THE U-BOAT BLOCKADE
Nothing in the history of the past four years has more clearly brought
out the difference between the civilised and the savage view of war,
than the record of the German U-boat campaign. All civilised men
are agreed, and have for centuries been agreed, about war. In their
view war may be unavoidable, in so far as all order and security are
ultimately dependent on force; but it is a lamentable necessity, and
when unnecessary--that is, when undertaken for any object whatever
except defence against aggression or tyranny--it is an abominable
thing, a violation of human nature. This view is not inconsistent
with the plain truth that the act of fighting is often pleasurable
in itself, and that, when fighting in a right spirit, men often
reach heights of nobility which they would never attain in peaceful
occupations.
The savage is in accord with this view on one point only. He has the
primitive joy of battle in him; but he cares nothing for right or
wrong, and his military power is exerted either wantonly, or with the
object of plunder and domination. So long as he gratifies his selfish
instincts, he does not care what happens to the rest of the human
race, or to human nature. Civilised men have for centuries laid down
rules of war, that human industry and human society might suffer only
such damage as could not be avoided in the exercise of armed force;
and above all, that human nature might not be corrupted by acts done
or suffered in brutal violation of it. These rules of chivalry were
not always kept, but by civilised nations they have never been broken
without shame and repentance. Savage races sometimes have a rudimentary
tradition of the kind--the less savage they. But, in general, they have
a brute courage and a brute ferocity, without mercy or law; and the
worst of all are those who, living in community with races of merciful
and law-abiding ideals, have themselves never been touched by the
spirit of chivalry, and have ended by making the repudiation of it into
a national religion of their own.
It has long been a recognised characteristic of the British stock, all
over the world, to regard a stout opponent with generous admiration,
even with a feeling of fellowship; and to deal kindly with him when
defeated. But this chivalry of feeling and conduct, now so widespread
among us, is a spiritual inheritance and derived, not from our Teutonic
ancestors, but from our conquest by French civilisation. It has never
been shared by the Germans, or shown in any of their wars. Froissart
remarked, five and a half centuries ago, on the difference between
the French and English knights, who played their limited game of war
with honour and courtesy, and the Germans, who had neither of those
qualities. A century later, it is recorded of Bayard--‘Le chevalier
sans peur et sans reproche’--that whenever he was serving in an army
with a German contingent, he was careful to stay in billets till
they had marched out, because of their habit of burning, when they
left, the houses where they had found hospitality. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries their barbarity was unbounded; the Thirty
Years’ War was the lasting shame of Europe, and the Sack of Magdeburg
a final example of the triumph of the wild swine in man. In the
eighteenth century, Prussia produced a grotesque anticipation of Zulu
ideals, and called its chief Frederick the Great. In the Napoleonic
wars, the cruelty of his German allies disgusted the Iron Duke, who
had commanded many ruffians and seen some appalling days of horror.
In our own time, we have witnessed the brutal attacks on Denmark and
Austria, the treachery of the Ems telegram, and the development of
Bismarck’s blood-and-iron policy into the complete Machiavellism of
Wilhelm II and his confederates. It is not a new character, the German;
it is an old one, long inherited. _Nemo repente fit Tirpissimas._
If anyone doubts this, or wishes to doubt it, let him look through
the criminal statistics of the German Government for the ten years
preceding the War, and read the book of Professor Aschaffenburg, the
chief criminologist of Germany, published in 1913. He will there find
it stated and proved, that the most violent and abominable forms of
crime were then prevalent in Germany, to a degree beyond all our
experience--beyond all imagination of what was possible in a human
community--and that the honest and patriotic writer himself regarded
this ever-rising tide of savagery, among the younger generation, as ‘a
serious menace to the moral stability of Europe.’ It is against this
younger generation, with these old vices, that we have had to defend
ourselves; and now that we have beaten them, now that the time has come
when, if they had been clean fighters and fellow-men, every British
hand would have been ready for their grip, we can but hold back with
grave and temperate anger, and the recollection that we have first to
safeguard the new world from those who have desolated and defiled the
old.
