Nothing in the history of the past four years has more clearly brought out the difference between the civilised and the savage view of war, than the record of the German U-boat campaign. All civilised men are agreed, and have for centuries been agreed, about war. In their view war may be unavoidable, in so far as all order and security are ultimately dependent on force; but it is a lamentable necessity, and when unnecessary—that is, when undertaken for any object whatever except defence against aggression or tyranny—it is an abominable thing, a violation of human nature. This view is not inconsistent with the plain truth that the act of fighting is often pleasurable in itself, and that, when fighting in a right spirit, men often reach heights of nobility which they would never attain in peaceful occupations.

The savage is in accord with this view on one point only. He has the primitive joy of battle in him; but he cares nothing for right or wrong, and his military power is exerted either wantonly, or with the object of plunder and domination. So long as he gratifies his selfish instincts, he does not care what happens to the rest of the human race, or to human nature. Civilised men have for centuries laid down rules of war, that human industry and human society might suffer only such damage as could not be avoided in the exercise of armed force; and above all, that human nature might not be corrupted by acts done or suffered in brutal violation of it. These rules of chivalry were not always kept, but by civilised nations they have never been broken without shame and repentance. Savage races sometimes have a rudimentary tradition of the kind—the less savage they. But, in general, they have a brute courage and a brute ferocity, without mercy or law; and the worst of all are those who, living in community with races of merciful and law-abiding ideals, have themselves never been touched by the spirit of chivalry, and have ended by making the repudiation of it into a national religion of their own.

It has long been a recognised characteristic of the British stock, all over the world, to regard a stout opponent with generous admiration, even with a feeling of fellowship; and to deal kindly with him when defeated. But this chivalry of feeling and conduct, now so widespread among us, is a spiritual inheritance and derived, not from our Teutonic ancestors, but from our conquest by French civilisation. It has never been shared by the Germans, or shown in any of their wars. Froissart remarked, five and a half centuries ago, on the difference between the French and English knights, who played their limited game of war with honour and courtesy, and the Germans, who had neither of those qualities. A century later, it is recorded of Bayard—‘Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’—that whenever he was serving in an army with a German contingent, he was careful to stay in billets till they had marched out, because of their habit of burning, when they left, the houses where they had found hospitality. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their barbarity was unbounded; the Thirty Years’ War was the lasting shame of Europe, and the Sack of Magdeburg a final example of the triumph of the wild swine in man. In the eighteenth century, Prussia produced a grotesque anticipation of Zulu ideals, and called its chief Frederick the Great. In the Napoleonic wars, the cruelty of his German allies disgusted the Iron Duke, who had commanded many ruffians and seen some appalling days of horror. In our own time, we have witnessed the brutal attacks on Denmark and Austria, the treachery of the Ems telegram, and the development of Bismarck’s blood-and-iron policy into the complete Machiavellism of Wilhelm II and his confederates. It is not a new character, the German; it is an old one, long inherited. Nemo repente fit Tirpissimas. If anyone doubts this, or wishes to doubt it, let him look through the criminal statistics of the German Government for the ten years preceding the War, and read the book of Professor Aschaffenburg, the chief criminologist of Germany, published in 1913. He will there find it stated and proved, that the most violent and abominable forms of crime were then prevalent in Germany, to a degree beyond all our experience—beyond all imagination of what was possible in a human community—and that the honest and patriotic writer himself regarded this ever-rising tide of savagery, among the younger generation, as ‘a serious menace to the moral stability of Europe.’ It is against this younger generation, with these old vices, that we have had to defend ourselves; and now that we have beaten them, now that the time has come when, if they had been clean fighters and fellow-men, every British hand would have been ready for their grip, we can but hold back with grave and temperate anger, and the recollection that we have first to safeguard the new world from those who have desolated and defiled the old.

Anger it must still be, however grave and temperate. Look at the conduct of the War, and especially at the conduct of the submarine war, as coolly and scientifically as you can, you will not find it possible to separate the purely military from the moral aspect. Technically, the Germans were making trial of a new weapon which it was difficult to use effectively under the old rules. They quickly determined, not to improve or adapt the weapon, but to abandon the rules. For this they were rightly condemned by the only powerful neutral opinion remaining in the world. But they not only broke the law, they broke it in German fashion. Their lawlessness, if skilfully carried out with the natural desire to avoid unnecessary suffering, might have been reduced to an almost technical breach, involving little or no loss of life. But they chose instead to exhibit to the world, present and to come, the spectacle of a whole Service practising murder under deliberate orders; and adding strokes of personal cruelty hitherto known only among madmen or merciless barbarians. Finally—and this concerns our future intercourse even more nearly—the German people at home, a nation haughtily claiming pre-eminence in all virtue, moral and intellectual, accepted every order of their ruling caste, and applauded every act of their hordes in the battle, however abhorrent to sane human feeling. In all this, we need make no accusations of our own; we have only to set out the facts, and the words with which the German people and their teachers received them and rejoiced in them.

