To Kiel in the 'Hercules' Part 1

To Kiel in the 'Hercules'

by Lewis R. Freeman.

I

INTO GERMAN WATERS

"The _Regensburg_ has been calling us for some time," said the chief signal officer as he came down for his belated "watch" luncheon in the ward-room, "and it looks as though we might expect to see her come nosing up out of the mist any time after two o'clock. She excuses herself for being late at the rendezvous by saying that the fog has been so thick in the Bight that she had to anchor during the night. It's not any too good a prospect for a look-see at Heligoland, for our course hardly takes us within three miles of it at the nearest."

It was in a fog that the _Hercules_ had dropped down through the moored lines of the Grand Fleet the previous morning, it was in a fog that she had felt her way out of the Firth of Forth and by devious mine-swept channels to the North Sea, and it was still in a fog that she--the first surface wars.h.i.+p of the Allies to penetrate deeply into them since the Battle of the Bight, not long after the outbreak of the war--was approaching German waters. Indeed, the whole last act of the great naval drama--from the coming of the _Konigsberg_ to the Forth, with a delegation to receive the terms of surrender, to the incomparable pageant of the surrender itself--had been played out behind the fitful and uncertain raisings and lowerings of a fog-curtain; and now the epilogue--wherein there was promise that much, if not all, that had remained a mystery throughout the unfolding of the war drama itself should be finally revealed--was being held up through the wilfulness of this same perverse scene-s.h.i.+fter. The light cruiser, _Regensburg_, which, "according to plan," was to have met us at nine that morning at a rendezvous suggested by the German Naval Staff, and pilot the _Hercules_ through the mine-fields, had not been sighted by early afternoon.

Numerous floating mines, rolling lazily in the bow-wave spreading to port and starboard and ogling us with leering, moon-faced impudence in the fog, had been sighted since daybreak, auguring darkly of the explosive barrier through which we were pa.s.sing by the "safe course" the Germans (in lieu of the promised charts which had failed to arrive) had advised us by wireless to follow.

Now mines, floating or submerged, are not pleasant things to navigate among. Although, theoretically, it is impossible for any s.h.i.+p to run into a floating mine even if she tries (the bow-wave tending to throw it off, as many experiments have proved); and although, theoretically, a s.h.i.+p fitted with paravanes cannot bring her hull into contact with a moored mine; yet the fact remained that s.h.i.+ps were being lost right along from both kinds. It seemed high time, then, in the case of the _Hercules_ and her escorting destroyers, that the German Navy, which had undertaken to see them safely through the mine barrier, and which knew more about the pattern of its death-traps than any one else, should begin to shoulder some of its responsibilities. It was good news that the _Regensburg_ was about to make a tardy appearance and hand over a hostage in the form of a German pilot.

The blank grey fog-curtain which trailed its misty folds across the ward-room scuttles discouraged all of the grate-side loungers whom I tried to bestir to go up at two o'clock to watch for the appearance of the _Regensburg_, and, meeting, with no better success in the snugly comfortable "commission-room" into which the former gun-room had been converted for the voyage, I mounted alone the iron ladders which led to the lofty vantage of the signal bridge. There was only a few hundred yards of visibility, but the even throb of the engines, the swift run of the foam along the sides, and the sharp sting of the air on my cheek told that there had been little if any abatement of the steady speed of seventeen knots at which _Hercules_ had been steaming since she pa.s.sed May Island the previous day at noon. The _Regensburg_, the chief yeoman of signals told me, had made a W.T. to say that she had been compelled by the fog to slow down again, and this, he figured, might make it between three and four o'clock before we picked her up. "There's no use waiting for the Huns, sir," he said, with a tired smile. "The hanging back habit, which they were four years in cultivating, seems to have grown on them so that they're hanging back even yet. Best go down and wait where it's warm, and I'll send a boy to call you when we know for certain when she'll turn up."