Anger it must still be, however grave and temperate. Look at the
conduct of the War, and especially at the conduct of the submarine war,
as coolly and scientifically as you can, you will not find it possible
to separate the purely military from the moral aspect. Technically, the
Germans were making trial of a new weapon which it was difficult to
use effectively under the old rules. They quickly determined, not to
improve or adapt the weapon, but to abandon the rules. For this they
were rightly condemned by the only powerful neutral opinion remaining
in the world. But they not only broke the law, they broke it in German
fashion. Their lawlessness, if skilfully carried out with the natural
desire to avoid unnecessary suffering, might have been reduced to an
almost technical breach, involving little or no loss of life. But
they chose instead to exhibit to the world, present and to come, the
spectacle of a whole Service practising murder under deliberate orders;
and adding strokes of personal cruelty hitherto known only among
madmen or merciless barbarians. Finally--and this concerns our future
intercourse even more nearly--the German people at home, a nation
haughtily claiming pre-eminence in all virtue, moral and intellectual,
accepted every order of their ruling caste, and applauded every act of
their hordes in the battle, however abhorrent to sane human feeling. In
all this, we need make no accusations of our own; we have only to set
out the facts, and the words with which the German people and their
teachers received them and rejoiced in them.
It was towards the end of 1914 that the German Admiralty conceived the
idea of blockading the British Isles by means of a submarine fleet.
There were, as we have already seen, great difficulties in the way.
For the pursuit and capture of commerce, a submarine is not nearly so
well fitted as an ordinary cruiser; is not, in fact, well fitted at
all. To hold up and examine a ship on the surface is too dangerous a
venture for a frail boat with a very small crew; to put a prize crew on
board, and send the captured vessel into port, is generally impossible.
As an exception, and in case of extreme necessity, it has always been
recognised that a prize may be sunk, if the crew and passengers are
safely provided for; but this proviso, too, is almost impossible for a
submarine to fulfil. Besides these technical difficulties, there was
also the danger of offending neutral powers, especially if their ships
were to be sunk without evidence that they were carrying contraband.
Under the advice of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, it was decided to defy
all these risks and difficulties. The question was asked by him, just
before Christmas 1914, ‘What would America say, if Germany should
declare a submarine war against all enemy trading vessels?’ and on
February 4, 1915, a formal proclamation followed from Berlin. This
announced that the waters round Great Britain and Ireland were held to
be a war-region, and that from February 18 ‘every enemy merchant-vessel
found in this region will be destroyed, without its always being
possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening.’
No civilised Power had ever before threatened to murder non-combatants
in this fashion; but there was even worse to come--the seamen of
nations not at war at all were to take their chance of death with
the rest. ‘Neutral ships will also incur danger in the war-region,
where, in view of the misuse of neutral flags ordered by the British
Government, and incidents inevitable in sea warfare, attacks intended
for hostile ships may affect neutral ships also.’ No ‘misuse of neutral
flags’ has ever been ordered by our Government. The destruction of a
merchant-vessel or liner without warning or search, is not an incident
‘inevitable in sea warfare’; it is an incident always avoided in any
sea warfare except that waged by barbarians.
A fortnight later the sinkings began; and on March 9 three ships
were torpedoed, without warning, in one day. In the case of one of
these, the _Tangistan_, 37 men were killed or drowned out of the 38 on
board. On March 15 the stewardess and five men of the _Fingal_ were
drowned. And on the 27th the crew of the _Aguila_ were fired upon while
launching their boats; three were killed and several more wounded. On
the 28th, the Elder-Dempster liner, the _Falaba_, from Liverpool to
South Africa, was stopped and torpedoed in cold blood. As the crew and
passengers sank, the Germans looked on from the deck of the U-boat,
laughing and jeering at their struggling victims, of whom 111 perished.
