The next day, followed by the French destroyer Mangini, the youngest destroyer in the British navy—le roi est mort, vive le roi, the Shark had been lost at Jutland; this was the new one—anchored, the symbol of victory, off Constantinople; and, on November 13th, the British and French Fleets, led by the flagship Superb, steamed to their anchorage. Superb, Téméraire, Lord Nelson, and Agamemnon—half the world's history lay in their names—they were followed by the cruisers and destroyer-flotillas of the British fleet of occupation. Behind them came a French squadron, followed in its turn by the Italian and Greek warships, the bulk of the fleets remaining in the Sea of Marmora, and only certain units entering the Bosphorus. The Superb and Téméraire anchored near the European shore, facing the Sultan's Palace and the Chamber of Deputies; astern of them lay the French, and, behind these again, the Italian and the Greek men-of-war. Every precaution against treachery had been taken, but this proved to be unnecessary; and, within the next two or three weeks, the whole of the Turkish Fleet and the battle-cruiser Goeben had been formally surrendered. With them, unseen, but none the less present, the German empire of the East had given up its sceptre.
Meanwhile, in the North Sea, two thousand miles away, more than that had laid down its arms; and there had begun off Harwich, on Wednesday, November 20th, the delivery into our hands of the German submarines. Conceived in sin, these had been foul from the beginning—they had never even been built but as instruments of murder—and it was perhaps fitting that they should be the first of the German Fleet to be handed over. Nor had any admiral earned a better right to receive them than Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt. Leaving by moonlight at 5 o'clock in the morning in his flagship the Curacoa, followed by the light cruisers Dragon, Centaur, Coventry, Danæ, and an escort of destroyers, the leading German submarines were encountered at the appointed rendezvous soon after seven. This was at a spot thirty-five miles east of Harwich, all the British crews being at Action Stations, and the German submarines accompanied by two transports that were to take their crews back to Germany.
The first of these to appear through the mist was the ex-hospital ship Sierra Ventana followed by the Titania, succeeded in her turn by the long single file of the first detachment of twenty submarines. While Admiral Tyrwhitt advanced toward the end of the line, the cruiser Dragon was detached to lead the procession inshore, a couple of airships and three sea-planes passing and repassing overhead.
The next rendezvous was to be near Cutler's Buoy, some eight miles out of Harwich, where, from British destroyers, the crews were to be embarked that would take the submarines into harbour. These were met at about half-past ten, and there then ensued a scene of humiliation such as no great Power had ever passed through since men first went down to the sea in ships. Those of the Germans that were necessary to run the engines were to be retained at their posts, but the navigating crews for the twenty submarines were waiting in the Melampus and Firedrake. Strict orders had been issued that there were to be no demonstrations; and indeed it was rather with contempt—perhaps with a sort of amazed half-pity—that the British sailors took up their duties.
In each case the process was the same. The British officer who was to take command saluted as he stepped aboard. The German officer, with his papers ready, met him, and handed these over for inspection. The German crew was then sent forward. The British navigating officer occupied the conning-tower, and the engineer-officer went below to superintend the working of the German engine-room ratings. Leaving the transports behind, and accompanied by destroyers, the twenty U boats, in groups of five, then proceeded up the channel of the Stour, passing between the gate-ships of the buoyed steel nets. As each came to anchorage just off Parkeston Quay, she was met by a motor-launch, into which her crew was disembarked; and these, amidst the silence of thousands of spectators, were conveyed to the destroyers that took them back to the transports. From beginning to end there was no demonstration of any kind; and none was to greet the remainder of the submarines—a hundred and twenty in all—that followed them. From shame to shame, blotting the seas, they passed without comment to their prison.
With equal truth that can be said of the procession that the next day was to witness, though here the note struck was one of a tragedy of which the surrendering U boats had been incapable. For, in the mighty ships of the High Seas Fleet—travesties though they had become, as instruments of admiralty—there had been, as the British navy felt, at least the possibilities of an honourable end. Proudly built, they dated from an era in which the U boat horror was still unimagined; and, in the hands of a Drake, could Germany have produced one, they might have postponed surrender and gone down in glory. Materially as they had recovered, however, from their defeat at Jutland, from the moral reverse they had never looked up; and the disintegration had been completed by Germany's own submarine policy. Lacking a soul, the body had died; and, to many who witnessed that procession of corpses, there was a sense of almost personal indecency at presiding over such a ceremony.
It was a quarter to four in the morning of November 21st when the Grand Fleet began to get under way to form the two mighty and moving walls between which the Germans were to approach the Firth of Forth; and the advanced destroyer-flotillas and light cruisers had set out for the rendezvous the night before. For ten days the North Sea had been shrouded in a thick mist, but, as the sun rose, the clouds blew off, and the sea lay clear and white-feathered. Later, and at different places along the hundred miles or so occupied by the parallel lines of the Grand Fleet, the mists were to triumph again, but only half-heartedly, and with the sun soon re-asserting itself.
Six miles separated the two lines, and at half-past eight they went to Action Stations, the leading ships of the High Seas Fleet having been picked up an hour before by the easternmost British units. Directing the whole operation—directing, at that moment, the vastest fleet that this planet had seen—Admiral Beatty, in his flagship the Queen Elizabeth, had taken his position in the northern line, his second-in-command, Admiral Sir Charles Madden, leading the southern-line battleships in the Revenge. Guiding the Germans, in the light cruiser Cardiff, was Rear-Admiral Alexander-Sinclair.
Of the promised total, one light cruiser, the Köln, had broken down and had had to turn back, and one destroyer had struck a mine, going to the bottom, though her crew had been rescued; but, behind the Cardiff, in a slow series, moved what had been the cream of the world's second navy. Led by the Battle-Cruiser Squadron, the Hindenburg, Derfflinger, Seydlitz, Moltke, and von der Tann, came the battleships Friedrich der Grosse, flying the German Rear-Admiral's flag, the Bayern, Grosser Kürfürst, Kronprinz Wilhelm, Markgraf, Kaiserin, Konig Albreckt, Prinz Regent Luitpold, and Kaiser. Behind these again steamed the six light cruisers, Karlsrühe, Frankfurt, Emden, Nürnberg, Brummer, and Bremen; and, bringing up the rear, steaming in five lines, and sandwiched between British escorts, were the remaining forty-nine destroyers of the fifty that had been demanded under the terms of the armistice.
So they steamed on, docile to every order, and, when the last of them had been deeply contained, Admiral Beatty gave the signal for the right-about-turn of the Grand Fleet. Surrounded on all sides, filthy, as was afterward to be discovered, and with their men abject and undisciplined, before they reached their anchorage near Inchkeith Island, Admiral Beatty had issued the following order: "The German flag is to be hauled down," he said, "at 3.57 to-day, and is not to be hoisted again without permission." That was at sunset; and, a moment after, Germany had ceased, even in name, to be a sea power.