Neither Sir Edward Grey and Ambassador Gerard, nor others interested
in securing a fair trial for the accused, imagined that his trial and
execution would be the hurried work of an afternoon, and there was
consternation when a Reuter despatch of July 28th gave the first news
of the shooting and made public the German _communiqué_ as follows:
“The accused was condemned to death because although he was not a
member of a combatant force, he made an attempt on the afternoon
of March 20, 1915, to ram the German submarine _U-33_ near the
Maas Lighthouse. The accused as well as the first officer and the
chief engineer of the steamer received at the time from the British
Admiralty a gold watch as a reward of his brave conduct on that
occasion, and his action was mentioned with praise in the House of
Commons.
“On the occasion in question, disregarding the U-boat’s signal to stop
and show his national flag, he turned at a critical moment at high
speed on the submarine, which escaped the steamer by a few meters only
by immediately diving. He confessed that in so doing he had acted in
accordance with instructions from the Admiralty.
“One of the many nefarious _franc-tireur_ proceedings of the British
Merchant Marine against our war vessels has thus found a belated but
merited expiation.”
This report aroused intense indignation in England, and hardly less
resentful feelings in neutral countries, especially in the United
States, whose Ambassador in Berlin was the intermediary of the English
protest against the basis of the court-martial. At once the British
Foreign Office addressed a note to Ambassador Page in London in which
was the statement:
“His Majesty’s Government finds it difficult to believe that a master
of a merchant ship who, after German submarines adopted the practice
of sinking merchant vessels without warning and without regard to the
lives of passengers or crew, took the only means at his disposal of
saving not only the vessel but the lives of all on board can have been
deliberately shot in cold blood for that action”; and the request was
made that urgent inquiry be made by the United States Embassy at Berlin.
The inquiry made it only too clear that the report was authoritative.
Premier Asquith, in the House of Commons, July 31st, said: “I deeply
regret that it appears to be true that Captain Fryatt has been
murdered by the Germans.” That he was not speaking extravagantly in
using the word “murdered” is evidenced by the fact that naval and
military experts, including those of Holland, strongly suspected of
more than a casual sympathy with the Germans, concurred in denouncing
the execution as a “judicial murder,” and insisting that Fryatt was
entitled to be regarded as a prisoner of war. In the subsequent
review of the case it was demonstrated conclusively by many citations
from German legal and military naval sources in declarations and
regulations made in 1914 and earlier that “Capt. Fryatt was well
within his rights in attempting to ram a hostile marine.” Had he sent
the submarine with her crew to the bottom by shell fire in avoiding
capture or destruction, he would have been held as a prisoner of war
if subsequently captured, but because he used the only weapon at
his command to escape the enemy vessel itself, “he was condemned to
execution by a court of German naval officers as a _franc-tireur_.”
August 15th, in the House of Commons, Premier Asquith declared: “This
country will not tolerate a resumption of diplomatic relations with
Germany after the war until reparation is made for the murder of Capt.
Fryatt.”