‘The sinking of the _Falaba_,’ said the _New York Times_, ‘is perhaps
the most shocking crime of the War.’
It did not long remain unsurpassed. In April, the German Embassy at
Washington publicly advertised that vessels flying the flag of Great
Britain or her allies were liable to destruction, and that travellers
sailing in them would do so at their own risk. Intending travellers
smiled at this outrageous threat and went on booking their passages to
Europe. Even when those about to sail in the huge liner _Lusitania_
received anonymous telegrams, warning them that the ship would be sunk,
no one believed that the Government of a great Power could seriously
intend such a crime. Not a single berth was countermanded, and, on May
1, the _Lusitania_ sailed from New York, carrying, besides her crew of
651, no less than 1,255 passengers.
On the morning of Friday, May 7, she made her landfall on the Irish
coast. The sea was dangerously calm; but Captain Turner, wishing ‘to
reach the bar at Liverpool at a time when he could proceed up the
river without stopping to pick up a pilot,’ reduced speed to 18 knots,
holding on the ordinary course. At 2 P.M. the _Lusitania_ passed the
Old Head of Kinsale; at 2.15 she was torpedoed without warning, and
without a submarine having been sighted by anyone on board. Her main
steam-pipe was cut, and her engines could not be stopped; she listed
heavily to starboard, and while she was under way it was very difficult
to launch the boats. At 2.36 she went down, and of the 1,906 souls on
board, 1,134 went down with her, only 772 being saved in the boats
which got clear.
This was, for the German Government and the German Navy, an
unparalleled disgrace. The German nation had still the chance of
repudiating such a crime. But they knew no reason for repudiating it;
it was congenial to their long-established character, and differed only
in concentrated villainy from the countless murders and brutalities
which had troubled the criminologists before the War. The German
people adopted the crime as their own act, and celebrated it with
universal joy. ‘The news,’ said the well-known _Kölnische Zeitung_,
‘will be received by the German people with unanimous satisfaction,
since it proves to England and the whole world, that Germany is
quite in earnest in regard to her submarine warfare.’ The _Kölnische
Volkszeitung_, a prominent Roman Catholic and patriotic paper, was
even more delighted. ‘With joyful pride we contemplate this latest
deed of our Navy, and it will not be the last.’ The two words ‘joyful’
and ‘pride’ are here the mark of true savagery. Only savages could
be joyful over the horrible death of a thousand women, children, and
non-combatants; only savages could feel pride in the act, for it was in
no way a difficult or dangerous feat. But this half-witted wickedness
is clearly recognised in Germany as the national ideal. In the midst
of the general exultation, when medals were being struck, holidays
given to school children, and subscriptions got up for the ‘heroic’
crew of the U-boat, Pastor Baumgarten preached on the ‘Sermon on the
Mount,’ and gave his estimate of the German character in these words:
‘Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve, from the bottom of his
heart, the sinking of the _Lusitania_--whoever cannot conquer his sense
of the gigantic cruelty to countless perfectly innocent victims, and
give himself up to honest delight at this victorious exploit of German
defensive power--him we judge to be no true German.’
‘It will not be the last.’ The threat was soon made good. On August
9, of the same year, the White Star liner _Arabic_, one day out from
Liverpool, was 60 miles from the Irish coast when she sighted the ss.
_Dunsley_ in a sinking condition. She naturally steered towards her;
but as she approached, a submarine suddenly appeared from behind the
_Dunsley_ and torpedoed the _Arabic_ without a moment’s warning. Boats
were got out, but the ship sank in eight minutes and 30 lives were lost
out of 424.
In both these cases the Germans, feeling that their joy and pride were
not exciting the sympathy of neutral nations, afterwards tried to
justify themselves by asserting that our liners carried munitions of
war. This was obviously impossible in the case of the _Arabic_, which
was bound from England to America. With regard to the _Lusitania_, an
inquiry was held by Judge Julius Meyer of the Federal District Court
of New York, who found that the _Lusitania_ did not carry explosives,
and added: ‘The evidence presented has disposed, without question and
for all time, of any false claims brought forward to justify this
inexpressibly cowardly attack on an unarmed passenger steamer.’
