The two men whom, I had heard talking French on the deck were Belgians. The one had been a soldier at Liege, and had managed to scramble across a ditch after his three days' tramp to Holland, although the sentry's bullet whistled uncomfortably close. He said that his strongest wish was to rejoin the Belgian army so that he might do his part to avenge the death of seven civilian hostages who had been shot before his eyes.

The other Belgian was just over military age, but he wanted to reach England to volunteer. His nerve and resource are certainly all right. He knew of the electrified wire along the Belgian-Dutch frontier, so he brought two pieces of gla.s.s with him, and thus held the current of death away from his body while he wriggled through to freedom.

We talked until after midnight. The French captain, formerly an instructor of artillery at Saint Cyr--the West Point and the Sandhurst of France--taken prisoner in the first autumn of the war, was the last to tell his story.

At Torgau, Saxony, in the heart of Germany, be plunged into the Elbe in the darkness of night, stemmed the swift waters, and on landing, half-drowned, rose speedily and walked fast to avoid a fatal chill.

For twenty-nine days he struggled on towards liberty. Nothing but the tremendous impulse of the desire for freedom could have carried him on his own two feet across Germany, without money, through countless closely-policed villages and great cities, in a country where everyone carries an ident.i.ty book (with which, of course, he was unprovided), without a friend or accomplice at any point of the journey, with only a map torn from a railway time-table, and no other guides than the sun, moon, and stars and direction posts. I will give the rest of the man's story in his own words.

"I came to the conclusion that my brain would not stand the captivity. I knew some of the difficulties before me, but I doubt whether I would have started if I had known them all. I lived on unthreshed wheat and rye, apples, blackberries, bilberries, carrots, turnips and even raw potatoes. I did not taste one morsel of cooked food or anything stronger than water till I arrived in Holland. I did not speak one word to any human being. On two occasions I marched more than thirty miles in the twenty-four hours. I slept always away from the roadside, and very often by day, and as far as possible from any inhabited house. I am, as you see, weak and thin, practically only muscle and bone, and during the last three days, while waiting in Holland for the boat, I have had to eat carefully to avoid the illness that would almost certainly follow repletion."

After I had lain down for a few hours' sleep, I thought, as I had often thought during the past thirty months, that although this is a war of machinery there is plenty of the human element in it, too.

People who tell only of the grim-drab aspect of the great struggle sometimes forget that romances just as fine as were ever spun by Victor Hugo happen around, them every day.

At dawn I hung to the rail of the wildly tossing s.h.i.+p, looking at the horizon from which the mists were clearing. Two specks began to grow into the long low black lines of destroyers. Our most anxious moment of the voyage had come. We waited for the shot that would show them to be German.

"They're all right. They're the escort!" came a voice on the winds that swept over the bridge.

They grew rapidly large, lashed the sea white as they tore along one on each side of us, diving through the waves when they could not ride them. When abreast of us they seemed almost to stop in their own length, wheel and disappear in the distance. Somehow the way they wheeled reminded me of the way the Cossacks used to pull their horses sharply at right angles when I saw them covering the rearguard in the retreat through the Bukovina.

The rough soldier at my side looked after them, with a mist in his eyes that did not come from the sea. "I'll be able to see my wife again," he said, more to the waves than to me. "I didn't write, because I didn't want to raise any false hopes. But this settles it, we're certain to get home safe now. I suppose I'll walk in and find her packing my food parcel for Germany--the parcel that kept me alive, while some of them poor Russian chaps with n.o.body to send them parcels are going under every day."

We ran close to two masts sticking up out of the water near the mouth of the Humber, the mast of our sister s.h.i.+p, which had gone down with all on board when she struck a mine.

That is the sort of sight which makes some critics say, "What is the matter with the British Navy?" Those critics forget to praise the mine-sweepers that we saw all about, whose bravery, endurance and n.o.ble spirit of self-sacrifice lead them to persevere in their perilous work and enable a thousand s.h.i.+ps to reach port to one that goes down.

