It was just before our arrival at Norddeich at the end of this first day's railway journey that I spoke to the German officer who had joined me at the window of the corridor about the very well-fed look of the people we had seen on the streets of Wilhelmshaven and at the stations of the towns and villages through which we had been passing. "It is true," he replied, "that we have never suffered for food in this part of the country, and that is because it is so largely agricultural. But wait until you go to the industrial centres. In Hamburg and Bremen, it is there that you will see the want and hunger. It is for those poorpeople that the Allies must provide much food without delay."
Personally, I did not go either to Hamburg or Bremen, being absent with parties visiting the Zeppelin stations at Nordholz and Tondern at the time the Shipping Board of the Naval Commission was inspecting British merchantmen interned in these once great ports. A member of that board, however, assured me that he had observed no material difference in the appearance of the people in the streets of Bremen and Hamburg and those of Wilhelmshaven. His party had taken "potluck" at the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg, where the food had been found ample in quantity and not unappetizing, even on a meatless day.
"But what of the poor?" I asked. "Did you see anything of the quarters that would correspond to the slums of London or Liverpool?"
"Germany," he replied, "to her credit, has very few places where the housing is outwardly so bad as in many British industrial cities I could name. We did not see much of the parts of Bremen and Hamburg where the working-classes live; but we did see a good deal of the workers themselves. I know under-feeding when I see it, for I was in Russia but a few months ago. But, so far as I could see, the chief difference between the men in the dockyards and shipbuildingestablishments of Hamburg and those of the Tyne and Clyde was that the former were working harder. They merely glanced up at us as we passed, with little curiosity and no resentment, and went right on with the job in hand. No, everything considered, I should not say that any one is suffering seriously for lack of food in either Bremen or Hamburg."
"No one is suffering seriously for lack of food." That was the feeling of all of us at the end of our first day in "starving Germany," and (if I may anticipate) it was also our verdict when theHerculessailed for England, three weeks later.
The names of "Norderney" and "Borkum" on the list of seaplane stations to be inspected seemed to strike a familiar chord of memory, but it was not until I chanced upon a dog-eared copy of "The Riddle of the Sands" on a table in the "Commission Room" of theHerculesthat it dawned upon me where I had heard them before. There was no time at the moment to re-turn the pages of this most consummately told yarn of its kind ever written, but, prompted by a happy inspiration, I slipped the grimy little volume into my pocket. And there (as the clattering special which was to take us to Norddeich,en routeto Norderney, turned off from the Bremen mainline a few miles outside of Wilhelmshaven) I found it again, just as the green water-logged fields and bogs of the "land of the sevensiels" began to unroll in twin panoramas on either side. Opening the book at random somewhere toward the middle, my eye was drawn to a paragraph beginning near the top of the page facing a much-pencilled chart."... The mainland is that district of Prussia that is known as East Friesland." (I remember now that it was "Carruthers," writing in theDulcibella, off Wangerogg, who was describing the "lay of the land.") "It is a short, flat-topped peninsula, bounded on the west by the Ems estuary and beyond that by Holland, and on the east by the Jade estuary; a low-lying country, containing great tracts of marsh, and few towns of any size; on the north side none. Seven islands lie off the coast. All, except Borkum, which is round, are attenuated strips, slightly crescent-shaped, rarely more than a mile broad, and tapering at the ends; in length averaging about six miles, from Norderney and Juist, which are seven and nine respectively, to little Baltrum, which is only two and a half."
As I turned the book sideways to look at the chart the whole fascinating story came back with a rush. What man who has ever knocked about in small boats, tramped roads and poked about generally in places where he had no business to poke could forget it? The East Friesland peninsula, with its "seven little rivers" and "seven channels" and "seven islands," was the "take off" for the German army which was to cross the North Sea in barges to land on the sands of "The Wash" for the invasion of England. And thisvery line over which our rickety two-car special was clinkety-clanking—I wished that "Carruthers" could have seen what a pitiful little old single-track it had become—was the "strategic trunk" over which the invading cohorts were to be shunted in their thousands to the waiting deep-sea-going barges in the canalizedsiels. There was Essen, which was to have been the "nodal centre" of the great embarkation, and scarcely had I located it on the map before its tall spire was stabbing the north-western skyline as we drew in to the station.
A raw-boned, red-faced girl, her astonishingly powerful frame clad in a man's greasy overall, lowered the barrier at the high-road crossing, the same barrier, I reflected, which had held up "Carruthers," Von Brunning, and the two "cloaked gentlemen" on the night of the great adventure. Four "land girls," in close-fitting brown corduroys, with great baskets of red cabbages on their shoulders, were just trudging off down the road to Dornum, the very "cobbled causeway flanked with ditches and willows, and running cheek by jowl with the railway track" which "Carruthers" had followed by midnight, with "fleecy clouds and a half moon overhead," in search of the Benser Tief. There was even a string of mighty barges towing down the narrow canal of the "Tief" whenwe crossed its rattling bridge a few minutes later. And just as "Carruthers" described, the road and railway clung closely together all the way to Dornum, and about halfway were joined by a third companion in the shape of a puny stream, the Neues Tief. "Wriggling and doubling like an eel, choked with sedges and reeds," it had no more pretensions to being navigable now than then. It still "looped away into the fens out of sight, to reappear again close to Dornum in a more dignified guise," and it still skirted the town to the east, where there was a towpath and a piled wharf. The only change I was able to note in the momentary halt of the train was that the "red-brick building with the look of a warehouse, roofless as yet and with workmen on the scaffolds," had now been covered with red tile and filled with red cabbages.
It was at Dornum that "Carruthers" (who was masquerading as a German sailor on his way to visit a sister living on Baltrum) fell in at a primitiveGasthauswith an ex-crimp, drunken with muchschnappsen, who insisted on accompanying him on a detour to Dornumersiel, where he had planned to do a hasty bit of spying. From the right-hand window I caught a brief glimpse of the ribbon of the coastward road, down the length of which the oddly-assorted pair—the ForeignOfficepréciswriter and the one-time "shanghai" artist—had stumbled arm-in-arm, treating each other in every gin-shop on the way.
"Carruthers'" detour to the coast carried him out of sight of the railway, so that he missed the little red-brick schoolhouse, close up by the track, where the buxom mistress had her whole brood of young Fritzes and Gretchens lined up along the fence of the right-of-way to wave and cheer our train as it passed. How she received word of the coming of the "Allied Special" we could only conjecture, but it was probably through some Workmen's and Soldiers' Council friend in the railway service. But even so, as the schoolhouse was three miles from the nearest station and had nothing suggestive of a telephone line running to it, she must have had herbanzaiparty standing by in readiness a good part of the forenoon session. Hurriedly dropping a window (they work rather hard on account of the stiffness of the thick paper strap), I was just able to gather that the burden of the greeting was "Good morning, good morning, sir!" repeated many times in guttural chorus. If any of them were shouting "Welcome!" as one or two of our party thought they heard, it escaped my ears. They did the thing so well one was sure it had been rehearsed, and wonderedhow long it had been since those same throaty trebles had been raised in the "Hymn of Hate." If "Carruthers" spying visit to Dornumersiel resulted in anything more "revealing" than the dig in the ribs one of the youngsters got from the mistress for (apparently) not cheering lustily enough, he neglected to set it down in his story. This little incident prepared us for much we were to see later in the way of German "conciliation" methods.