It was towards the end of 1914 that the German Admiralty conceived the idea of blockading the British Isles by means of a submarine fleet. There were, as we have already seen, great difficulties in the way. For the pursuit and capture of commerce, a submarine is not nearly so well fitted as an ordinary cruiser; is not, in fact, well fitted at all. To hold up and examine a ship on the surface is too dangerous a venture for a frail boat with a very small crew; to put a prize crew on board, and send the captured vessel into port, is generally impossible. As an exception, and in case of extreme necessity, it has always been recognised that a prize may be sunk, if the crew and passengers are safely provided for; but this proviso, too, is almost impossible for a submarine to fulfil. Besides these technical difficulties, there was also the danger of offending neutral powers, especially if their ships were to be sunk without evidence that they were carrying contraband.

Under the advice of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, it was decided to defy all these risks and difficulties. The question was asked by him, just before Christmas 1914, ‘What would America say, if Germany should declare a submarine war against all enemy trading vessels?’ and on February 4, 1915, a formal proclamation followed from Berlin. This announced that the waters round Great Britain and Ireland were held to be a war-region, and that from February 18 ‘every enemy merchant-vessel found in this region will be destroyed, without its always being possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening.’ No civilised Power had ever before threatened to murder non-combatants in this fashion; but there was even worse to come—the seamen of nations not at war at all were to take their chance of death with the rest. ‘Neutral ships will also incur danger in the war-region, where, in view of the misuse of neutral flags ordered by the British Government, and incidents inevitable in sea warfare, attacks intended for hostile ships may affect neutral ships also.’ No ‘misuse of neutral flags’ has ever been ordered by our Government. The destruction of a merchant-vessel or liner without warning or search, is not an incident ‘inevitable in sea warfare’; it is an incident always avoided in any sea warfare except that waged by barbarians.

A fortnight later the sinkings began; and on March 9 three ships were torpedoed, without warning, in one day. In the case of one of these, the Tangistan, 37 men were killed or drowned out of the 38 on board. On March 15 the stewardess and five men of the Fingal were drowned. And on the 27th the crew of the Aguila were fired upon while launching their boats; three were killed and several more wounded. On the 28th, the Elder-Dempster liner, the Falaba, from Liverpool to South Africa, was stopped and torpedoed in cold blood. As the crew and passengers sank, the Germans looked on from the deck of the U-boat, laughing and jeering at their struggling victims, of whom 111 perished. ‘The sinking of the Falaba,’ said the New York Times, ‘is perhaps the most shocking crime of the War.’

It did not long remain unsurpassed. In April, the German Embassy at Washington publicly advertised that vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or her allies were liable to destruction, and that travellers sailing in them would do so at their own risk. Intending travellers smiled at this outrageous threat and went on booking their passages to Europe. Even when those about to sail in the huge liner Lusitania received anonymous telegrams, warning them that the ship would be sunk, no one believed that the Government of a great Power could seriously intend such a crime. Not a single berth was countermanded, and, on May 1, the Lusitania sailed from New York, carrying, besides her crew of 651, no less than 1,255 passengers.

On the morning of Friday, May 7, she made her landfall on the Irish coast. The sea was dangerously calm; but Captain Turner, wishing ‘to reach the bar at Liverpool at a time when he could proceed up the river without stopping to pick up a pilot,’ reduced speed to 18 knots, holding on the ordinary course. At 2 P.M. the Lusitania passed the Old Head of Kinsale; at 2.15 she was torpedoed without warning, and without a submarine having been sighted by anyone on board. Her main steam-pipe was cut, and her engines could not be stopped; she listed heavily to starboard, and while she was under way it was very difficult to launch the boats. At 2.36 she went down, and of the 1,906 souls on board, 1,134 went down with her, only 772 being saved in the boats which got clear.