My foot was on the ladder, when the sight of a seagull dancing a giddy _pas seul_ on the t.i.tillating horn of a mine bobbing off astern recalled a story an Italian destroyer skipper had once told me, of how he had seen an Albanian sea eagle blow itself up as a consequence of executing a precisely similar manoeuvre. I lingered to get the chief yeoman's opinion of what I had hitherto considered a highly apocryphal yarn, and when he was called away to take down a signal to pa.s.s back to the destroyers, the loom of what looked to me like a s.h.i.+p taking shape in the fog drew me over to the starboard rail. It dissolved and disappeared as my gla.s.s focussed on it, only to raise its amorphous blur again a point or so further abeam. Then I recognized it, and smiled indulgent welcome to an old friend of many watches--the first cousin to the mirage, the looming shape which a man peering hard into thick fog keeps _thinking_ he sees at one end or the other of the arc of his angle of vision.

Any man actually on watch knows better than to let his mind take liberties with "fog pictures," and not a few of those who have done so have had the last picture of the series merge into a reality of wind and water and a good s.h.i.+p banging itself to pieces on a line of submerged rocks. But I--as so often in voyages of late--was on the bridge without duties or responsibilities. I was free to let the pictures take what form they would; and it must have been what the chief yeoman had just said about the weariness of waiting for the Huns that turned my mind to what I had heard and seen of the four-year vigil of the Grand Fleet.

There was a picture of Scapa as I had seen it on my earliest visit from the basket of a kite balloon towed from the old _Campania_, the same _Campania_ which now rested on the bottom of the Firth of Forth, and the top-masts of which we had pa.s.sed a half cable's length to port as the _Hercules_ steamed out the day before. There were golden sun-notes weaving in a Maypole dance with rollicking slate-black cloud shadows in that picture; but in the next--where the surface of the Flow was beaten to the whiteness of the snow-clad hills hemming it in--the brooding light was darkly sinister and ominous of import, for that was the winter day when we had word that two destroyers, which the might of the Grand Fleet was powerless to save, were being banged to bits against a cliff a few miles outside the gates. Then there was a picture of an Orkney midsummer midnight--just such a night, the officer of the watch told me, as the one on which he had seen the _Hamps.h.i.+re_, with Kitchener pacing the quarter-deck alone, pa.s.s out to her doom two years previously--with a fitful green light flooding the Flow, reflected from the sun circling just below the northern horizon, and every kite balloon in the air at the time being torn from its cable and sent flying towards Scandinavia before the ninety-mile gale which had sprung up from nowhere without warning.

Visions of golf on Flotta, picnics under the cliffs of Hoy, and climbs up the peat-boggy sides of the Ward Hill of the "Mainland," gave place to those of squadron boxing compet.i.tions--savage but cleanly fought bouts in a squared circle under the elevated guns of "Q" turret, with the funnels, superstructures, and improvised grandstands alive with bluejackets--and regattas, pulled off in various and sundry craft between the long lines of anch.o.r.ed battles.h.i.+ps. A long series (these more like panoramas) of hurried unmoorings and departures--by division, by squadron, and with all the Grand Fleet, through every square mile of the North Sea from the Bight to far up the coast of Norway--finished up at Rosyth, in that strange fortnight just before the end, when all but those on the "inside" thought the persistent "short notice" was due to a desire to keep the men aboard on account of the 'flu, and not to the fact of which the Admiralty appear to have been so well advised, that the German naval authorities--for the first and last time--were making desperate efforts to get their s.h.i.+ps out for the long-deferred _Tag_.