"Carruthers," when he returned to the railway again and took train at Hage, made the journey from the latter station to Norden in ten minutes. The fact that our special took twenty is sufficient commentary on the deterioration of German road-beds and rolling stock. Norden, which is the junction point for Emden, to the south, and Norddeich, to the north, is a good-sized town, and we noticed here that the streets were beflagged and arched with evergreen as at Wilhelmshaven, doubtless in expectation of returning troops. While our engines were being changed, a couple of workmen, standing back in the depths of a tool-house, kept waving their hands ingratiatingly every time the armed guard (who always paced up and down the platform while the train was at a station) turned his back. Whatthey were driving at—unless co-operating with the children in the general "conciliation" program—we were not able to make out.
From Norden to Norddeich was a run of but three or four miles, but a bad road-bed and a worse engine made the journey a tedious if fitting finale to our painful progress across the East Frisian peninsula. Halting but a few moments at the main station, the train was shunted to a spur which took it right out to the quay where the great dyke bent inward to form a narrow artificial harbour. A few steps across the slippery moss-covered stones, where the falling tide had bared the sloping landing, took us to where a small but powerfully engined steam launch was waiting to convey the party to Norderney. Manned by naval ratings, it had the same aspect of neglect which characterized all of the warships we had visited. The men saluted smartly, however, and on our expressing a wish to remain in the open air in preference to the stuffy cabin, they tumbled below and brought up cushions and ranged them along the deck-house to sit upon. The Allied officers dangled their legs to port, the German officers to starboard, while the ex-sailor and the "plain clothes" detective from the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council disposed themselves authoritatively in the wheel-house.
A few minutes' run between heavy stone jetties brought us to the open sea, where the launch began threading a channel which seemed to be marked mostly by buoys, but here and there by close-set rows of saplings, now just beginning to show their scraggly tops above the falling water. It was the sight of these latter marks—so characteristic of these waters—that reminded me that we had at last come out into the real hunting ground of theDulcibella, where "Davies" and "Carruthers" had puzzled out the solution of "The Riddle of the Sands." Norderney and Juist and Borkum and the other of the "seven islands" strung their attenuated lengths in a broken barrier to seaward, and between them and the mainland we were leaving astern stretched the amazing mazes of the sands, alternately bared and covered by the ebb and flow of the tides. Two-thirds of the area, according to "Carruthers," were dry at low water, when the "remaining third becomes a system of lagoons whose distribution is controlled by the natural drift of the North Sea as it forces its way through the intervals between the islands. Each of these intervals resembles the bar of a river, and is obstructed by dangerous banks over which the sea pours at every tide, scooping out a deep pool. This fans out and ramifies to east and west as the pent-upcurrent frees itself, encircles the islands, and spreads over the intervening flats. But the further it penetrates the less scouring force it has, and as a result no island is girt completely by a low-water channel. About midway at the back of each of them is a 'watershed,' only covered for five or six hours out of the twelve. A boat, even of the lightest draught, navigating behind the islands must choose its moment for passing these."
"I trust we have 'chosenourmoment' carefully," I said to myself after reading those lines and reflecting what a large part of their time theDulcibella,Kormoran, and all the other craft in the "Riddle" had spent careened upon sand-spits. To reassure myself, I leaned back and asked one of the German officers if boats didn't run aground pretty often on that run. "Oh, yes, most often," was the reply, "but only at low water or when the fog is very thick. With this much water, and when we can see as far as we can now"—there was about a quarter of a mile of visibility—"there is no danger. Our difficulty will come when we try to return this evening on the low water."
It may have been my imagination, but I thought he put a shade more accent on thattrythan a real optimist would have done under similar circumstances. But then, I told myself, it washardly a time when one could expect a German officer to be optimistic about anything.
Heading out through the well-marked channel of theBuse Tief, between the sands of theItzendorf Plateto port andHohe Riffto starboard, twenty minutes found the launch in the opener waters off the west end of Norderney where, with its light draught, it had no longer to thread the winding of the buoyed fairway. Standing on northward until the red roofs and white walls of the town sharpened into ghostly relief on the curtain of the mist, course was altered five or six points to starboard, and we skirted a broad stretch of sandy beach, from the upper end of which the even slopes of concreted "runs" were visible, leading back to where, dimly outlined in their darker opacity, a long row of great hangars loomed fantastically beyond the dunes. Doubling a sharp spit, the launch nosed in and brought up alongside the landing of a slip notched out of the side of the little natural harbour.
The Commander of the station—a small man, but wiry and exceedingly well set up—met us as we stepped off the launch. Then, and throughout the visit, his quiet dignity of manner and ready (but not too ready) courtesy struck a welcome mean between the incongruous blends of sullenness and subserviency we had encounteredin meeting the officers in the German warships. He saluted each member of the party as he landed, but tactfully refrained from offering his hand to any but the attached German officers. It was this attitude on the part of the Commander, together with the uniformly courteous but uneffusive demeanour of the other officers with whom we were thrown in contact, that made the visit to Norderney perhaps the pleasantest of all the many inspections carried out in Germany.
Walking inland along a brick-paved road, we passed a large canteen or recreation club (with a crowd of curious but quite respectful men lined up along the verandah railings to watch us go by) before turning in to a fine new brick-and-tile building which appeared to be the officers' Casino. Leaving our overcoats in the reception room, we joined the dozen or more officers awaiting us at the entrance and fared on by what had once been flower-bordered walks to the hangars. As we came out upon the "tarmac"—here, as with all German seaplane and airship stations, the runs for the machines in front of the hangars are paved with concrete instead of the tarred macadam which is used so extensively in England and France—the men of the station were seen to be drawn up by companies, as for a review. Each company stood smartly to attention at the order of its officersas the party came abreast of it, and we—both Allied and German officers—saluted in return. As we passed on, each company in turn broke rank and quietly dispersed to barracks, their officers following on to join the party in the furtherest hangar, where the inspection was to begin. The discipline appeared to be faultless, and it was soon evident that the men and their officers had arrived at some sort of a "working understanding" to tide them over the period of inspection, if not longer.
The two representatives of the Workmen and Soldiers who had accompanied our party from Wilhelmshaven were allowed to be present during the inspection, and with them two other "white-banders" who appeared to have been elected to represent the men of the station. All other men had been cleared out of the sheds in conformity with the stipulations of the armistice. Some unauthorized individual—apparently a mechanic—who, halfway through the inspection, was noticed following the party, was summarily ordered out by the Commander. He obeyed somewhat sullenly, but though we subsequently saw him in gesticulative confab with some of his mates on the outside, he did not venture again into any of the hangars. That was the nearest approach to insubordination we saw in Norderney.