This was, for the German Government and the German Navy, an unparalleled disgrace. The German nation had still the chance of repudiating such a crime. But they knew no reason for repudiating it; it was congenial to their long-established character, and differed only in concentrated villainy from the countless murders and brutalities which had troubled the criminologists before the War. The German people adopted the crime as their own act, and celebrated it with universal joy. ‘The news,’ said the well-known KÖlnische Zeitung, ‘will be received by the German people with unanimous satisfaction, since it proves to England and the whole world, that Germany is quite in earnest in regard to her submarine warfare.’ The KÖlnische Volkszeitung, a prominent Roman Catholic and patriotic paper, was even more delighted. ‘With joyful pride we contemplate this latest deed of our Navy, and it will not be the last.’ The two words ‘joyful’ and ‘pride’ are here the mark of true savagery. Only savages could be joyful over the horrible death of a thousand women, children, and non-combatants; only savages could feel pride in the act, for it was in no way a difficult or dangerous feat. But this half-witted wickedness is clearly recognised in Germany as the national ideal. In the midst of the general exultation, when medals were being struck, holidays given to school children, and subscriptions got up for the ‘heroic’ crew of the U-boat, Pastor Baumgarten preached on the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and gave his estimate of the German character in these words: ‘Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve, from the bottom of his heart, the sinking of the Lusitania—whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to countless perfectly innocent victims, and give himself up to honest delight at this victorious exploit of German defensive power—him we judge to be no true German.’

‘It will not be the last.’ The threat was soon made good. On August 9, of the same year, the White Star liner Arabic, one day out from Liverpool, was 60 miles from the Irish coast when she sighted the ss. Dunsley in a sinking condition. She naturally steered towards her; but as she approached, a submarine suddenly appeared from behind the Dunsley and torpedoed the Arabic without a moment’s warning. Boats were got out, but the ship sank in eight minutes and 30 lives were lost out of 424.

In both these cases the Germans, feeling that their joy and pride were not exciting the sympathy of neutral nations, afterwards tried to justify themselves by asserting that our liners carried munitions of war. This was obviously impossible in the case of the Arabic, which was bound from England to America. With regard to the Lusitania, an inquiry was held by Judge Julius Meyer of the Federal District Court of New York, who found that the Lusitania did not carry explosives, and added: ‘The evidence presented has disposed, without question and for all time, of any false claims brought forward to justify this inexpressibly cowardly attack on an unarmed passenger steamer.’

The year closed with the torpedoing, again without warning, on December 30, of the P. and O. liner Persia, from London to Bombay. She sank in five minutes, and out of a total of 501 on board, 335 were lost with her. Four of her boats were picked up after having been thirty hours at sea.

The year 1916 was a not less proud one for Germany; but it was distinctly less joyful. The American people took a fundamentally different view of war, especially of war at sea, and they began to express the difference forcibly. The German Government, after months of argument, was driven to make a show of withdrawing from the most extreme position. They admitted, on February 9, 1916, that their method was wrong where it involved danger to neutrals, and they offered to pay a money compensation for their American victims. They also repeated the pledge they had already given, and broken, that unarmed merchantmen should not be sunk without warning, and unless the safety of the passengers and crew could be assured; provided that the vessels did not try to escape or resist. This again is a purely savage line of thought; no civilised man could seriously claim that he was justified in killing unarmed non-combatants or neutrals by the mere fact of their running away from him. As for the ‘safety of passengers and crew,’ we shall see presently how that was ‘assured.’

But it matters little how the pledge was worded; it was never intended to be kept. Only six weeks after it was given, it was cruelly broken once more. On March 24, 1916, the French passenger steamer Sussex, carrying 270 women and children, and 110 other passengers, from Folkestone to Dieppe, was torpedoed without warning as she was approaching the French coast. Many were killed or severely injured by the explosion, others were drowned in getting out the boats. There were twenty-five Americans on board, and their indignation was intense; for the ship was unarmed, and carried no munitions or war stores of any kind. Nor, as President Wilson pointed out, did she follow the route of the transports or munition ships. She was simply a well-known passenger steamer, and eighty of her company on board were murdered in cold blood by pirates.