Then the fog-bank ahead--or so it seemed--was splashed with the gay colour of "Armistice Night," when all the spare signal lights (to say nothing of a lot that couldn't be spared) of the Grand Fleet streaked the sky with joyous spurts and fountains of fire, when stealthy pirate bands from the K-boats dropped through the ward-room skylights of the light cruisers and carried off prisoners who had to be ransomed with champagne, when Admirals danced with matelots on the forecastles of the battle-cruisers, and all the pent-up feelings of four years ascended in one great expansive "whouf" of gladness. I recalled with a chuckle how the "General" signal which the Commander-in-Chief had made ordering the historic occasion to be celebrated by "splicing the main brace"

according to immemorial custom in the Navy, was preceded by "Negative 6th B.S.," in consideration of the sad fact that the Yankee s.h.i.+ps had nothing aboard to "splice" with. That didn't prevent them, though, from bending a white ensign on their flag halliards, hoisting it to the main topmast of the _New York_, and illuminating it with all the searchlights of the squadron. That happy tribute, I recalled, to the flag of the Navy with which the Americans had served with such distinction for a year, had started the sacking of the signal light lockers, and that picture ended as it began, with the dour Scotch heavens lanced with coloured flame spurts which the dark tide of the Firth gave back in crinkly reflections.

The next picture to sharpen into focus on the fog-curtain was that of a long, trim three-funnelled cruiser, with a white flag at her fore and the German naval ensign at her main, heading in toward the mouth of the Firth of Forth under the escort of a squadron of British light cruisers and destroyers. I had witnessed the meeting of the _Konigsberg_, which was bringing over Admiral Meurer and other German naval officers to arrange the details of the surrender of the High Sea Fleet, from the foretop of the _Ca.s.sandra_. The rendezvous, at which the _Konigsberg_ had been directed by wireless to meet the Sixth Light Cruiser Squadron ordered to escort her in, chanced to fall in an area under which a German submarine, a fortnight previously, had planted its full load of mines. These, in the regular course of patrol, had been discovered and swept up within a day or two, but since that fact had not been communicated to the Germans, the _Konigsberg_, doubtless thinking the English sense of humour had prompted them to prepare for her a bit of a surprise in the way of a lift by a German petard, skulked off to the southward, where she was only rounded up after two hours of rending the ether with wireless calls. There were two things I remembered especially in connection with that historic meeting--one was the mob of civilians (probably would-be delegates from the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council) jostling the officers on the roomy bridge of the _Konigsberg_, and the other was the fluent cursing of the gunnery lieutenant of the _Ca.s.sandra_, who was with me in the foretop, over the unkind fate which had robbed him of the chance of opening up with his six-inch guns on the first Hun wars.h.i.+p he had set eyes on since the war began. I thought I had heard in the course of the past year all that the British sailor had to say of the German as a naval foe; but L---- said several new things that afternoon, and said them well.

Poor old _Ca.s.sandra_! Although we did not get word of it until a day or two after our arrival in Wilhelmshaven, within a very few hours of the time I was thinking of her there in the fog of the Bight, she had collided with a mine in the Baltic and gone to the bottom.

There was another picture of the _Konigsberg_ ready to follow on as the first dissolved. This was the brilliantly lighted hull of her--the only undarkened s.h.i.+p of the hundreds in the Firth of Forth that night--as I saw it an hour before daybreak the following morning, when I set off from the _Ca.s.sandra_ in a motor launch to be present in the _Queen Elizabeth_ during the historic conference which was to take place there that day. Admiral Beatty had refused to receive the revolutionary delegates at the preliminary conference which had been held in the British flags.h.i.+p the previous night, and as a consequence it appears that Admiral Meurer and his staff were summoned to make a report to their "superiors" on their return. This strange meeting had been convened shortly after midnight (so the captain of the M.L., which had been patrolling round the _Konigsberg_ all night, told me), but still, five hours later, as "M.L. 262" slid quietly by at quarter speed, the rumble of guttural Teutonic voices raised in heated argument welled out of the open scuttles of what had probably been the ward-room. It occurred to me even then that this rumble of angry dispute was prophetic of what Germany had ahead in the long night that was closing upon her.

Although "M.L. 262" ended up an hour later with her propellers tangled in the cable of Ox-Guard boom, I managed to get on the flags.h.i.+p in time to see Admiral Meurer and his party come climbing up out of the fog to her quarter-deck. The conference lasted, with short intervals, until long after dark, and the next picture I saw was that of five German naval officers, chagrined and crestfallen, being piped over the side to the barge which was to take them to the destroyer standing by in the fog to return with them to the _Konigsberg_ at her anchorage, Inchkeith.

