Technically an expert of the highest order, modest and courageous, he was idolized by his men, and his conduct when once, off the port of Memel, the propellers of his submarine became caught in some German nets, would have afforded ample reason for this, even had it not been an expression of a character already well known to them. Whether or no he had been taking a legitimate risk, for the predicament in which they found themselves, he instantly took the full blame. For several hours, they had tried in vain to free themselves, and it looked as if at last they had been outwitted. Calling his crew together, he frankly confessed to them that he had taken them into this trap and that he saw no way out. His intention was, therefore, if the worst should come to the worst, to rise to the surface and give them a chance for their lives, he himself remaining below to blow up the vessel and save it from capture. Happily, by a last skilful and well-planned manoeuvre, he succeeded in freeing the propellers from the entanglement, and the E19 was once more at liberty, having never been nearer death, to continue her career.
It was not only as a submarine commander of the first quality, however, that Cromie was unobtrusively making his mark, but as an organizer and administrator in charge of his flotilla through a period of ever-increasing difficulty. Busy, as he was, arranging for repairs and supplies, and safeguarding the moral of his men in strange and remote surroundings, he found or made time to learn the Russian language, with results quite impossible to over-estimate. By the end of 1916, he had acquired—let us rather say there had come to him—a reputation extending far beyond the little technical world of the British submarine contingent. For patent efficiency, complete honesty, and entire fearlessness, there are no international boundaries; and in Cromie there were added to these a very remarkable patience and deep human sympathies. It was these qualities, recognized by all parties, that, throughout the abrupt and dark changes of the Russian Revolution, invested Cromie with an unique influence, responsible for the saving of scores of lives.
Stationed at Reval, it was largely due to Cromie that, when the naval mutiny broke out in the Russian Fleet, many officers were saved from the fate that befell their less fortunate colleagues at Helsingfors and Cronstadt. With his headquarters on the Russian cruiser Dwina, Cromie lived through the spectacle of beholding his own Russian servant appointed to the command of the vessel; yet, though he had vigorously deplored the formation of the committees that took over the charge of the Fleet and appealed to them in vain to uphold the discipline vital to the preservation of the Russian navy, their personal respect for him enabled him to hold his flotilla together and even to carry on offensive warfare.
It was not for very long, however, that this continued possible. The débâcle that had set in could not be stayed; and, after the treaty between Germany and the Bolshevik Government had been signed at Brest-Litovsk, hope flickered out. There was then nothing left but to destroy the British submarines, and for their gallant crews to return home; but Captain Cromie, as he had then become, was appointed naval attaché at Petrograd.
Here he carried into a new and perilous sphere the same qualities that had already distinguished him, and his influence with all sections was of a kind possessed by no other British representative. Even when the British Embassy was withdrawn, he remained at his post in spite of the fast-accumulating threats of hunger, pestilence, fanaticism, and German intrigue. He was at last to die, at Bolshevik hands, in a Petrograd brawl in September, 1918; but yet without leaving, in spite of the madness that slew him, a real enemy in Russia.
A bold and skilful seaman, a first-class organizer and leader of men, a naturally sagacious diplomatist, he was of a type not too common even in the navy itself. A Chevalier of St. George, in the case of Francis Cromie, it may be said that the words, indeed, bore their literal meaning, and few of our losses in the turmoil of war were less reparable than his.