The year closed with the torpedoing, again without warning, on December
30, of the P. and O. liner _Persia_, from London to Bombay. She sank in
five minutes, and out of a total of 501 on board, 335 were lost with
her. Four of her boats were picked up after having been thirty hours at
sea.
The year 1916 was a not less proud one for Germany; but it was
distinctly less joyful. The American people took a fundamentally
different view of war, especially of war at sea, and they began to
express the difference forcibly. The German Government, after months
of argument, was driven to make a show of withdrawing from the most
extreme position. They admitted, on February 9, 1916, that their method
was wrong where it involved danger to neutrals, and they offered to
pay a money compensation for their American victims. They also repeated
the pledge they had already given, and broken, that unarmed merchantmen
should not be sunk without warning, and unless the safety of the
passengers and crew could be assured; provided that the vessels did not
try to escape or resist. This again is a purely savage line of thought;
no civilised man could seriously claim that he was justified in killing
unarmed non-combatants or neutrals by the mere fact of their running
away from him. As for the ‘safety of passengers and crew,’ we shall see
presently how that was ‘assured.’
But it matters little how the pledge was worded; it was never intended
to be kept. Only six weeks after it was given, it was cruelly
broken once more. On March 24, 1916, the French passenger steamer
_Sussex_, carrying 270 women and children, and 110 other passengers,
from Folkestone to Dieppe, was torpedoed without warning as she was
approaching the French coast. Many were killed or severely injured by
the explosion, others were drowned in getting out the boats. There were
twenty-five Americans on board, and their indignation was intense; for
the ship was unarmed, and carried no munitions or war stores of any
kind. Nor, as President Wilson pointed out, did she follow the route of
the transports or munition ships. She was simply a well-known passenger
steamer, and eighty of her company on board were murdered in cold blood
by pirates.
The President went on to say that the German Government ‘has failed
to appreciate the seriousness of the situation which has arisen, not
only out of the attack on the _Sussex_ but out of the whole method
and character of submarine warfare as they appear in consequence
of the practice of indiscriminate destruction of merchantmen, by
commanders of German submarines. The United States Government,’ he
continued, ‘has adopted a very patient attitude, and at every stage
of this painful experience of tragedy upon tragedy, has striven to be
guided by well-considered regard for the extraordinary circumstances
of an unexampled war.... To its pain, it has become clear to it that
the standpoint which it adopted from the beginning is inevitably
right--namely, that the employment of submarines for the destruction
of enemy trade is of necessity completely irreconcilable with the
principles of humanity, with the long existing, undisputed rights of
neutrals, and with the sacred privileges of non-combatants.’
This note touches the real point, and settles it; until the submarine
is as powerfully armed and armoured, and manned with as large a crew
as a cruiser of the ordinary kind, it is not a ship which can be used
for the general purposes of blockade by any civilised nation. And it
may be added that, even if the Germans had possessed submarines of a
suitable kind, they could not have brought their prizes into port,
because our Fleet and not theirs had the control of the seas. As it
was, they pretended once more to submit, and gave nominal orders
that merchant-vessels ‘shall not be sunk without warning and without
saving human lives, unless these vessels attempt to escape or offer
resistance.’