The officers of the station—now that we saw them, a score or more in number, all together—were a fine, business-like looking lot. All of them wore some kind of a decoration, most of them several, and among these were two or three of the highly-prized Orders "Pour le Mérite." As Norderney was the "star" seaplane station, that body of keen-eyed, square-jawed young flying officers undoubtedly included the cleverest naval pilots at Germany's disposal. What their many decorations had been given for there was, of course, no way of learning; nor did we find out whether the presence of so many of them at the inspection was voluntary or by order. Though, like their Commander, quiet and reserved, they were invariably courteous and willing in doing anything to facilitate the tedious progress of inspection.
There was an amusing little incident which occurred during the course of inspection in connection with a very smart young German officer, who, from the moment I first saw him at the door of the Casino, I kept telling myself I had encountered somewhere before. For half an hour or more—while checking the names and numbers of the machines in my notebook as inspection was completed—my mind was running back through one German colony or foreign settlement afteranother, trying to find the scene into which that florid face (with its warm, wide-set eyes and its full, sensual mouth) fitted. Dar-es-Salaam, Windhoek, Tsingtau, Yap, Apia, Herbertshöhe—I scurried back through them all without uncovering a clue. Where else had I met Germans? The southern "panhandle" of Brazil, the south of Chile, Bagdad— That was the first name to awaken a sense of "nearness." "Bagdad, Bagdad Railway, Assur, Mosul," I rambled on, and just as I began to recall that I had encountered Germans scattered all along the caravan route from the Tigris to Syria, the object of my interest turned up those soulful eyes of his to look at one of the American officers clambering into the "house" of the "Giant" monoplane seaboat under inspection at the moment—and I had him.
"Aleppo! 'Du Bist Wie Eine Blume!'" I chortled exultantly, my mind going back to a night in June, 1912, when, the day after my arrival from the desert, the American Consul had taken me to a party at the Austrian Consulate in honour of some one or other who was about to depart for home—wherever that was. Young Herr X—— (I even recalled the name now) and his brother, both on the engineering staff of the Bagdad Railway, were among the guests, the former very smitten with a sloe-eyed sylph of a GreekLevantine, whose mother (so a friendly gossip told me) had been a dancer in a café chantant in Beirut before she married the Smyrna hairdresser who afterwards made a fortune buying licorice root from the Arabs. The girl (there was no denying the lissome grace of her serpentine slenderness) was sipping her pink rose-leaf sherbet in a balcony above the open court when Herr X—— had been asked to sing along towards midnight, and the fervid passion of his upturned glances as he sung "Du Bist Wie Eine Blume" as an encore to "Ich Liebe Dich" had made enough of an impression on my mind to need no more than the reminder vouchsafed me to recall it.
Evidently (perhaps because I had not furnished him with a similar reason) Herr Romeo did not trace any connection between my present well-rounded, "sea-faring" figure and the sun-dried, fever-wrecked anatomy I had dragged into Aleppo in 1912, for I noted that his eyes had passed over me impersonally twice or thrice without a flicker of recognition. The explosiveness of my exultant chortle, however, must have assailed the ear of the German officer standing a couple of paces in front of me, for he turned round quickly and asked if I had spoken to him.
"No—er—not exactly," I stammered, adding, at the promptings of a sudden reckless impulse,"but I would like to ask if you knew when Lieutenant X—— over there left the Bagdad Railway for the flying service?"
"He was at the head office in Frankfurt when the war began, and joined shortly afterwards," the young officer replied promptly, stepping back beside me. Then, as the somewhat surprising nature of the query burst upon him, a look of astonishment flushed his face and a pucker of suspicion drew his bushy brows together in a perturbed frown. "But may I ask—" he began.
"And his brother who was with him in Aleppo—the one with the scar on his cheek and the top of one ear sliced off," I pressed; "where is he?"
"Died of fever in Nishbin," again came the prompt answer. "But" (blurting it out quickly) "how do you know about them?"
Being human, and therefore weak, it was not in me to enlighten him with the truth, and to add that I was merely a second-class Yankee hack writer, temporarily togged out in an R.N.V.R. uniform to regularize my position of "Keeper of the Records" of the Allied Naval Armistice Commission. No, I couldn't do that. Indeed, everything considered, I am inclined to think that I rendered a better service to the Allied cause whenI squared my shoulders importantly and delivered myself oracularly of, "It is our business to know" (impressive pause) "all."
My reward was worthy of the effort. "Ach, it is but true," sighed the young officer resignedly. "The English Intelligence is wonderful, as we have too often found out."
"It is not bad," I admitted modestly, as I strolled over to make a note of the fact that the machine-gun mounting of one of theFrederichafenshad not been removed.
I could see that my young friend was bursting to impart to Lieutenant X—— the fact that he was a "marked man," but it was just as well that no opportunity offered in the course of the inspection. That the ominous news had been broken at luncheon, however, I felt certain from the fact that when, missing X—— from the group of officers who saluted us from the doorway of the Casino on our departure, I cast a furtive glance at the upper windows, it surprised him in the act of withdrawing behind one of the lace curtains. I only hope he has nothing on his conscience in the way of hospital bombings and the like. If he has, it can hardly have failed to occur to him that his name is inscribed on the Allies' "black-list," and that he will have to stand trial in due course.
It's a strange thing, this cropping up of half-remembered faces in new surroundings. The very next day, in the course of the visit to the Zeppelin station at Nordholz—but I will not anticipate.
Under the terms of the armistice the Germans agreed to render all naval seaplanes unfit for use by removing their propellers, machine-guns, and bomb-dropping equipment, and dismantling their wireless and ignition systems. To see that this was carried out on a single machine was not much of a task, but multiplied by the several scores in such a station as Norderney, it became a formidable labour. To equalize the physical work, the sub-commission for seaplane stations arranged that the British and American officers included in it should take turn-and-turn about in active inspection and checking the result of the latter with the lists furnished in advance by the Germans. At Norderney the "active service" side of the program fell to the lot of the two American officers to carry out. The swift pace they set at the outset slowed down materially toward the finish, and it was a pair of very weary officers that dropped limply from the last twoAlbatrossesand sat down upon a pontoon to recover their breath. It was, I believe, Lieut.-Commander L—— who, ruefully rubbing down a cramp which persisted in knottinghis left calf, declared that he had just computed that his combined clamberings in the course of the inspection were equal to ascending and descending a mountain half a mile high.
