Part 13

The fog lifted during the night, and for an hour or two the following morning there were even signs that our long-lost friend, the sun, was struggling to show his face through the sinister shoals of cumulo-nimbus banked frowningly across the south-eastern heavens. It was evident dirty weather was brewing, but for the moment Kiel and its harbour were revealed in all their loveliness. Completely land-locked from the open Baltic, the beautiful little fiord disclosed a different prospect in whichever direction one turned his eyes. The famous _Kaiserliche_ Yacht Club was close at hand over the port quarter of the _Hercules_, with a villa-bordered strand opening away to the right. The airy filagree of lofty cranes revealed the location of what had been Europe's greatest naval dockyard, while masses of red roofs disclosed the heart of Kiel itself. Heavily wooded hills, still green, rippled along the skyline on the opposite side of the fiord, with snug little bays running back into them at frequent intervals as they billowed away toward the Baltic entrance. Singularly attractive even in winter, it must have been a veritable yachtsman's paradise in summer. Recalling the marshes and bogs of the Jade, I marvelled at the restraint of the German naval officer whom I had heard say that he and his wife "much _preferred_ Kiel to Wilhelmshaven."

The warships in the harbour proved far less impressive by daylight than at night. Looming up through the mists in the darkness, they had suggested the presence of a formidable fleet. Now they appeared as obsolete hulks, from several of which even the guns had been removed. There was not a modern capital ship left in Kiel; in fact, the only warship of any class which could fairly lay claim to that designation was the _Regensburg_, which had managed to push her broken nose through the canal and was now lying inshore of us, apparently alongside some sort of quay or dock. The most interesting naval craft (if such a term could be applied to it) in sight was a floating submarine dock, anchored a cable's length on the port beam of the _Hercules_, but even that--as was proved on inspection--was far from being the latest thing of its kind.

The British ships were the object of a good deal of interest, especially during the first few hours of the day while the fog held off. Various and sundry small craft put off with parties to size us up at close range, amongst these--significant commentary on the fact that at every one of the conferences, including the one held that very day, the Germans had advanced "petrol shortage" as the reason why cars could not be provided to reach this or that station--being a number of motor launches. As all of these seemed to be in the hands of white-banded sailors or dockyard "mateys," the inference might have been drawn that the petrol used was not under the control of the naval authorities; but so many of the other "reasons," advanced to discourage, if not to obstruct, inspections which the Germans, for one reason or another, did not want to have made turned out to be fictitious, that one was tempted to believe that "the absolute lack of petrol" was on all fours with them.

Most of these excursion parties kept at a respectful distance, but there was one launch-load of men and girls from the docks, which persisted in circling close to the ships, and even in coming up under the stern of the _Hercules_, and offering to exchange cap ribbons. The two-word reply of one of the bluejackets to these overtures would hardly do to print, but its effect was crushing. Nothing but poor steering prevented that launch from taking the shortest course back to the dockyard landing.

The German Naval Armistice Commission which came off to the _Hercules_ at Kiel to discuss arrangements for inspection in the Baltic differed from that at Wilhelmshaven only in a few of the subordinate members. Rear-Admiral Goette continued to preside, with the tall, blonde Von Müller, of the first _Emden_, and the shifty, pasty-faced Hinzmann, of the General Staff at Berlin, as his chief advisers. Commander Lohmann still presided over the German sub-commission for shipping, but there was a new officer in charge of "air" arrangements. This latter individual, who proved to be one of the most "Hunnish" Huns we encountered anywhere, I shall have something to say of in the next chapter.

That the German Commission had been "stiffened" under the influence of new forces in Kiel was evident from the opening of the conference; in fact, a good part of this opening Baltic sitting was devoted to reducing them to the same state of "sweet reasonableness" in which they had risen from the closing sitting at Wilhelmshaven. One of the most astonishing of their contentions arose in connection with three unsurrendered U-boats, which had been discovered in the course of warship inspection at Wilhelmshaven. Asked when these might be expected ready to proceed to Harwich, Admiral Goette replied that his Government did not consider themselves under obligation to deliver the boats at all. The justification advanced for this remarkable stand constituted one of the most delightful instances of characteristic Hun reasoning that developed in the course of the visit. This was the gist of it: "We agreed to deliver all U-boats in condition to proceed to sea in the first fourteen days of the armistice," contended the Germans; "but--although we don't deny that they _should_ have been delivered in that period--the fact that they _were not_ so delivered releases us from our obligation to deliver them now. As evidence of our good faith, however, we propose that the vessels in question be disarmed and remain in German ports."

