Part 12

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.

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.

At one point we came upon two men and a girl feverishly engaged in skinning a horse, which appeared to have dropped dead in the furrow. Or rather, they had already skinned it and were busy cutting up the carcass. Watching through my glass from the bridge of the _Viceroy_, I saw all three of them rush helter-skelter over a hill and out of sight as the _Hercules_ came abreast of them, only to hurry back and resume their grisly work when she had disappeared around a bend just ahead. When they again took to their heels on sighting the _Viceroy_, I asked the pilot what they were afraid of. The law required, he replied, that the authorities should be notified of the death of any head of live stock in order that the meat (in case it was deemed fit for human consumption) should be distributed through the regular rationing channels. These people, he thought, were in the act of stealing their own dead horse, and doubtless their guilty consciences made them fear they would be reported and delivered up to justice.

Since witnessing this incident I have found myself rather less inclined to dwell in retrospect on that huge, juicy "beefsteak" I had devoured with such gusto when it was the _pièce de résistance_ on the menu of our luncheon at the Nordholz Zeppelin station a couple of days previously.

Through the low country the construction of the canal had evidently been only a matter of dredging, but the multiplication in size and number of the "dumps" as the elevation increased showed that there had been places where digging on an extensive scale had been necessary, especially in connection with the widening and deepening operations. The fact that most of the "dumps" appeared to consist of earth of a very loose and sandy nature, some of them so much so that they had been planted thickly with young trees to prevent their being shifted by the winds, showed that the excavation problem had been a comparatively simple one, more of the nature of that at Suez than Panama, where so much of the way had to be blasted through solid rock.

The looseness of the earth had made it necessary to cut the banks at as low an angle as forty-five degrees in places to prevent caving, and at these points the under-water part of the channel was faced with roughly cut stone to minimize erosion. As this work was only carried a few feet above the surface of the water, it required but slight speed on the part of a large ship to produce a wave high enough to splash over on to the unprotected earth and bring it down in slides. This had doubtless happened very often in the course of the frequent shuttling to and fro of the High Sea Fleet, for the stonework was heavily undermined in many places, with few signs to indicate that much had been done in the way of repairs.

Except in the locks (and even there the concrete was cracking badly in places, particularly at the Kiel end), the canal shows many evidences of the haste of its construction and the serious deterioration it has suffered from heavy use and poor maintenance. It will require much money and labour to put it in proper condition, and neither of these is likely to be over plentiful in Germany for some years to come.

Our first glimpse of Allied prisoners in their "natural habitat" occurred at a point about twenty miles inland from Brunsbüttel, where a new and very lofty railway viaduct was being thrown across the canal. The extensive groups of huts along the bank in the shadow of the half-completed final span of steel looked, from the distance, like ordinary workmen's quarters. As we drew nearer, however, broad belts of barbed wire surrounding those on the right side suggested that they were used as a prison camp even before our glasses had revealed the motley clad group on the bank waving to the _Hercules_. As the _Viceroy_ came abreast the excited and constantly augmenting crowd, we saw that the uniforms were mostly French and Russian, though there were three or four men in the grey of Italy and at least one with the unmistakable cap of the Serbs. A hulking chap in khaki, whom I was making the object of an especially close scrutiny on the chance that he might be British or American, put an end to doubt by slapping his chest resoundingly and announcing proudly, "_Je suis Belge!_" From the fact that they were all in good spirits, we took it that they were getting enough to eat and that prospects for repatriation were favourable.

We had quite given up hope of sighting any British when suddenly, from behind a barbed-wire barrier fencing off the last groups of huts, rang out a cry of "'Ow's ol'Blighty?" Sweeping my glass round to the quarter from whence the query came, I focussed on a phiz which, despite its mask of lather, I should have recognized as Cockney just as surely in Korea or Katmandu as on the banks of the Kiel Canal. Waving his brush jauntily in response to the salvo of delighted howls boomed out by the bluejackets lining the starboard rail, he turned back to the little pocket mirror on the side of the hut and resumed his interrupted shave.

"Can you beat that, I ask you?" gasped an American Flying officer who had just clambered up to the bridge. "Here it is the first time that 'Tommy' has seen his country's flag in anywhere from one to four years; and yet, even when he must know he could get a lift home for the asking, all he does is to--go on scraping his face! I say, can you beat it?"

The captain did not reply, but his indulgent grin indicated a sympathetic understanding of "British repressiveness."

But if this particular "Tommy" had been somewhat casual in his greeting, there was nothing to complain of on that score in the reception given us by the next British prisoners we encountered, a few miles further along. The incident--one of the most dramatic of the visit--occurred just after the _Hercules_ had passed under the great railway viaduct which crosses the canal almost midway between Brunsbüttel and Kiel. Wherever practicable, I might explain, all railways have been carried across the canal at a height sufficient to allow even the lofty topmasts of the German warships to pass under by a comfortable margin. Not one of the several viaducts runs much under two hundred feet above the canal, and to attain this height at an easy grade long approaches have been necessary. Some of these--partly steel trestle, partly embankment--stretched beyond eyescope to left and right; but at the viaduct in question the ascent was made by means of two great spiral loops at either end.

A segment of the loop on the left ran close beside the canal in the form of a steep embankment, and as the _Hercules_ glided under the viaduct I saw (we had closed up to within a few hundred yards of her at the time) a long train of passenger cars, drawn by two puffing engines, just beginning the heavy climb. Suddenly I caught the flash of what I took to be a red flag being wildly waved from one of the car windows, and I was just starting to tell the captain that we were about to pass a trainload of revolutionaries when the gust of a mighty cheer swept along the waters to us and set the radio aerials ringing above my head.