Practically all of the machines at Norderney were of the tried and proven types—Brandenburgs,Albatrosses,Frederichafens,Gothas, etc.—already well-known to the Allies. (It was not until the great experimental station at Warnemünde, in the Baltic, was visited a fortnight later that specimens of the latest types were revealed.) The Allied experts of the party were greatly impressed with the excellence of construction of all of the machines, none of them appearing to have suffered in the least as a consequence of a shortage of materials. The steel pontoons in particular—a branch of construction to which the Germans had given much attention, and with notable success—came in for especially favourable comment. (The Commander of the station, by the way, showed us one of these pontoons which he had had fitted with an engine and propeller and used in duck-shooting.) The general verdict seemed to be that the Germans had little to learn from any one in the building of seaplanes, and that this was principally due to the fact that they had concentrated upon it for oversea work, where the British had been going in more and morefor swift "carrier" ships launching aeroplanes. It was by aeroplanes launched from the "carrier"Furiousthat the great Zeppelin station at Tondern was practically destroyed last summer, and there is no doubt that this kind of a combination can accomplish far more effective work—providing, of course, that the power using it has command of the sea—than anything that can be done by seaplanes. It was the fact that Germany didnothave control of the sea, rather than any lack of ingenuity or initiative, that pinned her to the seaplane, and, under the circumstances, it has to be admitted that she made very creditable use of the latter.
The one new type of machine at Norderney (although the existence of it had been known to the Allies for some time) was the "giant" monoplane seaboat, quite the most remarkable machine of the kind in the world at the present time. Though its span of something like 120 feet is less than that of a number of great aeroplanes already in use, its huge breadth of wing gave it a plane area of enormous size. The boat itself was as large—and apparently as seaworthy—as a good-sized steam launch, and so roomy that one could almost stand erect inside of it. It quite dwarfed anything of the kind I had ever seen before. Nor was the boat, spacious as it was, the only closed-inspace. Twenty feet or more above the deck of it, between the wings, was a large "box" containing, among other things, a very elaborately equippedsound-proofwireless room. The technical instruments of control and navigation—especially the very compact "Gyro" compasses—stirred the Allied experts to an admiration they found difficult to restrain.
One of the German officers who had accompanied us from Wilhelmshaven told me something of the history of this greatest of monoplanes. "This flying boat," he said, while we waited for the somewhat lengthy inspection to be completed, "was the last great gift that Count Zeppelin" (he spoke the name with an awe that was almost adoration) "gave to his country before he died. He was terribly disappointed by the failure of the Zeppelin airship as an instrument for bombing, and the last months of his life were spent in designing something to take its place. He realized that the size of the mark the airship offered to the constantly improving anti-aircraft artillery, together with the invention of the explosive bullet and the increasing speed and climbing power of aeroplanes, put an end for ever to the use of Zeppelins where they would be exposed to attack. He set about to design a heavier-than-air machine that would be powerful enough to carry areally great weight of bombs, and the 'Giant' you see here is the result.
"As Count Zeppelin did not believe that it would ever be possible to land a machine of this weight and size on the earth, he made it a flying boat. But it was not intended for flights over water at all in the first place—that was to be simply for rising from and landing in. It was to be kept at one of our seaplane stations on the Belgian coast, as near as possible to the Front, and from here it was to go for bombing flights behind the enemy lines. But before it was completed experience had proved that it was quite practicable to land big machines on the earth, and so the 'Giant' found itself superseded as a bomber. It was then that it was brought to the attention of the Naval Flying Service, and we, recognizing in it the possibilities of an ideal machine for long-distance reconnaissance, took it over and completed it. Now, although a few changes have been made in the direction of making it more of a 'sea' machine, it does not differ greatly from the original designs of Count Zeppelin."
As to how the machine had turned out in practice he was, naturally, rather non-committal. The monoplane, he thought, had the advantage over a biplane for sea use that its wings were much higher above the water, and therefore much lesslikely to get smashed up by heavy waves. He admitted that this machine had proved extremely difficult to fly—or rather to land—and that it had been employed exclusively for "school" purposes, for the training of pilots to fly the others of the same type that had been building. Now that the war was over, he had some doubts as to whether these would ever be completed. "We are having to modify so many of our plans, you see," he remarked naïvely.
On the fuselage of several of the machines there were evidences that signs or marks had been scratched out and painted over, and I took it that the words or pictures so recently obliterated had probably been of a character calculated to be offensive to the visiting Allied officers. One little thing had been overlooked, however, or else left because it was in a corner somewhat removed from the ebb and flow of the tide of inspection. I discovered it while passing along to the machine shops in the rear of one of the hangars, and later contrived to manœuvre myself back to it for a confirmatory survey. It was nothing more or less than a map of the United States which some angry pilot had thoroughlystrafedby stabbing with a penknife blade. I was not able to study it long enough to be sure just what the method of the madness was, but—from the fact that theenvirons of New York, Pittsburg, Philadelphia and Detroit had been literally pecked to pieces—it seemed possible that it might have been an attack on the industrial centres—perhaps because they were turning out so much munitions for the Allies.
There were two other maps tacked up on the same wall. One was of Africa, with the ex-German colonies coloured red, with lighter shaded areas overflowing from them on to British, Belgian, French, and Portuguese possessions. This may have been (I have since thought) a copy of the famous map of "Africa in 1920," issued in Germany early in the war, but I had no time to puzzle out the considerable amount of explanatory lettering on it. So far as I could see, this map was unmarked, not even a black mourning border having been added.
The third map was of Asia, and a long, winding and apparently rather carefully made cut running from the north-west corner toward the centre completely defeated me to account for. The fact that it ran through Asia Minor, Northern Syria, and down into Mesopotamia seemed to point to some connection with the Bagdad Railway—perhaps astrafeat an enterprise which, first and last, had deflected uselessly so huge an amount of German money and material.
The inspection over and the terms of the armistice having been found most explicitly carried out, we returned to the reception room of the Casino for lunch. Although the Commander protested that all arrangements had been made for serving us withmittagessen, our senior officer, acting under orders, replied that we had brought our own food and that this, with a pitcher of water, would be quite sufficient. The water was sent, and with it two beautiful long, slender bottles ofHockwhich—as they were never opened—only served to accentuate the flatness of the former.
We heard the officers of the station trooping up the stairs as we unrolled our sandwiches, and just as we were pulling up around the table some one threw open a piano in the room above our heads and struck three ringing chords. "Bang!"—interval—"Bang!"—interval—"Bang!" they crashed one after the other, and the throb of them set the windows rattling and the pictures (paintings of the station's fallen pilots) swaying on the wall.
"Prelude in G flat," breathed Major N—— tensely, as he waited with eye alight and ear acock for the next notes. "My word, the chap's a master!"
But the next chord was never struck. Instead, there was a gruff order, the scrape of feet on thefloor, and the slam of a closed piano, followed by the confused rumble of several angry voices speaking at the same time. Then silence.
"Looks like the majority of our hosts don't think 'Inspection Day's' quite the proper occasion for tinkling Rachmaninoff on the ivories," observed Lieutenant-Commander L——, U.S.N., after which he and Major N—— began discussing plans for educating the popular taste for "good music" and the rest of us fell to on our sandwiches.