The Germans had so thoroughly convinced themselves that this fantastic interpretation would be accepted by the Allied Commission that Admiral Goette did not consider himself able to concede Admiral Browning's demand (that the three submarines should be surrendered at once) without referring the matter back to Berlin. Definite settlement, indeed, was not arrived at until the final conference nearly a week later, and in that time news had been brought of several score U-boats completed, or nearing completion, in the yards of the Elbe and the Weser.

There was no phase of the Allied Commission's activities which some endeavour was not made to obstruct or circumscribe in the course of this opening session at Kiel. The German sub-commission for shipping reported that their Government did not feel called upon to grant the claim of the Allies for the return of vessels seized as prizes; the inability to arrange for special trains and the lack of petrol would make it impossible to reach certain air stations by land, while, so far as the experiment station at Warnemünde was concerned, the armistice did not give the Allies the right to visit it at all; as for the Great Belt forts, they were already disarmed, and really not worth the trouble of inspecting anyway.

And so it went through some hours, the upshot of it being that the Germans, as at Wilhelmshaven, "vowing they would ne'er consent, consented." Merchant ship inspection began that afternoon, continuing throughout the remainder of the stay at Kiel as one steamer after another came in from this or that Baltic port and dropped anchor. The following day search of the numerous old warships was started, and the day after that word came that the way had even been cleared for the inspection of the great experimental seaplane station at Warnemünde. For the first time there was promise that the work of the Commission would be completed within the period of the original armistice.

IX

TO WARNEMÜNDE AND RÜGEN

There had been a half-mile or more of visibility when we got under weigh at eight o'clock, but in the mouth of Kiel Fiord a solid wall of fog was encountered, behind the impenetrable pall of which all objects more than a few yards ahead were completely cut off. The mist-muffled wails of horns and whistles coughed eerily in the depths of the blank smother to port and starboard, and once the beating of a bucket or saucepan heralded the spectre of a "bluff lee-boarded fishing lugger" as the bare steerage way imparted by its flapping yellow mainsail carried it clear of the _Viceroy's_ sharp stem.

Three or four more units of that same fatalistic fishing fleet had been missed by equally narrow margins when, looming high above us as they sharpened out of the fog, appeared the bulging bows of what looked to be a large merchantman. At the same instant, too late by many seconds to be of any use as a warning, the snort of a deep-toned whistle ripped out in response to the querulous shriek of our own syren.

When two ships, steaming on opposite courses at something like ten knots, meet in a fog the usual result is a collision, and nothing but the quick-wittedness of the captain of the _Viceroy_ prevented one on this occasion. The stranger, in starboarding his helm, bared a long expanse of rusty paunch for the nose of the destroyer to bury itself in, as a sword-fish stabs a whale, and that is what must inevitably have happened--with disastrous consequences to both vessels in all probability--had the _Viceroy_ also attempted to avoid collision by turning to port. Realizing this with a sure judgment, the captain fell back on an alternative which would hardly have been open to him with a destroyer less powerfully built and engined than the latest "V's." I have already told how, in the lock at Brunsbüttel, he had stopped his ship dead, just short of the gates, by going astern with the engines at the proper moment. Here, in scarcely more time than it takes to tell it, he not only stopped her dead but had her backing (at constantly accelerating speed) away from the slowly turning merchantman. The jar (followed by a prolonged throbbing) was almost as sharp as when the air-brakes are set on the wheels of a speeding express, and the outraged wake of her, like the back of a cat whose fur has been rubbed the wrong way, arched in a tumbling fountain high above her quivering stern. But back she went, and so gave the burly freighter room to blunder by in.

There was just time to note her high bulwarks, two or three suspicious-looking superstructures (which one's passing acquaintance with "Q" boats suggested as possibly masking guns), and a folded seaplane housed on the poop, before the menacing apparition thinned and melted into the fog as suddenly as it had appeared.

"I think that ship is the _Wolf_," volunteered the pilot, watching with side-cast eyes the effects of the announcement. "You will perhaps remember it as the great raider of the Indian Ocean."

The captain looked up quickly from the chart as though about to say something; then thought better of it, and, with a wistful smile, turned back to his study of the channel. I had seen him smile resignedly like that a few days previously off the Elbe estuary when a speeding widgeon, whose line of flight had promised to carry it right over the forecastle, had sheered off without giving him a shot. What he had said on that occasion was, "Hang the blighter; another chance missed!"

Going aft to breakfast, I was hailed by Korvettenkapitän M---- (the officer commanding all Baltic air stations who was accompanying us to Warnemünde and Rügen), warming himself at the engine-room hatchway, and informed that the ship just sighted was "the famous raider, _Moewe_, that has been so many times through the English blockade." It was he that was correct, as it turned out. We found the _Moewe_ anchored three or four cables' lengths on the port bow of the _Hercules_ when we returned to Kiel the following evening.