It was "Officers' Night" for the kinema in the "Q.E.," and they were showing a "made-in-California" film called the "Rise and Fall of Julius Caesar." I remember distinctly that Casca had just driven the first thrust, and the mob of conspirators were thronging upon Caesar round the "base of Pompey's statue," when the commander sent me word that the guests were about to depart.

The captain of the fleet, the captain, the commander, the officer of the watch and the boatswain were waiting at the head of the starboard gangway as I stepped on deck, and out of the fog, which had thickened till I could not see the muzzles of the guns of "Y" turret, the Germans were advancing from aft. The frown on Admiral Meurer's heavy brows was magnified by the cross light of the "yard-arm group" at the gangway, and his mouth, with its thin hard lips, showed as a straight black line.

With a click of the heels and the characteristic automaton bow of the German, he saluted the British officers in turn, beginning with the captain of the fleet, stepped down the short gangway and disappeared into the waiting barge to the shrilling of the pipes. Bowing and clicking, the others followed suit, a weedy "sub," with an enormous roll of papers under his arm, going over last.

The _Oak_, herself invisible in the fog, groped blindly with her searchlight to pick up the barge. "We must hold the light steady,"

facetiously quoted the Press correspondent at my elbow from a speech of President Wilson's which had appeared in the morning papers, and then added thoughtfully, "It may be a _light_ that kind need for guidance, but if I had the leading of them for the next generation it would be by a ring in the nose."

Now, panorama resumed. It was the day of the surrender, and the _Cardiff_, with her high-flown kite balloon in tow, was leading the line of German battle-cruisers out of the eastern mist. I was watching from the bridge of the _Erin_, and an officer beside me, recognizing the _Seydlitz_, flying the rear-admiral's flag, in the lead, with the _Moltke_ and _Derfflinger_ next in line, told how, from the light cruiser in which he had chased them at Dogger Bank, he had seen at least two of the three, leaving the _Blucher_ to her fate, das.h.i.+ng for the shelter of their minefields with flames swirling about their mastheads. Another spoke casually of how, in the _Tiger_ at Jutland, he had been for a wild minute or two, while his s.h.i.+p was rounding a "windy corner" as Beatty turned north to meet the British Battle Fleet, under the concentrated fire of all the battle-cruisers--with the exception of the _Hindenburg_, but with the _Lutzow_ added--now steaming past us. We remarked the "flattery of imitation" in the resemblance of the _Hindenburg_ with her long run of forecastle and "flare" bows, to the _Repulse_ and _Renown_, and of the symmetrical, two-funnelled _Bayern_ as she appeared between the _Kaisers_ and the _Konigs_ in the German battles.h.i.+p line to the British _Queen Elizabeth_ cla.s.s laid down before the war. The _Queen Elizabeth_ herself, falling out of line to take the salute of the s.h.i.+ps of the fleet she had led to victory as they pa.s.sed, brought that reel of panorama to an end.

The next was of five s.h.i.+ps of the _Kaiser_ cla.s.s, as they had appeared from the _Emperor of India_, which, with the rest of the Second Division, was escorting a squadron of the enemy to Scapa for internment.

We saw the German s.h.i.+ps at closer range now, and the better we saw them the worse they looked. Their fine solidity was less impressive than from a distance, for now our gla.s.ses revealed the filth of the decks, the lack of paint, and the slovenly, sullen att.i.tude of the motley garbed figures lounging along the rails. We pa.s.sed within a biscuit toss of the _Kaiserin_ when their leading s.h.i.+p, the _Friedrich der Grosse_, lost her bearings in some way and failed to follow the _Canada_ through the anti-submarine boom off the end of Flotta, an action which only the smartest kind of seamans.h.i.+p on the part of the division of _Iron Dukes_ prevented from developing into a serious disaster. Most of the Huns--to judge by the expression on the faces leering across at us--would have welcomed a smash; but it was avoided by a hair, and they ultimately straightened themselves out, straggled through into the Flow, and on to their more or less final resting-place, off the inner entrance to Gutter Sound.