The fog—that all-pervading East Frisian fog—which had been thickening steadily during the inspection, settled down in a solid bank while we sat at lunch. With a scant dozen yards of visibility, the Commander rated the prospects of crossing to the mainland so unfavourable that he suggested our remaining for the night at one of the Norderney hotels still open, and going over to Borkum (which we were planning to reach by destroyer) the next morning by launch. It was the difficulty in securing a prompt confirmation of what would have been a time-saving change of schedule which led Captain H—— to reject the plan and decide in favour of making an attempt to reach Norddeich in, and in spite of, the fog. The Commander shook his head dubiously. "My men who know the passage best have left the station,"he said; "but I will do the best I can for you, and perhaps you will have luck." He saw us off at the landing with the same quiet courtesy with which he had received us. He was a very likable chap, that Commander; perhaps the one individual with whom we were thrown into intimate contact in the course of the whole visit to whom one would have thought of applying that term.
Noticing that the launch in which we were backing away from the landing was at least double the size of the one in which we had crossed, I asked one of the German officers if the greater draught of it was not likely to increase our chances of running aground.
"Of course," he replied; "but the larger cabin will also be much more comfortable if we have to wait for the next tide to get off."
As the launch swung slowly round in the mud-and-sand stained welter of reversed screws, I bethought me of the "Riddle" again, and fished it forth from my pocket. It was disappointing to leave without having had a glimpse of the town where "Dollmann" and his "rose-brown-cheeked" daughter Clara had lived, but the fog closed us round in a grey-walled cylinder scarcely more in diameter than the launch was long. But we were right on the course, I reflected, of the dinghy which "Davies" piloted with such consummateskill through just such a fog ("five yards or so was the radius of our vision," wrote "Carruthers") to Memmert to spy on the conference at the salvage plant on that desolate sand-spit. I turned up the chapter headed "Blindfold to Memmert," and read how, sounding with a notched boathook in the shallows that masterly young sailor had felt his way across theBuse Tiefto the eastern outlet of theMemmert Balje, the only channel deep enough to carry the dinghy through the half-bared sandbanks between Juist and the mainland. Our own problem, it seemed to me, was a very similar one to that which confronted "Davies," only, in our case, it was the entrance of the channel where theBuse Tiefnarrowed between theHohes Riffand theItzendorf Platethat had to be located. Failing that, we were destined to roost till the next tide on a sandbank, and that meant we were out for all night, as there would be no chance of keeping to a channel, however well marked, in both fog and darkness.
Ten minutes went by—fifteen—twenty—with no sign of the buoy which marked the opening we were trying to strike. Now the engines were eased down to quarter-speed, and she lost way just in time to back off from a shiningglacisof steel-grey sand that came creeping out of the fog. For the next ten minutes, with bare steerageway on, she nosed cautiously this way and that, like a man groping for a doorway in the dark. Then a hail from the lookout on the bow was echoed by exclamations of relief from the German officers. "Here is the outer buoy," one of them called across to us reassuringly; "the rest of the way is well marked and easy to follow. We will soon be at Norddeich."
Presently a fresh buoy appeared as we nosed on shoreward, then a second, and then a third, continuing the line of the first two. Speed was increased to "half," and the intervals of picking up the marks correspondingly cut down. Confident that there was nothing more to worry about, I pulled out "The Riddle" again, for I had just recalled that it was about halfway to Norddeich, in theBuse Tief, that "Carruthers" had brought off his crowning exploit, the running aground of the tug and "invasion" lighter—with Von Brunning, Boehme, and the mysterious "cloaked passenger"—as they neared the end of the successful night trial trip in the North Sea. Substituting himself for the man at the wheel by a ruse, he had edged the tug over to starboard and was just thinking "What the Dickens'll happen to her?" when the end came; "aeuthanasiaso mild and gradual (for the sands are fringed with mud) that the disaster was on us before I was aware of it.There was just the tiniest premonitory shuddering as our keel clove the buttery medium, a cascade of ripples from either beam, and the wheel jammed to rigidity in my hands as the tug nestled up to her final resting-place."
And very like that it was with us. It was a guttural oath from somewhere forward rather than any perceptible jar that told me the launch had struck, and it was not till after the screw had been churning sand for half a minute that there was any perceptible heel. It had come about through one of the buoys being missing and the next in line out of place, one of the Germans reckoned; but whatever the cause, there we were—stuck fast. Or, at least, we would have been with any less resourceful and energetic a crew. If their very lives had depended on it, those four or five German seamen could not have worked harder, nor to better purpose, to get that launch free. At the end of a quarter of an hour their indefatigable efforts were rewarded, and a half hour later we were settling ourselves in the warm compartment of our waiting train. The Hun has no proper sense of humour. Reverse therôles, and any British bluejackets I have ever known would have run a German Armistice Commission on to the first sandbank that hove in sight, and damned the consequences.
I have written in a previous chapter of the great contrast observed between themoraleof the men at Norderney, and the other seaplane stations visited by parties from the Allied Naval Commission, and that of those in the remaining German warships, accounting for the difference by the fact that the former had been kept busier than the latter, and that they had not suffered the shame of the "Great Surrender" which has cast a black, unlifting shadow upon the dregs of the High Sea Fleet. Whether the airships were kept as busy as the seaplanes right up to the end it would be difficult to say, but, whatever may be the reason for it, we found themoraleof the great Zeppelin stations suffered very little if at all in comparison with that of the working bases of the naval heavier-than-air machines.
For all the barbarity of many of their raids, there was splendid stuff in the officers and crews of the Zeppelins which engaged in the campaign of "frightfulness" against England, and it is idle to deny it. In a better cause, or even in worthierwork for an indifferent cause, the skill and courage repeatedly displayed would have been epic. Considering what these airships faced on every one of their later raids—what their commanders and crews must have known were the odds against them after the night when the destruction of the first Zeppelin over Cuffley, in September, 1916, proved that the British had effectually solved the problem of igniting the hydrogen of the inner ballonettes—one cannot but conclude that themoraleof the whole personnel must have been very high during even this trying period. If it had not been high, there would undoubtedly have been mutinies at the airship stations, such as are known to have occurred on so many occasions among the submarine crews. Even in the light of present knowledge, there is nothing to indicate that there had ever been serious trouble in getting Zeppelin crews for the most hazardous of raids. So far as could be gathered from our visits to the great airship stations of the North Sea littoral, this very excellentmoraleprevailed to the last; indeed, practically everything seen indicated that it still prevails.
Of the several German naval airship stations visited by parties from the Allied Commission, the most important were Althorn, Nordholz, and Tondern. The interest in the latter was largelysentimental, due to the fact that it was practically wiped out last summer as the result of a bombing raid by aeroplanes launched from theFurious. It was known that little had been done to rehabilitate it as a service station since that time, and the Commission's airship experts' desire to visit what was left of the sheds was actuated by a wish to see what damage had been done rather than by any feeling that the station really counted any longer as a base of Germany's naval air service. Our visit to the ruins of Tondern, and what we learned there of the way it was destroyed, is a story by itself, and I will tell it in a separate chapter.