"You can't tell me that's a 'Bolshie' yell," observed the American officer decisively. "Nothing but Yanks or Tommies could cough up a roar like that, believe me."

Then I saw that all the canal-ward sides of the dozen or more coaches were wriggling with khaki arms and shoulders (for all the world as though a great two-hundred-yard-long centipede had been pinned up there and left to squirm), and that what I had taken for the red flag of anarchy was only the mass effect of a number of fluttering bandannas. Again and again they cheered the _Hercules_ and the White Ensign, with a fresh salvo for the _Viceroy_, which they sighted just before the curve of the loop the train was ascending cut off their view of the canal. That was all we ever heard or saw of them. We were never even sure whether they were British or American. We felt certain, however, that the fact that most of them were still in khaki indicated that their stay in the "Land of Kultur" had not been a long one, and, moreover, that they were already on the first leg of their journey home.

Prisoners working on the land--mostly Russian--were more and more in evidence as we neared the Kiel end of the canal. The majority of them still wore their army uniforms, but otherwise there was little to differentiate them--a short distance away at least--from the native peasant labour. None of them appeared to be under guard, and in many places they were working side by side with German farm hands of both sexes. At a number of points I saw Russians lounging indolently in groups consisting mostly of Germans (several of which included women) that had gathered along the banks of the canal to watch us pass, and two or three times I observed unmistakable Russian prisoners (or perhaps ex-prisoners) walking arm-in-arm and apparently in animated conversation with German girls. They seem quite to have taken root in the country. Indeed, the pilot of the _Viceroy_ for the first half of the passage through the canal--he was a Schleswig man, strongly Danish in appearance and probably in sympathies--assured me that the Germans had had the greatest difficulty in getting Russian prisoners to leave the country at all, and that there had been frequent "desertions" from trains and boats whenever it had been attempted. This may well have been true, though--with labour in Germany as much in demand as it was throughout the war--I doubt very much if a great deal in the way of repatriation of Russians had ever been attempted.

With the towns and villages increasing in size and number as we came to the fertile rolling country toward the Baltic end of the canal, evidences multiplied that the population expected our coming and that, directly or indirectly, they had been instructed to adopt a "conciliatory" bearing. In the farming region toward the North Sea end their bearing had been more suggestive of indifference than anything else; but in the crowds that came down to line the railed "promenades" along the banks an ingratiating attitude was at once apparent. Some of these people, of course, were of Danish extraction and probably sincere, especially a number who waved their hands from well inside their doorways, as though to avoid being observed by their neighbours; but for the most part it was the same nauseating exhibition we had already seen repeated so often at railway stations all over the North Sea littoral.

The only individual we saw in the whole passage who thoroughly convinced me of his sincerity was a bloated ruffian who hailed us from the stern of the barge he had edged into a ferry slip to give us room to pass. "Go back to England, you English swine!" he roared to the accompaniment of a lewd gesture. We learned later that he gave both the _Hercules_ and _Verdun_ the same peremptory orders. Yes, he was quite sincere, that old bargee, and for that reason I have always thought more kindly of him than of all the rest of his grimacing brethren and sistern we saw along the canal that day. A spectacled student (though it is quite possible he was trying to put the same sentiment in politer language) was rather less convincing. "English gentlemen," he cried, drawing his loose-jointed frame up to its full height and glaring at the bridge of the _Viceroy_ from under his peaked cap, "why do you come here?" That may have been intended for a protest, or, again, he may merely have been "swanking" his linguistic accomplishments.

The bluejackets were splendid. There were places--notably at several industrial establishments where crowds of rather "on-coming" girls in trousers exerted their blonde witcheries to the full in endeavours to "start something"--when the least sign of friendliness from the ship would have undoubtedly been met with loud acclaim. But not a British hand did I see lifted in response to the hundreds waved from the banks, while many a simpering grin died out as the moon-face behind it passed under the steady stare of the imperturbable _matelots_ lining the rails of the steadily steaming warships.

The length of the Kiel Canal is just under a hundred kilometres (about sixty miles), so that--at the speed of ten kilometres an hour to which we were limited--the passage required about ten hours, exclusive of the time spent in locking in and out. As it was an hour after dawn when we began the passage at Brunsbüttel, the short winter day was not long enough to make it possible to reach the other end in daylight. By five o'clock darkness had begun to settle over the waters, and the grey mists, piling ever thicker in the narrow notch between the hills, deepened through violet to purple before taking on the black opacity of the curtain of the night. Then the lights came on--parallel rows of incandescents narrowing to mist-softened wedges of blurred brightness ahead and astern--and we continued cleaving our easy effortless way through the ebony water.

The blank squares of lighted villa windows heralded the approach to Kiel; then factories, black, still, and stagnant, with the tracery of overhead cranes and the bulk of tall chimneys showing dimly through the mists; then the locks. As the difference between the canal level and the almost tideless Baltic is only a matter of inches, locking-out was even a more expeditious operation than locking in from the Elbe at the other end. There was just time to note that the "_Kaiser Wilhelm_" mosaic, there as at Brunsbüttel, had been scrubbed up bright and clean, when the gates ahead folded inward and the way into the Baltic was open. Half an hour later, after steaming slowly across a harbour past many moored warships, we were tying up alongside the _Hercules_, where she had come to anchor a mile off Kiel dockyard.

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