily, she did not appear to be making much water. She followed us
through the canal without difficulty, and--as the days when she would
be called on to shake out her thirty knots were gone for ever--it is
probable that she served Admiral Goette as well for a flagship as any
other of her undamaged sisters would have. But they were never able to
smooth out her "brow of care" during all our stay in German waters;
indeed, I shall be greatly surprised if (to use the expressive term I
heard a bluejacket in the _Viceroy_ apply to it that morning) she does
not come poking that "cauliflower nose" in front of her when she is
finally handed over for internment at Scapa.
Although they would be dwarfed beside such great structures as the Pedro
Miguel or Gatun locks of the Panama Canal, the locks at Brunsbüttel
are fine solid works, displaying on every hand evidences of the great
attention which had been given to providing for their rapid operation
under pressure, as when the High Sea Fleet was being rushed through
from the Baltic to the North Sea. Having been enlarged primarily to
"double the strength of the German Fleet," expense had not mattered in
the way it would have had the canal been expected to justify itself
commercially. The merchant traffic of the waterway for many years to
come would not have demanded the double locks at either end; but naval
exigencies called for speedy operation at any cost, and they were built.
Everything about the locks was in extremely good repair. Even the great
agate and onyx mosaic of the name KAISER WILHELM KANAL, set between
the double-headed eagles of the Imperial arms, was swept and polished
to display it to best advantage. The locks were only the front window
display, however, for the badly eroded banks of the canal itself
testified to the same lack of maintenance as the railways were suffering
from. As our pilot reported that the revolutionists had spent the
night obliterating all the Imperial names--such as _Kaiserstrasse_ and
_Kronprintzstrasse_--in Brunsbüttel, one felt safe in assuming that the
gaudy mosaic on the lock wall had been furbished as a decoration, not as
a symbol.
The _Hercules_, having been raised to the proper level, was locked
out into the canal, along which she proceeded at the steady six-knot
speed laid down as the limit not to be exceeded by ships of her size.
Although of considerably less displacement than a number of the largest
of the German capital ships, she was of greater draught than any of
these, and even the burning of several hundred tons of coal in the
voyage from Rosyth still left her drawing slightly more than the thirty
odd feet that the German naval command had set as the limit. This had
been figured out in advance, however, and an oiling all round of the
destroyers before leaving Wilhelmshaven had brought her up just the few
inches necessary to making the passage without inflicting injury to
herself or to the canal.
The _Hercules_ had traversed about a mile of the canal before the
_Viceroy_ was locked out to follow in her wake, and something like that
interval was preserved throughout most of the passage. The _Verdun_
kept about a quarter of a mile astern of the _Viceroy_, with the
_Regensburg_--but so far back as to be out of sight--bringing up the
rear. Two squat patrol launches--one on either quarter, a couple of
hundred yards astern--followed the _Hercules_ all the way, but for just
what purpose we could not make out.
For the first few miles the country on either side of the canal was
of the same low-lying nature as that through which all of our railway
journeys from Wilhelmshaven had been made. Ditched and dyked marshland
alternated with stretches of bog and broad sheets of stagnant water
where the drainage system had proved unequal to carrying off the
overflow in the inundations following the winter rains. Cultivation was
at a standstill here, probably until the water-logged soil dried out in
the spring. Like the East Frisian peninsula, the region was essentially
a grazing rather than an agricultural one, and the farmers were paying
the penalty of having broken up grassland that was only dry enough for
cultivation during a few months of the year. Cattle were scarce, sheep
scarcer, and such of the inhabitants as were visible around the dismal
farmsteads had the dull, purposeless air of people with nothing to do
and plenty of time to do it in.
[Illustration: SEMAPHORE STATION ON KIEL CANAL, FROM "HERCULES"]
As we fared inland only the gradually heightening banks told that the
country was increasing in elevation. Ponds and bogs were still frequent,
and it was not until the first low hills were reached that there
appeared to be enough drainage for the land to shake itself free of
water. Here the country took on a more cheerful aspect, due principally
to the fact that the people, many of whom were working, seemed less
"bogged down"--mentally and physically--than their countrymen in the
water-logged areas near the sea. Most of them were capable of
recognizing us as Allied warships (something which few of the others
appeared to have done), and when this had sunk home they usually hurried
down to the bank of the canal for a closer view. Most of these isolated
farming people were undemonstrative, and it was not until the more
sophisticated inhabitants of the villages and towns were encountered
that women and children were seen to wave their hands and men to doff
their hats and bow. Most of the population, both agricultural and
industrial, is found toward the Kiel rather than the Brunsbüttel end of
the canal.