The President went on to say that the German Government ‘has failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation which has arisen, not only out of the attack on the Sussex but out of the whole method and character of submarine warfare as they appear in consequence of the practice of indiscriminate destruction of merchantmen, by commanders of German submarines. The United States Government,’ he continued, ‘has adopted a very patient attitude, and at every stage of this painful experience of tragedy upon tragedy, has striven to be guided by well-considered regard for the extraordinary circumstances of an unexampled war.... To its pain, it has become clear to it that the standpoint which it adopted from the beginning is inevitably right—namely, that the employment of submarines for the destruction of enemy trade is of necessity completely irreconcilable with the principles of humanity, with the long existing, undisputed rights of neutrals, and with the sacred privileges of non-combatants.’

This note touches the real point, and settles it; until the submarine is as powerfully armed and armoured, and manned with as large a crew as a cruiser of the ordinary kind, it is not a ship which can be used for the general purposes of blockade by any civilised nation. And it may be added that, even if the Germans had possessed submarines of a suitable kind, they could not have brought their prizes into port, because our Fleet and not theirs had the control of the seas. As it was, they pretended once more to submit, and gave nominal orders that merchant-vessels ‘shall not be sunk without warning and without saving human lives, unless these vessels attempt to escape or offer resistance.’

It was not intended that this third promise should be kept; there were other ways of evading the issue. The Rappahannock, a ship which sailed with a crew of 37, from Halifax, on October 17, 1916, was never heard of again, except in the wireless message by which the German Admiralty reported her destruction. The plan of sinking without a trace was first officially recommended by Count Luxburg, the German diplomatic agent in the Argentine; but the German Professor Flamm, of Charlottenburg, has also the honour of having proposed it in the paper Die Woche. ‘The best would be if destroyed neutral ships disappeared without leaving a trace, and with everything on board, because terror would very quickly keep seamen and travellers away from the danger zones, and thus save a number of lives.’ No doubt the Rappahannock was ‘spurlos versenkt’; so was the North Wales, and so were many others meant to be. The German method, in 1916, was to torpedo the ship, and then shell the survivors in their open boats. This was done in the cases of the Kildare and the Westminster, both sunk in the Mediterranean; but on neither occasion were the pirates successful in killing the whole of the crew, and their crime was therefore known and doubly execrated by the whole civilised world. None the less, they continued the hideous practice, and in the following eight months fired upon the helpless survivors of at least twelve ships, enumerated with authentic details in a list published by the Times on August 20, 1917.

On the whole, the year 1916 was a difficult one for the German people. The objections of America to the practice of piracy were becoming uncomfortably urgent; promises had to be made under compulsion, and the ‘joyful pride’ of the nation would have been much diminished if it had not been reinforced by two successes of a new kind. On March 17, 1916, the Russian hospital ship Portugal was torpedoed off the Turkish coast in the Black Sea. She carried no wounded, but had on board a large crew and a staff of Red Cross nurses and orderlies. It was a clear morning, the ship was flying the Red Cross flag, and had a Red Cross conspicuously painted on every funnel; but she was deliberately destroyed, with 85 of those on board, including 21 nurses and 24 other members of the Red Cross staff. On November 21, a British hospital ship, the Britannic, was sunk in the same way. She was a huge vessel, and had on board 1,125 people, of whom 25 were doctors, 76 nurses, and 399 medical staff. The outrage was said by the Germans to be justified by ‘the suspicion of the misuse of the hospital ship for purposes of transport.’ This suspicion was wholly unfounded, and the submarine commander had taken no steps to enquire into the truth.

In 1917 and 1918, the ‘proudest’ and most ‘joyful’ period in the short history of the German Navy, there was no longer any need for the humiliation of excuses. On January 31, 1917, Germany proclaimed her intention of sinking at sight every ship found in the waters around the British Isles and the coast of France, or in the Mediterranean Sea. It was at the same time announced—quite falsely—that the German Government had conclusive proof of the misuse of hospital ships for the transport of munitions and troops, and that therefore the traffic of hospital ships within certain areas ‘would no longer be tolerated.’ President Wilson dealt promptly with this infamous proclamation. On February 3, he told Congress that he had severed diplomatic relations between America and Germany; on April 6, he formally declared war.