They were two thoroughly typical specimens of their kind, the pilot and the flight commander, so much so that either would have been pounced on with delight by a cartoonist looking for a model for a figure of "Hun Brutality." The former claimed to have served most of the war in U-boats, and from the fact that he was only a "one-striper," one reckoned that he was a promoted rating of some kind. He was tall, dark, and powerful of build, with hard black eyes glowering from under bushy brows. He talked of his submarine exploits with the greatest gusto, among these being (according to his claim) the launching of the torpedo which damaged the _Sussex_. It is possible that he was quite as useful a U-boat officer as he said he was (for he looked fully capable of doing a number of the things one had heard of U-boat officers doing); but he turned out, as the sequel proved, only an indifferent pilot.

The flight officer is easiest described by saying that he was like what one would imagine Hindenburg to have been at thirty-five or thereabouts. The resemblance to the great Field-Marshal was physical only, for the anti-type, far from having the "bluff, blunt fighter" air of the former, was a subtle intriguer of the highest order. Just how "subtle" he was may be judged from the fact that within ten minutes of coming aboard that morning he had drawn one of the British officers aside to warn him of the menace to England in Wilson's "fourteen points," and that, a quarter of an hour after the snub this kindly advice won him, he had cornered one of the American officers to bid him beware of the inevitable attack his country must very soon expect from England and Japan.

A half-hour more "by luck and lead" took us out of the fog, and an almost normal visibility made it possible for the _Viceroy_ to increase to her "economic" cruising speed of seventeen knots. The red roofs of the summer hotels along Warnemünde's waterfront began pushing above the horizon a little after noon, and by one we were heading in to where the mouth of a broad canal opened up behind a long stone breakwater. A large ferry steamer, flying the Danish flag, was just rounding the end of the breakwater and turning off to the north-west, and from the word "ARMISTICE" painted on her sides in huge white letters we took it she was engaged in repatriating Allied prisoners by way of Copenhagen. As we closed her, this impression was confirmed by the sight of two men in the unmistakable uniforms of British officers pacing the after-deck arm-in-arm. Surprised that they appeared to be taking no notice of the _Viceroy_, with the White Ensign at her stern doing its best to flap them a message of encouragement, I raised my glass and scanned them closely. Then the dark glasses both were wearing, and their slow uncertain steps, at once suggested the sad explanation of their indifference. There was no doubt the sight of both was seriously affected, and that they were probably hardly able more than to feel their way around. As nothing less than "Rule Britannia" or "God Save the King" on the syren would have given them any hint of how things stood, we had to pass on unrecognized.

Running a quarter of a mile up the canal, the _Viceroy_ went alongside the wall a hundred yards above the railway station. The news of our arrival had spread quickly in the town, and among a considerable crowd which assembled along the waterfront were a number of British prisoners, most of them in their khaki. Several German sailors--one or two of them with white bands on their arms--to whom the Tommies had been talking, kept discreetly in the background, but the latter, grinning with delight and exchanging good-natured chaff with the bluejackets, caught our mooring lines and helped make them fast. They looked in extremely good condition and spirits, the consequence--as we learned presently--of having had a considerable accumulation of prisoners' stores turned over to them since the armistice. Beer, they said, was the only thing they were short of, and this difficulty they seemed in a fair way to remedy when I left with the "air" party for the seaplane station.

The great Warnemünde experiment station occupied the grounds of what appeared to have been some kind of a pre-war industrial or agricultural exposition. Crossing the canal in a launch, a few steps took us to and through a somewhat pretentious entrance arch, from where it was several hundred yards to the first of a long row of wood and steel hangars. The Commander of the station had received us at the landing; the rest of the officers met us in the roadway in front of the first shed to be inspected. Evidences of the resentment they undoubtedly felt over having to give way in the matter of the visit (it had been the German contention that Warnemünde, not being a service station, was not liable to inspection under the terms of the armistice) were not lacking, but as these were mostly confined to scowling glances they did not interfere seriously with the work in hand.

As the Allied Commission, in the conference of a couple of days previously at Kiel, had insisted on the visit to Warnemünde on the grounds of satisfying itself that what the Germans claimed was an experiment station was not used for service work, inspection was limited to the comparatively perfunctory checking over of the machines against a list furnished in advance, seeing that they displayed no evidences of having been used for anything more than experimental flights, and ascertaining that they had been properly disarmed. This, as soon as it became evident that the station was in fact quite what the Germans had claimed it to be, was done very rapidly, the inspection of well over a hundred machines, housed in eight or ten different sheds, being completed within three hours.