The final picture, as it chanced, which my fancy projected on the curtain of the fog was one that embraced what I saw from the steam pinnace which was taking me to the _Imperieuse_, on my way back to Rosyth. An angry Orkney sunset was flaring over the hills of Hoy--a sullenly red glow, gridironed by thin strata of black cloud like the bars of a grate--and a sinister squall was advancing from the direction of Stromness to the northward. For a few moments the hot light of the sunset had silhouetted the confused hulls of battles.h.i.+ps and battle-cruisers against the silvered seas beyond, and revealed the disordered phalanx of the moored destroyers blocking the mouth of Gutter Sound; then it was quenched by the onrush of the storm clouds, and all that was left of the High Seas Fleet disappeared into shadow and driving rain.

It was a far cry, I reflected, from the Kaiser's "Our future lies upon the seas!" and Admiral Rodman's "The German s.h.i.+ps are of no use to anybody; the simplest solution of the problem of their disposition is to take the whole lot to sea and sink them." And yet--

Suddenly, stereoscopically clear, on the blank sheet of the fog left as the High Sea Fleet faded from sight, the head-on silhouette of an unmistakably German light cruiser appeared. For an instant the soaring mast and the broad bridge suggested that my fancy had materialized the _Konigsberg_ again. Then the rat-a-tat of a signal searchlight recalled me to my senses, and it did not need the chief yeoman of signals' "There she is, sir; sending away a boat to bring us a pilot," to tell me we had finally rendezvoused with the _Regensburg_. I descended to the quarter-deck to see the pilot come over the side.

Very smartly handled was that cutter from the _Regensburg_. I remember that especially because it was almost the only German boat that came alongside during all the visit which did not either ram the gangway, or else miss it more than the length of a boat-hook. They explained this by saying that most of the skilled men had left the navy, and that their boats, as a consequence, were in the hands of comparative novices. At any rate, at least one first-cla.s.s crew of boat-pullers had remained in the _Regensburg_, and they brought their cutter alongside the gangway as neatly as though the _Hercules_ were lying in harbour.

Three men, each carrying a small suit-case, came over the side and saluted the officer of the day and the intelligence officer of the admiral's staff, who awaited them at the head of the gangway.

The first was a three-stripe officer of the rank the Germans call Korvettenkapitan, the second a warrant officer, and the third (as we presently were informed) a qualified merchant pilot. The Korvettenkapitan was slender of figure, and had a well-bred, gentlemanly appearance not in the least suggestive of the "Hunnishness" one a.s.sociated--and with good reason, too, as subsequent experience proved--with the German naval officer. His flushed expression showed plainly that he felt deeply the humiliation of the task a.s.signed him of taking the first enemy wars.h.i.+ps into a German harbour. His head remained bowed a moment after his final salute; then he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and asked to be conducted to the bridge at once in order to take advantage of the improved visibility in pus.h.i.+ng on in through the minefields.

If one felt a touch of involuntary sympathy for the senior naval officer, a glance at the sinister figure of the merchant pilot was an efficacious antidote. Thick-set and muscular of build, with slack-hanging ape-like arms and bandy legs, his corded bull neck was crowned with the prognathous-jawed head of a gorilla, and a countenance that might well have been a composite of the saturnine phizzes of Trotsky and Liebknecht. One knew in an instant that here was the super-Bolshevik, and looked for the red band on his sleeve, which could only have been temporarily removed while he appeared among the Englanders to spy upon the naval officer whom the revolutionists would not permit to act alone. The way things stood between the two became evident almost at once, for the officer informed the British interpreter at the first opportunity that he could not be responsible for the pilot, while the latter, when some query from the Korvettenkapitan respecting the position of a certain buoy was repeated to him, contented himself with drawing his fingers significantly across his throat, clucking in apparent imitation of a severed wind-pipe, and continuing the guzzling of the plate of "kedgeree" which had been engaging his undivided attention at the moment of interruption.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HELIGOLAND IN SIGHT!]