On that rough voyage across the North Sea, through the destroyer and armed motor launch patrol, maintained by men who work unflinchingly in the shadow of death, I felt once again the power of the British Navy. I cast my lot with that Navy when I left Holland. I know what its protection means, for I could not have crossed on a neutral Dutch vessel.

It is all very well to complain about a few raiders that manage in thirty months to pierce the British patrols, or the hurried dash of swift destroyers into the Channel, but when you look from the white chalk cliffs of the Kentish coast at hundreds of vessels pa.s.sing safely off the Downs, when you sail the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and see only neutral and Allied s.h.i.+ps carrying on commerce, when you cross the Rhine and stand in food lines hour after hour and day after day, where men and women who gloried in war now whine at the hards.h.i.+ps it brings, when you see a mighty nation disintegrating in the shadow of starvation, and then pa.s.s to another nation, which, though far less self-sustaining in food, has plenty to eat, you simply have to realise that there are silent victories which are often farther reaching than victories of _eclat_.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE LITTLE s.h.i.+PS

I have been particularly impressed with two misconceptions which have existed, and to some extent still exist, not only in Germany but in neutral countries. The first is that England lacks virility, is degenerate, has had her day of greatness; the second, that in the present war she is continuing what is alleged to have been her policy in the past, namely, pulling the strings and reaping the benefit while other nations do the fighting. Through personal investigation I find these contentions so thoroughly refuted that to develop the point would be to commence another book instead of finis.h.i.+ng this one.

As I write I can look from my desk in the Alexandra Hotel, Bridlington, on to the North Sea where it washes the "Frightfulness Coast," for Bridlington lies between Hull and Scarborough.

I see trawlers fis.h.i.+ng and mine-sweeping whenever I raise my eyes from my writing. Their crews know that they work in the shadow of death in what they describe in the dock-side taverns as the greatest sport in the world. Praise of the big s.h.i.+ps often causes us to forget the little s.h.i.+ps. I admire the one and reverence the other. For if the men on the humbler craft could be intimidated, the doctrine of Frightfulness would be justified by victory.

Intimidation is a favourite weapon of the people across the Rhine.

I was among them when their airmen dropped bombs on Paris early in the war. "It is really humane," they said, "for it will frighten the civilian population into imploring the military to yield to us to save them." They thought the same of Zeppelin raids over England. Intimidation was their guiding star in Belgium. The first I heard of the ma.s.sacre of Louvain was from one of its perpetrators.

Intimidation was again their weapon in the case of Captain Fryatt.

"We planned it well," snarled a member of the Reichstag, incensed over my expression of disapproval, "Before we sent our s.h.i.+ps to intercept the _Brussels_ we determined to capture him, try him quickly and execute him. Since our submarines will win the war we must protect them by all pa.s.sible means. You see, when the next British captain thinks of ramming one of our submarines he will remember the fate of Captain Fryatt and think twice!"

Once more Germany is attempting intimidation, and seeking to make neutrals her ally in an attempt to starve Britain into defeat. The American Amba.s.sador is leaving Berlin, hundreds of neutral vessels hug havens of safety all over the world, but the women in Grimsby and Hull still wave farewell to the little trawlers that slip down the Humber to grapple with death. Freighters, mine-sweepers, trawlers, and the rest of the unsung tollers of the sea continue their silent, all-important task. They know that for them Germany has declared the law off, that they will be slaughtered at sight.

They know also that despite the Grand Fleet and the armies in France, the Allies and their cause will go down in complete defeat if Germany succeeds in blocking the routes of commerce. The insurmountable obstacle in her path is the simple, old-fas.h.i.+oned dogged courage of the average British seaman.