Germany had very ambitious plans for the development of the Althorn station, and it is probable at one time that it was intended that it should supersede even the mighty Nordholz as the premier home of naval Zeppelins. If such were really the intention, however, there is no doubt that it was effectually put an end to by a great fire and explosion which occurred there about the middle of last year, the material destruction from which—in sheds and Zeppelins—was vastly greater even than that from the British raid on Tondern. The Germans speak of this disaster with a good deal of bitterness, usually alluding to the cause as "mysterious," but rather giving the impression that they believe it to have been the work of"Allied agents." If this is true, the job will stand as a fair offset against any single piece of work of the same character that German agents perpetrated in France, Britain, or America. Only the blowing up of the great Russian national arsenal in the second year of the war is comparable to it for the amount of material damage wrought. Althorn remained a station of some importance down to the end of the war, however, and that the Germans still expected to do important work from there was indicated by the fact that one of its new sheds housed the great "L-71," the largest airship in the world at the present time.
But it was in the great Nordholz station that the airship sub-commission was principally interested, not only for what it was at the moment—incomparably the greatest and most modern of German Zeppelin aerodromes—but also for what had been accomplished from there in the past, and even for what might conceivably be done from there in the future. Nordholz is a name that would have been burned deep into the memories of South and East Coast Britons had it been known three years ago, as it is now, that practically all of the Zeppelin raids over England were launched from there. The popular idea at the time—which even appears to have persisted with most Londoners down to the present—was thatairship stations had been constructed in Belgium, and that these alternated with those of Germany in dispatching raiders across the North Sea to England. A single glimpse of such a station as Nordholz is enough to show that the huge amount of labour and expense involved in building even a comparatively temporary aerodrome fit for regular Zeppelin work would have been fatal to the idea of establishing such installations in Belgium, or anywhere else where Germany did not feel certain of remaining in fairly permanent control. The station at Jamboli, in Bulgaria, for instance, is known to have been able only to dispose of one or two Zeppelins, and considerable intervals between flights were imperative for keeping them in trim. It would never have been equal to the strain of steady raiding.
There were other German airship stations within cruising distance of England, but Nordholz was so much the best equipped, especially in the first years of the war when Zeppelin raiding was the most active, that the most of the work, and by long odds the most effective of it, was done from there. There were grim tales to be told by that band of hard-eyed, straight-mouthed, bull-necked pilots—all that survived some scores of raids over England and some hundreds of reconnaissance flights over the North Sea—who receivedand conducted round the Naval Commission party, though, unfortunately, we did not meet upon a footing that made it possible more than to listen to the account of an occasional incident suggested by something we were seeing at the moment.
The route which our party traversed from Wilhelmshaven to the Nordholz airship station—the latter lies six or eight miles south of the Elbe estuary in the vicinity of Cuxhaven—was a different one from any followed on our previous visits, all of which had taken us more to the south or east. It was through the same low-lying, dyked-in country, however, where the water difficulty, unlike most other parts of the world, was one of drainage rather than of irrigation. Great Dutch windmills turned ponderously under the impulse of the light sea-breeze, as they pumped the water off the flooded land. Cultivation, as in the region traversed to the south, was at a standstill, but overflowing barns—great capacious structures they were, with brick walls and lofty thatched roofs—proved that the harvest had been a generous one.
Instead of routing our two-car special over the all-rail routeviâBremen, distance and time were saved by leaving it at a small terminus opposite Bremerhaven, crossing to the latter by tug, andproceeding north in more or less direct line to our destination. Little time was lost in getting from one train to the other. The tug, which had been held in readiness for our arrival, cast off as soon as the last of the party had clambered over its side, and the short run across the grey-green tide of the estuary was made in less than a quarter of an hour. Four powerful army cars—far better machines, these, than the dirigible junk heaps we had been compelled to use at Wilhelmshaven—were waiting beside the slip, and another ten minutes of what struck me as very fast and reckless driving, considering it was through the main streets of a good-sized city, brought us to the station and another two-car special. Both going and returning, it was the best "clicking" lot of connections any of the parties made in the course of the whole visit, showing illuminatingly what our "hosts" could do in that line when they were minded to.
Swift as was our passage through the streets of Bremerhaven, there was still opportunity to observe many evidences of the vigorous growth it had made the decade preceding the outbreak of the war, and of the plans that had been made in expectation of a continuation of that growth. Blocks and blocks of imposing new buildings—now but half-tenanted—and the nuclei of what had been budding suburbs were more suggestive ofthe appearance of a Western American mushroom metropolis after the collapse of a boom than a town of Europe. The railway station—a fine example of Germany's so-called "New Art" architecture—in its spacious waiting-rooms, broad subways, and commodious train sheds looked capable of serving the city of half a million or so which it had confidently been expected the empire's second port would become at the end of another few years. As things have turned out, Bremerhaven will at least have the consolation of knowing that it is not likely to be troubled with "station crushes" for some decades to come.
The astonishingly well-dressed and orderly crowd of a thousand or more waiting outside the portal of the station in expectation of the arrival of a train-load of returning soldiers made no unfriendly demonstration of any character. On the contrary, indeed, as at Wilhelmshaven, a number of children waved their hands as our cars drove up, and a goodly number of men solemnly bared their heads as we filed past. The special which awaited us at a platform reached after walking through a long vaulted subway running beneath the tracks consisted, like the one we had left on the other side of the river, of an engine and two cars. The rolling stock of this one was in better shape than that of the other, however, and with abetter maintained road-bed to run over, the last leg of our journey was covered at an average speed of over thirty miles an hour, quite the fastest we travelled by train anywhere in Germany.
For the most of the way the line continued running through mile after mile of water-logged, sea-level areas crossed by innumerable drainage canals and bricked roadways gridironing possible inundation areas with their raised embankments. At the end of an hour, however, the patches of standing water disappeared, and presently the bulk of the great sheds of Nordholz began to notch the northern skyline, where they stood crowning the crest of the first rising ground in the littoral between the Dutch frontier and the Elbe. With only a minute or two of delay in the Nordholz yards, the train was switched to the airship station's own spur, and at the end of another mile had pulled up on a siding directly opposite the main entrance.
The commander of the station, with two or three other officers, was waiting to receive us as we stepped out on the ground. Ranged up alongside this row of heel-clicking, frock-coated, be-medalled and be-sworded Zeppelin officers was an ancient individual of a type which seemed to recall the fatherly old Jehus of the piping days of Oberammergau. Every time the officers saluted,he raised his hat, bowed low from the waist, and exclaimed, "Good morning to you, gentlemen." When the last of us had been thus greeted, he called out a comprehensive, "This way to the carriages, gentlemen," and trotted off ahead, bell-wether fashion, through the gate.
Here we found waiting four small brakes and a diminutive automobile, the sum total of the station's resources in rapid transit, according to the commander. Getting into the motor to precede us as pilot, he asked the party to dispose itself as best it could in the horse-drawn vehicles. Then, with old "Jehu" holding the reins of the first vehicle and men in air-service uniform—utter strangers to horses they were, too—tooling the other three, we started off along a well-paved road.