After putting a German pilot aboard each of the four destroyers, the _Regensburg's_ cutter was hoisted in, and we got under weigh again. The visibility had improved considerably, and presently a darker blur on the misty skyline resolved itself into the familiar profile of Heligoland.

At first only the loom of the great cliff was discernible, but by the time this had been brought abeam a slender strip of low-lying ground with warehouses, cranes, and the masts of s.h.i.+ps, was distinctly visible.

All hands crowded to the starboard side to have a glimpse of Germany's famous island outpost, but the nearest thing to a demonstration I saw was by two marines, who were doing a bit of a shuffle on the precarious footing of a turret top and singing l.u.s.tily:

"Oh, won't it be grand out in Hel-i-go-land, When we've wound up the Watch on the Rhine!"

Whatever illusions they had formed of the "grandness" of Heligoland they were allowed to keep, for the only ones who were given to see at close range the dismal greyness of the island fortress were the members of one of the "air" parties, who made a hurried visit in a destroyer to see that the provisions of the Armistice had been carried out at the seaplane station.

The thickening fog-banks which shut off our view of Heligoland were not long in thinning the guiding _Regensburg_ to a dusky phantom nosing uncertainly into the misty smother in the direction of where our charts indicated the Bight should be narrowing to the shallow waters of Jade Bay, in an inner corner of which lay Wilhelmshaven. We had counted on getting there that evening, and a wireless had already been received saying that a German Naval Commission was standing by to come off for a preliminary conference. After heading in for a couple of hours through seas which I heard an officer coming off watch describe as "composed of about equal parts of water, misplaced buoys and floating mines,"

all hopes of arriving that night were dashed by a signal from the _Regensburg_, saying that she had been compelled to anchor on account of the fog. Calling her destroyer "chicks" about her to mother them for the night, the _Hercules_ let go what was probably the first anchor a British surface s.h.i.+p had dropped into German mud since the outbreak of the war.

The unexpected delay made it necessary for both the _Hercules_ and the destroyer to put up their pilots for the night. This was managed in the former by giving the officer the flag captain's sea-cabin, and slinging hammocks for his two a.s.sistants outside. Doubtless the opportunity to enjoy a change of food was not unwelcome to any of them. They were served with the regular ward-room dinner. The officer declined the offer of drinks, and said he had his own cigarettes. The other two made a clean sweep of anything that they could get hold of. Even these had cigarettes, but the young signalman who had the temerity to smoke one which was proffered him in exchange for one of his own, advanced that as an excuse for a mess he made of taking down a searchlight signal from a destroyer two hours later.

"That ---- Bolshevik," said the lad the next day, in telling me about the tragedy, "declared the f.a.g he giv' me was made of baccy smuggled into Germany by a friend of his. I tells him that was no kind of reason for him using me to smuggle the smoke out of Germany. And I tells him it tastes to me like rope end, that baccy, and, what's more, that I'd be very happy to return it to him with a rope end. I can't say for certain whether he twigged that little joke or not."

From one of the destroyers, too, there came the next day a story of similar friction in the matter of dispensing hospitality to the guest of the night. The latter, unlike the one who was sent to the _Hercules_, appears to have been a typical Hun. Beginning by introducing himself as a relative of the ex-Kaiser, he ended up by all but going on strike because no sheets could be provided for the bunk in the cabin which--through turning out its owner to "sling" in the ward-room--had been given him for the night. That alone had been a considerable concession under the circ.u.mstances, for, through the presence of two extra flying officers, two "subs" had given up their cabins, and were sleeping in the ward-room already. It must have been a really amusing show that young sprig of Junkerism put up. He mentioned the matter of linen several times, finally rising to the crescendo of "I must have the sheets by nine o'clock, and it now lacks but five minutes of that time."