The machines were, of course, an extremely interesting assortment, for practically all of them were either new designs or else old ones in process of development. There was the last word in steel pontoons, with which the Germans have been so successful, and also a number of the very striking all-metal _Junker_ machines, in the construction of which wood, and even fabric, has been replaced by the light but tough alloy called "duraluminum." One of the German officers volunteered the information that the principal advantage of the latter over the ordinary machine was the fact that more of it could be salved after a crash. The fact that there was nothing to burn sometimes rendered it possible to save an injured pilot entangled in the wreckage, where the wood and fabric of an ordinary machine would have made him a funeral pyre. Against these advantages, he added, stood the handicap of greater weight and the fact that the metal wings occasionally deflected into the pilot or petrol tank a bullet which would have passed harmlessly through wood and fabric.

There were several of the late _Travemunde_ and _Sablatnig_ types, medium-sized machines which, with their powerful engines and trim lines, looked extremely useful. A large double-engined Gotha torpedo-launching seaplane was viewed with a good deal of interest by the experts of the party, because it was a type to the development of which it had been expected that the Germans had given a great deal of attention. Down to the very day of the armistice the Grand Fleet--whether at Rosyth or Scapa--was never considered entirely free from the menace of an attack by a flotilla of torpedo-carrying seaplanes, and it was a matter of considerable surprise to the sub-commission for naval air stations when it transpired in the course of their visits to the German North Sea and Baltic bases to find a practically negligible strength in these types. The almost prohibitive odds against getting a seaplane carrier within striking distance of either of the Grand Fleet bases--handicap imposed by the complete surface command of the North Sea by the British--was undoubtedly responsible for Germany's failure to develop a type of machine which there was little chance of finding an occasion to use. Even this one at Warnemünde--representing as it did the latest development of its type--was far from being equal to machines with which the British were practising torpedo-launching a year before the end of the war.

The most imposing exhibit at Warnemünde was a "giant" seaplane rivalling in size the great monoplane flying boat we had seen at Norderney. The two were so different in type that it was difficult to compare them, though it is probable that in engine power--both of them had four engines of from 250 to 300 horse-power each--and in wing area they were about equal. The Warnemünde machine--which was a biplane, with two pontoons instead of a "boat"--had a somewhat greater spread of wing, but this must have been compensated for by the vastly greater breadth of those of the monoplane. Superior seaworthiness had been claimed for the latter on account of the greater height of its wings from the water when afloat; but that was _ex parte_ evidence, and we had no chance to hear what Warnemünde had to say in favour of _its_ pet.

An incident which occurred in connection with the inspection of the "giant" furnished a very graphic idea of the really colossal size of it. In order to get over it the more quickly, all of the several members of the Allied party climbed up and took a hand in the work. Whether the German officers thought some of the gear might be carried off by the visitors, whether they were afraid the secrets of some of their technical instruments might be discovered, or whether they were simply "doing the honours of the occasion," we were never quite sure. At any rate, up swarmed at least a dozen of them, scrambling like a crowd at a ticket turnstile to get inside. In a jiffy they had disappeared, swallowed completely by the capacious fuselage. Not even a head was in sight. Only the clatter of many tongues and the clang of boots tramping on steel plates told that close to a score of men were jostling each other in the cavernous maw of the mighty "amphibian."

Only the Commander of the station--a somewhat porcine-looking individual, whose rotund figure furnished ample explanation why _he_ had not joined the scramble--and myself were left on _terra firma_. Plainly disturbed by the thought that Germany's supreme achievement in aerial science was passing under the eye of the enemy, he paced up and down moodily for a minute or two and then, with clearing brow, came over and asked me what was the horse-power of the largest "Inglisch Zeeblane."

"I really can't tell you," I replied, half angry, half amused at the supreme cheek of the man.

"Ach, but vy will you not tell me?" he urged wheedlingly. "Der war iss over; ve vill now have no more zeecrets. Today you see all ve haf. Preddy soon ve come und see all you haf. There iss much ve can learn from you, und much you can learn from us. Ve vill haf no more zeecrets."

There were several things that I wanted to say to that Hun optimist, and it required no little restraint to pass them over and confine myself to suggesting that he should take up the matter of the exchange of "zeecrets" with Commander C----, the Senior Officer of-the party. He looked at the latter (who was just descending) irresolutely once or twice, and then, doubtless seeing nothing encouraging in the set of Commander C---- 's lean Yankee jaw, shrugged his fat shoulders and resumed his moody pacings. We encountered a number of eager "searchers for knowledge" in the course of the visit, but no other that I heard of who employed quite such a "Prussian mass tactics" style of attack as this one.