It was not intended that this third promise should be kept; there were
other ways of evading the issue. The _Rappahannock_, a ship which
sailed with a crew of 37, from Halifax, on October 17, 1916, was never
heard of again, except in the wireless message by which the German
Admiralty reported her destruction. The plan of sinking without a
trace was first officially recommended by Count Luxburg, the German
diplomatic agent in the Argentine; but the German Professor Flamm, of
Charlottenburg, has also the honour of having proposed it in the paper
_Die Woche_. ‘The best would be if destroyed neutral ships disappeared
without leaving a trace, and with everything on board, because terror
would very quickly keep seamen and travellers away from the danger
zones, and thus save a number of lives.’ No doubt the _Rappahannock_
was ‘spurlos versenkt’; so was the _North Wales_, and so were many
others meant to be. The German method, in 1916, was to torpedo the
ship, and then shell the survivors in their open boats. This was done
in the cases of the _Kildare_ and the _Westminster_, both sunk in the
Mediterranean; but on neither occasion were the pirates successful in
killing the whole of the crew, and their crime was therefore known and
doubly execrated by the whole civilised world. None the less, they
continued the hideous practice, and in the following eight months fired
upon the helpless survivors of at least twelve ships, enumerated with
authentic details in a list published by the _Times_ on August 20, 1917.
On the whole, the year 1916 was a difficult one for the German people.
The objections of America to the practice of piracy were becoming
uncomfortably urgent; promises had to be made under compulsion, and the
‘joyful pride’ of the nation would have been much diminished if it had
not been reinforced by two successes of a new kind. On March 17, 1916,
the Russian hospital ship _Portugal_ was torpedoed off the Turkish
coast in the Black Sea. She carried no wounded, but had on board a
large crew and a staff of Red Cross nurses and orderlies. It was a
clear morning, the ship was flying the Red Cross flag, and had a Red
Cross conspicuously painted on every funnel; but she was deliberately
destroyed, with 85 of those on board, including 21 nurses and 24 other
members of the Red Cross staff. On November 21, a British hospital
ship, the _Britannic_, was sunk in the same way. She was a huge vessel,
and had on board 1,125 people, of whom 25 were doctors, 76 nurses, and
399 medical staff. The outrage was said by the Germans to be justified
by ‘the suspicion of the misuse of the hospital ship for purposes of
transport.’ This suspicion was wholly unfounded, and the submarine
commander had taken no steps to enquire into the truth.
In 1917 and 1918, the ‘proudest’ and most ‘joyful’ period in the short
history of the German Navy, there was no longer any need for the
humiliation of excuses. On January 31, 1917, Germany proclaimed her
intention of sinking at sight every ship found in the waters around
the British Isles and the coast of France, or in the Mediterranean
Sea. It was at the same time announced--quite falsely--that the German
Government had conclusive proof of the misuse of hospital ships for
the transport of munitions and troops, and that therefore the traffic
of hospital ships within certain areas ‘would no longer be tolerated.’
President Wilson dealt promptly with this infamous proclamation. On
February 3, he told Congress that he had severed diplomatic relations
between America and Germany; on April 6, he formally declared war.
The savages were now entirely free to take their own way, and they
took it. On the night of March 20, 1917, the hospital ship _Asturias_,
steaming with all navigating lights, and with all the proper Red
Cross signs brilliantly illuminated, was torpedoed and sunk without
warning. Of the medical staff on board, 14 were lost, including one
nurse, and of the ship’s company 29, including one stewardess. On March
30, the _Gloucester Castle_ was torpedoed without warning, but her
wounded were all got off in safety. On April 17, the _Donegal_ and the
_Lanfranc_ were both sunk while bringing wounded to British ports. In
the _Donegal_, 29 wounded were lost, and 12 of the crew. The _Lanfranc_
carried, besides 234 British wounded and a medical staff of 52, a batch
of wounded German prisoners to the number of 167, including officers.