I was never able to verify the story that the steward really gave him the sheets of notepaper that one of the Yankee officers volunteered to contribute. How mad the young exquisite was about the whole affair may be judged from the fact that he left behind him in the morning his own personal and private cake--only slightly used--of toilet soap. Whether this was pure sw.a.n.k--high princely disdain of an object of value--or whether he was blind with pa.s.sion and overlooked it, they could never quite make up their minds in the _V----_.

The fog lapped and curled dankly round the _Hercules_ that night, wrapping the s.h.i.+p in a clammy shroud of cold moisture that dripped eerily from the rigging and sent a chill to the marrow of the bones of the men and officers on watch. But below there was warmth and comfort.

The ward-room celebrated the occasion with a "rag" to the music of its own Jazz band, while in the admiral's cabin the kinema man, who had been brought along to film the historic features of the voyage, entertained with a movie of a South American revolution, a picture full of the play of hot pa.s.sion and fierce jealousy, enacted in and around an ancient castle which none but a Californian could have recognized as a building of the recent San Diego Exposition. "The Admiral's Movies," "With a Complete Change of Program Nightly," became one of the star turns of the voyage from that time on.

Cut off though we were by the fog from sighting anything farther away than the riding lights of the nearest destroyer, strange voices of the new world we had moved into since morning kept reaching the _Hercules_ on the wings of the wireless. Now it was the _Regensburg_ calling to say, "I am lying off Outer Jade Lights.h.i.+p and illuminating it with my searchlight." Not much help, that, on a night when a searchlight itself was quenched to a will-o'-the-wisp at a cable's length. Then there was a message from the main fount of some "Workmen's and Soldiers' Council"

requesting that the Allied Naval Commission should receive a delegation of its members at Wilhelmshaven. It was not a long message, but the reply flashed back to it was, I understand, a good deal shorter. There was chatter between s.h.i.+p and s.h.i.+p, and even the call--from somewhere in the Baltic, I believe--of a steamer in distress. The name of the _Moewe_, in an otherwise unintelligible message, caused hardly the flutter it would have had we picked it up in the same waters a month earlier.

There was little news to us in a message from some land station telling all and sundry that the "high-sea-s.h.i.+p" _Regensburg_ was "_zu Anker bei aussen Jade Feuerschiff_," that the _Hercules_ and destroyers were "_zu Anker bei Weser Feuerschiff_," and that there was "_noch Nebel_." The _Regensburg_ had already told us where she was and our own position we knew: also the fact that "fog continues."

A groan from Germany in travail reached us in a message from the "Soldatenrat" of the "Fortress of Bork.u.m" to the Council in Berlin.

They disapproved most heartily of the att.i.tude of the meeting of the "_Gross Berliner_" councils for Greater Germany. They greatly regretted the attempt of one part of the people to establish a dictators.h.i.+p over another, and considered that this showed a lamentable lack of confidence in "_unserem Volke_"--"our people." "_Wir wollen Demokratie und keine Diktatur_," they concluded; "we want a democracy and no dictator."

Then we heard the German battles.h.i.+p _Konig_ (which, in company with the _Dresden_, a destroyer and two transports, we had sighted that morning tardily _en voyage_ to make up the promised quota at Scapa) calling to the _Revenge_--at that time the flags.h.i.+p of the squadron watching the interned s.h.i.+ps--for guidance. "Am near to the point of a.s.sembly with the other s.h.i.+ps," she said in German, "and bad weather is coming on.

Cannot stop with _Dresden_ in tow. What course can I take from point of a.s.sembly?"

Deep called to deep when the C.-in-C. of the Grand Fleet at Rosyth told the C.-in-C. of the High Sea Fleet what arrangements were being made to send back the surplus crews of the interned s.h.i.+ps, and for a while the vibrant ether let fall such familiar names as _Karlsruhe_, _Emden_, _Nurnberg_, _Hindenburg_, _Kaiser_, _Von der Tann_ and _Friedrich der Grosse_, men from all of which, we learned, were to be started homeward in a transport called the _Pretoria_.