The savages were now entirely free to take their own way, and they took it. On the night of March 20, 1917, the hospital ship Asturias, steaming with all navigating lights, and with all the proper Red Cross signs brilliantly illuminated, was torpedoed and sunk without warning. Of the medical staff on board, 14 were lost, including one nurse, and of the ship’s company 29, including one stewardess. On March 30, the Gloucester Castle was torpedoed without warning, but her wounded were all got off in safety. On April 17, the Donegal and the Lanfranc were both sunk while bringing wounded to British ports. In the Donegal, 29 wounded were lost, and 12 of the crew. The Lanfranc carried, besides 234 British wounded and a medical staff of 52, a batch of wounded German prisoners to the number of 167, including officers. ‘The moment the torpedo struck the Lanfranc,’ wrote a British officer on board, ‘the Prussians made a mad rush for the life-boats. One of their officers came up to a boat close to which I was standing. I shouted to him to go back, whereupon he stood and scowled, “You must save us.” I told him to wait his turn. Other Prussians showed their cowardice by dropping on their knees and imploring pity. Some cried “Kamarad,” as they do on the battle-field. I allowed none of them to pass me.... In these moments, while wounded Tommies lay in their cots unaided, the Prussian moral dropped to zero. Our cowardly prisoners made another crazy effort to get into a life-boat. They managed to crowd into one—it toppled over. The Prussians were thrown into the water, and they fought with each other in order to reach another boat containing a number of gravely wounded British soldiers.... The behaviour of our own lads I shall never forget!’—but there is no need to tell that part of the story; it is old, centuries old, and is repeated unfailingly whenever a British ship goes down.

In July 1917, a new type of ‘heroic deed’ was added to the ‘proud and joyful’ list. At 8 P.M., on July 31, the Belgian Prince was torpedoed without warning; the crew escaped in three boats. The submarine then ordered the boats to come alongside, took the master on board and sent him below. ‘Then,’ says Mr. Thomas Bowman, chief engineer, ‘all the crew and officers were ordered aboard, searched, and the life-belts taken off most of the crew and thrown overboard. I may add, during this time the Germans were very abusive towards the crew. After this the German sailors got into the two life-boats, threw the oars, bailers, and gratings overboard, took out the provisions and compasses, and then damaged the life-boats with an axe. The small boat was left intact, and five German sailors got into her and went towards the (sinking) ship. When they boarded her, they signalled to the submarine with a flash-lamp, and then the submarine cast the damaged life-boats adrift and steamed away from the ship for about two miles, after which he stopped. About 9 P.M. the submarine dived, and threw everybody in the water without any means of saving themselves.’

Mr. Bowman swam till daylight, and was picked up by a chance patrol-boat. The only other survivors were a man named Silessi, and an American named Snell, who had succeeded in hiding a life-belt under his overcoat. The intention here was, of course, that the Belgian Prince should be ‘spurlos versenkt’; and in other cases the same result was aimed at by ramming and sinking the boats with the shipwrecked men in them. The crews of the French steamers Lyndiane and Zumaya were destroyed in this way in the summer of 1918; and on June 27 the case of the Llandovery Castle marked, perhaps, the highest pitch of German ‘pride.’ This hospital ship was torpedoed and sunk without warning, though she was showing all her distinguishing lights. After she had gone down, the pirate commander took his U-boat on a smashing-up cruise among the survivors; and by hurling it hither and thither, he succeeded in ramming and sinking all the boats and rafts except one, which escaped. The survivors in this boat heard the sound of gunfire behind them for some time; it can only be conjectured that the murderers were finishing their work with shrapnel. The number of those cruelly done to death in this massacre was 244.

The deeds here enumerated form a small but characteristic part of the German submarine record. The total number of women, children, and non-combatants, murdered in the course of the U-boat blockade, is more than seventeen thousand. It has been a failure as a blockade; nine million tons of British, and six million of allied and neutral shipping have been sunk; but the U-boats have never, for a day, held the control of the sea. The policy was a device of savages, and of a nation of savages. There is no escape from this charge; for the policy was approved and deliberately adopted, by the representatives of the whole German people, with the exception only of the few despised and detested Minority Socialists. In October 1918, Herr Haase testified in the Reichstag: ‘Most of the Parties are now trying to get away from the accentuated submarine war ... in reality all the Parties, except the Socialist Minority, share the guilt. The first resolution in favour of submarine war was drafted by all the leaders, including Herr Scheidemann and Herr Ebert. The accentuation of submarine warfare was a natural consequence. You Socialists are also guilty because, to the very last, you gave the old regime the credits for carrying on the War.’

The Germans do not yet realise the crime they confess; they have corrupted one of the oldest and noblest bonds in human life—the brotherhood of ‘them that go down to the sea in ships, and have their business in great waters.’ And this they have done because they are, by nature, not seamen but savages.