The Germans have developed to an astounding degree the quality of incorrectly diagnosing other peoples, due partly to the unbounded conceit engendered by their three wars of unification and their rapid increase of prosperity. Their mental food in recent years has been war, conquest, disparagement of others and glorification of self. They entered the struggle thinking only in army corps and siege artillery. Certain undefinable moral qualities, such as the last-ditch spirit of the old British Army on the Yser, did not come within their scope of reckoning.

British illusions of the early part of the war are gone. The average Briton fully appreciates Germany's gigantic strength, and he coldly realises that as conditions are at present, his country must supply most of the driving force--men, guns, and sh.e.l.ls--to break it. He thinks of the awful cost in life, and the thought makes him serious, but he is ready for any sacrifice. He welcomes help from Allies and neutrals, but whether the help be great or small, he is willing and resolved to stand on his own feet, and carry on to the end. It is this spirit which makes Britain magnificent to-day.

When losses are brought home to the Germans they generally give vent to their feelings by hurling maledictions upon their enemies.

The Briton, under similar circ.u.mstances, is usually remarkably quiet, but, unlike the German, he is _individually_ more determined, in consequence of the loss, to see the thing through.

Somehow the German always made me feel that his war determination had been organised for him.

Organisation is the glory and the curse of Germany. The Germans are by nature and training easily influenced, and as a ma.s.s they can be led as readily in the right path as in the wrong.

Common-sense administration and co-operation have made their cities places of beauty, health, comfort and pleasure. But when you stop for a moment in your admiration of the streets, buildings, statues, bridges, in such a city as Munich and enter a crowded hall to sit among people who listen with attention, obedience and delight to a professor venomously instructing them in their duty of "hating with the whole heart and the whole mind," and convincing them that "only through hate can the greatest obstacles be overcome," you begin to suspect that something is wrong.

It is part of the Prussian nature to push everything to extremes, a trait which has advantages and disadvantages. It has resulted in brilliant achievements in chemical and physical laboratories, and in gout, dyspepsia and flabbiness in eating establishments. A virtue carried too far becomes a vice. In Germany patriotism becomes jingoistic hatred and contempt for others, organisation becomes the utilisation of servility, obedience becomes willingness to do wrong at command.

Americans and British are inclined to ascribe to the Germans their own qualities. In nothing is this more obvious than in the English idea that the fair treatment of Germans in England, will beget fair treatment of the English in Germany. The Prussians, who have many Oriental characteristics--and some of them, a good deal of Oriental appearance--think orientally and attribute fair, or what we call sportsmanlike, treatment to fright and a desire to curry favour.

When Maubeuge fell I heard Germans of all cla.s.ses boast of how their soldiers struck the British who offered to shake hands after they surrendered to the Germans. Nearly two years later, during the Battle of the Somme, some Berlin papers copied from London papers a report of how British soldiers presented arms to the group of prisoners who had stubbornly defended Ovillers. I called the attention of several German acquaintances to this as an evidence of Anglo-Saxon sporting spirit, but I got practically the same response in every case. "Yes, they are beginning at last to see what we can do!" was the angry remark.

The Germans have become more and more "Prussianised" in recent years. State wors.h.i.+p had advanced so far that the German people entered the conflict in the perverted belief that the German Government had used every means to avert war. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the German people entered the war reluctantly. They did not. There was perfect unity in the joyful thought of German invincibility, easy and complete victory, plenty of plunder, and such huge indemnities that the growing burden of taxation would be thrown off their shoulders.

A country where the innocent children are scientifically inoculated with the virus of hate, where force, and only force, is held to be the determinant internationally of mine and thine, where the morals of the farmyard, are preached from the professorial chair in order to manufacture human cogs for the machine of militarism, is an undesirable and a dangerous neighbour and will continue so until it accepts other standards. A victorious Germany would not accept other standards.

That is why I look on the little s.h.i.+ps with so much admiration this morning. They sail between Germany and victory, for if they could be intimidated Britain would be starved out. Then the gospel that "only through hate can the greatest obstacles be overcome," would be the corner-stone of the most powerful Empire of history.