A long row of very attractive red brick-and-tile houses of agreeably varied design were apparently the homes of married officers. Our way led past only the first five or six of them, but a stirring of lace curtains in every one of these told that we were running the gauntlet of hostile glances all the way. One glowering Frau—though in the semi-negligée of a "Made-in-Germany"kimonoof pale mauve, her Brunhildian brow was crowned with a "permanently Marcelled"coiffureof the kind one sees in hairdressers' windows—disdained all cover, and so stepped out upon her veranda justin time to see the elder of her blonde-braided offspring in the act of waving a Teddy Bear—or it may have been a woolly lamb or a dachshund—at the tail of the procession of invadingEngländers. She was swooping—a mauve-tailed comet with a Gorgon head—on the luckless "fraternisatress" as my brake turned a corner and the loom of a block of barracks shut "The Row" from sight, but a series of shrill squeals, piercing through the raucous grind of steel tyres on asphalt pavement, told that punishment swift and terrible was being meted out.
"More activity there than I saw in all of Bremerhaven," laconically observed the Yankee Ensign sitting next me. "Who said the German woman was lacking in temperament?"
Driving through the barracks area—where all the men in sight invariably saluted or stood at attention as we passed—and down an avenue between small but thickly set pines, the road debouched into the open, and for the first time we saw all the sheds of the great station at comparatively close range. Then we were in a position to understand with what care the site had been chosen and laid out. Occupying the only rising ground near the coast south of the Kiel Canal, it is quite free from the constant inundations whichthreaten the alluvial plain along the sea. The sheds are visible from a great distance, but it is only when one draws near them that their truly gigantic size becomes evident. Of modern buildings of utility, such as factories and exhibition structures, I do not recall one that is so impressive as these in sheer immensity. Yet the proportions of the sheds are so good that constant comparison with some familiar object of known size, such as a man, alone puts them in their proper perspective.
The sheds are built in pairs, standing side by side, and on a plan which has brought each pair on the circumference of a circle two kilometres in diameter. The chord of the arc drawn from one pair of sheds to the next in sequence is a kilometre in length, while the same distance separates each pair on the circumference from the huge revolving shed in the centre of the circle. The whole plan has something of the mystic symmetry of an ancient temple of the sun. Of the half-dozen pairs of sheds necessary to complete the circle, four had been constructed and were in use. Each shed was built to house two airships, or four for the pair. This gave a capacity of sixteen Zeppelins for the four pairs of sheds, while the two housed in the revolving shed in the centrebrought the total capacity of the station up to eighteen—a larger number, I believe, than were ever over England at one time.
Scarcely less impressive than the immensity of the sheds and the broad conception of the general plan of the station was the solidity of construction. Everything, from the quarters of the men and the officers to the hangars themselves, seemed built for all time, and to play its part in the fulfilment of some far-reaching plan. Costly and scarce as asphalt must have been in Germany, the many miles of roads connecting the various sheds were laid deep with it, and, as I had a chance to see where repairs were going on, on a heavy base of concrete. The sheds were steel-framed, concrete-floored, and with pressed asbestos sheet figuring extensively in their sides. All the daylight admitted (as we saw presently) filtered through great panes of yellow glass in the roof, shutting out the ultra-violet rays of the sun, which had been found to cause airship fabric to deteriorate rapidly.
The barracks of the men were of brick and concrete, and were built with no less regard for appearance than utility. So, too, the officers' quarters and the Casino, and the large and comfortable-looking houses for married officers I have already mentioned. All had been built very recently,many in the by no means uneffective "New Art" style, to the simple solidity of which the Germans seemed to have turned in reaction from the Gothic. Beyond all doubt Germany was planning years ahead with Nordholz, both as to war and peace service. They were quite frank in speaking of the ambitions they still have in respect of the latter, and (from casual remarks dropped once or twice by officers) I should be very much surprised if their plans for developing the Zeppelin as a super-war machine have been entirely shelved.
The road along which we drove to reach the first pair of sheds to be visited ran through extensive plantations of scraggly screw-pine, which appear to have been set—before the site was chosen for an air station—for the purpose of binding together the loose soil and preventing its shifting in the heavy winds. Wherever the trees had encroached too closely upon the hangars, the plantations had been burned off. Over one considerable area the accumulations of ash in the depressions showed the destruction to have been comparatively recent, and this I learned had been burned over, in the panic which followed the blowing up of the Tondern sheds by British bombing machines last summer, in order to minimize the risk from the raid which Nordholz itself neverceased to expect right down to the day of the armistice.
The staggering size of the great sheds became more and more impressive as we drew nearer, and when the procession finally turned and went clattering down the roadway between one of the pairs, the towering walls to left and right blotted out the sky like the cliffs of a rocky cañon. Halfway through this great defile the officers of the station were waiting to receive and conduct us round. A hard, fit, capable-looking lot of chaps they were. Every one of them had at least one decoration, most of them many, and among these were two or three OrdersPour de Mérite, the German V.C. One at least of them—the great long-distance pilot, Von Butlar—was famous internationally, and few among the senior of them (as I was assured shortly) but had been over England more than once. They were the best of Germany's surviving Zeppelin pilots, and one was interested to compare the type with that of the pick of her sea-pilots as we had seen them at Norderney.
Running my eye round their faces as the mingled parties began moving slowly toward the side door of the first shed to be inspected, I recognized at once in these Zeppelin officers the same hard, cold, steady eyes, the same aggressive jaw, and the same wide, thin-lipped mouth that hadpredominated right through the officers we had met at Norderney. These, I should say, are characteristic of the great majority of the outstanding men of both of Germany's air services. The steady eye and the firm jaw are, indeed, characteristic of most successful flying men, but it is the "hardness," not to say cruelty, of the mouth which differentiates the German from the high-spirited, devil-may-care air-warrior of England and America.
These Zeppelin pilots seemed to me to run nearer to the German naval officer type than did the seaplane officers. The latter were nearly always slender of body, wiry and light of foot, where (though there were several exceptions, including the great Von Butlar) the former were mainly of generous girth, with the typical German bull neck corrugating into rolls of fat above the backs of their collars. A Major of the R.A.F., who had been walking at my side and doing a bit of "sizing up" on his own account, put the difference rather well when he said, as we waited our turn to pass in through the small side door of the great grey wall of the shed: "If I was taking temporary refuge in a hospital, convent, or orphan asylum during a German air raid, I'd feel a lot better about it if I knew that it was some of those seaplane chaps flying overhead rather than some ofthis batch. That thick-set one there, with the cast in his eye and the corded neck, has a face that wouldn't need much make-up for the Hun villain in a Lyceum melodrama. Yes, I'm sure these Zepp. drivers will average a jolly lot 'Hunnier' than the run of their seaplane men."