‘The moment the torpedo struck the _Lanfranc_,’ wrote a British officer
on board, ‘the Prussians made a mad rush for the life-boats. One of
their officers came up to a boat close to which I was standing. I
shouted to him to go back, whereupon he stood and scowled, “You must
save _us_.” I told him to wait his turn. Other Prussians showed their
cowardice by dropping on their knees and imploring pity. Some cried
“Kamarad,” as they do on the battle-field. I allowed none of them to
pass me.... In these moments, while wounded Tommies lay in their cots
unaided, the Prussian moral dropped to zero. Our cowardly prisoners
made another crazy effort to get into a life-boat. They managed to
crowd into one--it toppled over. The Prussians were thrown into the
water, and they fought with each other in order to reach another
boat containing a number of gravely wounded British soldiers.... The
behaviour of our own lads I shall never forget!’--but there is no
need to tell that part of the story; it is old, centuries old, and is
repeated unfailingly whenever a British ship goes down.
In July 1917, a new type of ‘heroic deed’ was added to the ‘proud and
joyful’ list. At 8 P.M., on July 31, the _Belgian Prince_ was torpedoed
without warning; the crew escaped in three boats. The submarine then
ordered the boats to come alongside, took the master on board and sent
him below. ‘Then,’ says Mr. Thomas Bowman, chief engineer, ‘all the
crew and officers were ordered aboard, searched, and the life-belts
taken off most of the crew and thrown overboard. I may add, during this
time the Germans were very abusive towards the crew. After this the
German sailors got into the two life-boats, threw the oars, bailers,
and gratings overboard, took out the provisions and compasses, and then
damaged the life-boats with an axe. The small boat was left intact,
and five German sailors got into her and went towards the (sinking)
ship. When they boarded her, they signalled to the submarine with a
flash-lamp, and then the submarine cast the damaged life-boats adrift
and steamed away from the ship for about two miles, after which he
stopped. About 9 P.M. the submarine dived, and threw everybody in the
water without any means of saving themselves.’
Mr. Bowman swam till daylight, and was picked up by a chance
patrol-boat. The only other survivors were a man named Silessi, and an
American named Snell, who had succeeded in hiding a life-belt under his
overcoat.
The intention here was, of course, that the _Belgian Prince_ should be
‘spurlos versenkt’; and in other cases the same result was aimed at by
ramming and sinking the boats with the shipwrecked men in them. The
crews of the French steamers _Lyndiane_ and _Zumaya_ were destroyed
in this way in the summer of 1918; and on June 27 the case of the
_Llandovery Castle_ marked, perhaps, the highest pitch of German
‘pride.’ This hospital ship was torpedoed and sunk without warning,
though she was showing all her distinguishing lights. After she had
gone down, the pirate commander took his U-boat on a smashing-up cruise
among the survivors; and by hurling it hither and thither, he succeeded
in ramming and sinking all the boats and rafts except one, which
escaped. The survivors in this boat heard the sound of gunfire behind
them for some time; it can only be conjectured that the murderers were
finishing their work with shrapnel. The number of those cruelly done to
death in this massacre was 244.
The deeds here enumerated form a small but characteristic part of the
German submarine record. The total number of women, children, and
non-combatants, murdered in the course of the U-boat blockade, is
more than seventeen thousand. It has been a failure as a blockade;
nine million tons of British, and six million of allied and neutral
shipping have been sunk; but the U-boats have never, for a day, held
the control of the sea. The policy was a device of savages, and of a
nation of savages. There is no escape from this charge; for the policy
was approved and deliberately adopted, by the representatives of the
whole German people, with the exception only of the few despised and
detested Minority Socialists. In October 1918, Herr Haase testified in
the Reichstag: ‘Most of the Parties are now trying to get away from
the accentuated submarine war ... in reality all the Parties, except
the Socialist Minority, share the guilt. The first resolution in
favour of submarine war was drafted by all the leaders, including Herr
Scheidemann and Herr Ebert. The accentuation of submarine warfare was
a natural consequence. You Socialists are also guilty because, to the
very last, you gave the old _regime_ the credits for carrying on the
War.’
The Germans do not yet realise the crime they confess; they have
corrupted one of the oldest and noblest bonds in human life--the
brotherhood of ‘them that go down to the sea in ships, and have their
business in great waters.’ And this they have done because they are, by
nature, not seamen but savages.