Up to that moment my experience of German airships had been limited to the view of them as slender silver pencils of light gliding swiftly across the searchlight-slashed skies of London, and three or four inspections of the tangled masses of aluminium and charred wood which remained when ill-starred raiders had paid the supreme penalty. I was indebted to the Zeppelins for a number of thrills, but only two or three of them (and one was in the form of a bomb which gave me a shower bath of plate glass in Kingsway) were comparable to the sheer wave of amazement which swept over me when, having passed from the cold grey light of the winter morning into the warm golden glow of the interior of the big shed to which we had come, I looked up and beheld the towering loom of the starboard side of "L-68," with the sweeping lines of her, fining to points at both ends, exaggerating monstrously a length which was sufficiently startling even when expressed in figures. The secret of the hold which the Zeppelin had for so long on the imagination ofthe German people was not hard for me to understand after that. It was easy to see how they could have been led to believe that it could lay Paris and London in ruins, and that the very sight of it would in time cause the enemies of their country to sue for peace. One saw, too, how hard it must have been for them finally to believe that the Zeppelin had been mastered by the aeroplane, and that the high hopes they had built upon it had really crashed with the fallen raiders.
There were two Zeppelins in the shed we had entered—"L-68" and another monster of practically the same size. The former, with great irregularly shaped strips of fabric dangling all along its under side, suggested a gigantic shark in process of being ripped up the belly for skinning. Being deflated, the weight of its frame was supported by a number of heavy wooden props evenly distributed along either side from end to end. Its mate, on the other hand, being full of hydrogen and practically ready for flight, had to be prevented from rising and bumping against the yellow skylights by a series of light cables, the upper ends of which were attached at regular intervals along both sides of the framework, while below they were made fast to heavy steel shoes which ran in grooves set in the concrete floor. The latter contrivance—especially an arrangementfor the instant slipping of the cable—was very cleverly devised and greatly interested the Allied experts.
There were two or three things the popular mind had credited the modern Zeppelin with embodying which we did not find in these latest examples of German airship development. One of these was an "anti-bomb protector" on the top, something after the style of the steel nets erected over London banks and theatres for the purpose of detonating dropped explosives before they penetrated the roof. The fact that attempts to destroy Zeppelins by bomb had invariably—with the exception of the one brought down by Warneford in Belgium in 1915—resulted in failure, was doubtless largely responsible for this belief in the existence of a protecting net, whereas the reason for those failures is probably to be found in the fact that only about one bomb in a hundred will find enough resistance in striking an airship to detonate. At any rate, there were no indications that either the earlier or later Zeppelins we saw had ever been protected in this way. Indeed, we did not even see a single one of the machine-guns, which every one had taken for granted were mounted on top of all Zeppelins to resist aeroplane attack, though these, of course, with their platforms, may well have been removed in the courseof the disarmament imposed by the armistice terms.
Nor had these late airships the bright golden colour of those that one saw over London in the earlier raids. That the refulgent tawniness of them was not due entirely to the reflected beams of the searchlights was proved by the uncharred fragments of fabric one had picked up at Cuffley and Potters' Bar. But the German designers had been giving a good deal of study to invisibility, since that time, with the result that these new airships were coloured over all their exposed surfaces a dull slaty black that would hardly reflect a beam of bright sunshine.
The cars, which were both smaller and lighter than those from the airships brought down in England, were all underslung, and none of them was enclosed in the framework, as had often been stated. Even these were not built entirely of metal, heavy fabric being used to close up all spaces where strength was not required. The bomb-dropping devices had been removed, but the numbered "switchboard" in the rearmost car, from which they could be released, still remained. The cars, free from every kind of protuberance that could meet the resistance of the air, were effectively and gracefully "stream-lined." The framework and bodies of the cars were made ofthe light but strong "duraluminum" alloy, which the Germans have spent many years in perfecting for this purpose. A small fragment of strut which I picked up under "L-68" has proved, on comparison, considerably lighter in specific gravity than similar pieces from three of the Zeppelins brought down early in the war. Indeed, in spite of its admixture of heavier metals for "stiffening," the latest alloy seems scarcely heavier than aluminum itself.
The inspection of an airship to see that it had been disarmed according to the provisions of the armistice was, as may be imagined, rather more of a job than a similar inspection of even a "giant" seaplane. In a Zeppelin that is more or less the same size as theMauretaniathe distances are magnificent, and while most of the inspection was confined to the cars, that of the wireless, with a search for possible concealed machine-gun mountings, involved not a little climbing and clambering. One's first sight of the interior of a deflated Zeppelin—in an inflated one the bulging ballonettes obstruct the view considerably—is quite as impressive in its way as the premier survey of it from the outside. No 'tween decks prospect in the largest ship afloat, cut down as it is by bulkheads, offers a fifth of the unbroken sweep of vision that one finds opened before him as heclimbs up inside the tail of a modern airship. Although airy ladders and soaring lengths of framework intervene, they are no more than lace-work fretting the vast space, and the eye roams free to where the side-braces of the narrow "walk" seem to run together in the nose. Only, so consummate the illusion wrought on the eye and brain by the strange perspective, that "meeting point" seems more like six hundred miles away than six hundred feet. The effect is more like looking to the end of the universe than to the end of a Zeppelin. No illusion ever devised on the stage to give "distance" to a scene could be half so convincing. All that was "cosmic" in you vibrated in sympathy, and it took but a shake of the reins of the imagination to fancy yourself tripping off down that unending "Road to Anywhere" to the music of the Spheres. You—
"Gee, but ain't that a peach of a little 'Gyro'?" filtering up through the fabric beneath my feet awakened me to the fact that the inspection of "L-68" having reached the rearmost car, was near its finish. Clambering back to earth, I found the party just reassembling to go to the carriages for the drive to the great revolving shed, which was the next to be visited.
Its central revolving shed is perhaps the most arresting feature of the Nordholz station. It isbuilt on the lines of a "twin" engine turntable, with each track housed over, and with every dimension multiplied twenty-five or thirty-fold. The turning track is laid in a bowl-shaped depression about ten feet deep and seven hundred feet in diameter. The floors of both sheds (which stand side by side, with only a few feet between) are flush with the level of the ground, so that the airships they house may be run out and in without a jolt. The turning mechanism, which is in the rear of the sheds and revolves with them, is entirely driven by electricity. The shifting of a lever sets the whole great mass in motion, and stops it to a millimetre of the point desired, the latter being indicated on a dial by a needle showing the direction of the wind.
The Germans assured us—and on this point the British and American airship experts were in full agreement with them—that the revolving shed is absolutely the ideal installation, as it makes it possible to launch or house a ship directlyintothe wind, and so allows them to be used on days when it would be out of the question to launch them from, or return them to, an ordinary hangar. The one point against it seems to be its almost prohibitive cost. This central shed at Nordholz was designed some time before the war, and was completed a year or so after its outbreak. The Germansdid not tell what it had cost, but they did say that the latter was so great—both in money and in steel deflected from other uses—that they had not contemplated the building of another during the continuance of the war.