Hung around all four walls of the room were perhaps a dozen oil paintings of flying officers in uniform, and although they bore no names, we knew (from what had been told us of a similar display in the reception-room at Norderney) that they were portraits of pilots who had lost their lives in active service. One—a three-quarters length of a small wiry man, with gimlet eyes and a jaw that would have made that of a wolf-trap look soft and flexible in comparison—I recognized at once as having been reproduced in the German papers as the portrait of the great Schramm, who had been killed when his Zeppelin was brought down at Potters' Bar. Another—the bust of a man of rather a bulkier figure than the first, but with a face a shade less brutal—was also strangely familiar. I felt sure I had seen before that terribly determined jaw, that broad nose with its wide nostrils, that receding brow, with the bony lumps above the eyes, and the tentacles of my memory went groping for when and where, while I went on sipping my glass of Rotwein and listening to Major P——[1] and Ensign E—— comparing sensations on dropping from airplanes with parachutes.
[1] Major Pritchard, who subsequently distinguished himself by landing from R-34, after its transatlantic flight, with a parachute.
"If the Huns," the former was saying, "had had proper parachutes most of the crews of the Zepps brought down in England could have landed safely instead of being burned in the air. Of the remains of the crew of the one brought down at Cuffley, hardly a fragment was recognizable as that of a man. But if—"
Like a flash it came to me. The warm, comfortable room, with its solid "New Art" furniture and the table stacked with plates of food and wine bottles, faded away, and I saw a tangled heap of metal and burning debris, sprawling across a stubble field and hedgerow, and steaming in the cold early morning drizzle that was quenching its still smouldering fires. Five hours previously that wreckage had been a raiding Zeppelin, charging blindly across London, pursued by searchlights and gun-fire. I had watched the ghostly shape disappear in the darkness as it shook off the beams of the searchlights, and when it appeared again it was as a descending comet of streaming flame streaking earthward across the north-western heavens. After walking all the rest of the night—with a lift from an early morning milk cart—I had arrived on the scene at daybreak, and before the cordon of soldiers which later kept the crowds back had been drawn. They had just cut a way through the wreckage to one of the cars, and were cooling down the glowing metal with a stream pumped by a little village fire-engine. Then they began taking out what remained of the bodies of the crew. Some had been almost entirely consumed by the fierce flames, and it is literally true that many of the blackened fragments were hardly recognizable as human. But there was one notable exception. By a miracle, the chest and head of the body of what had undoubtedly been the commanding officer had been spared the direct play of the flames. The fingers gripping the steering wheel were charred to the bone, but the upper part of the tunic was so little scorched that it still held the Iron Cross pinned into it. The blonde eyebrows, beneath the bony cranial protuberances, were scarcely singed, and even the scowl and the tightly compressed lips seemed to express intense determination rather than death agony. That portrait—and doubtless most of the others that looked down upon our strange luncheon party that day at Nordholz—must have been painted from life.
[VI]
MERCHANT SHIPPING
The difference between the work of the Shipping Board of the Allied Naval Armistice Commission and that of the other sub-commissions was well defined by one of its members when he facetiously described it as "the only branch of the business that pays dividends." The work of the sub-commissions for the inspection of warships, seaplane and airship stations and forts, in that it was for the purpose of seeing that certain disarmament or demolition had been carried out, was largely destructive; that of the Shipping Board, on the other hand, which had as its end the return to the Allies of all of their merchant ships interned in German harbours, was constructive. The Shipping Board began to "pay dividends" (in the form of steamers dispatched for home ports) almost from the day of the arrival of the Hercules in Wilhelmshaven, and these continued steadily until the last of the interned ships surviving—a number had, unfortunately, been lost in mine-sweeping and other dangerous work in which the Germans had employed them—had found its way back to resume its place as a carrier of men and merchandise and restore the heavily depleted tonnage of the country to which it belonged.
At the outbreak of the war there were ninety-six Allied vessels in German harbours, and all of these were promptly placed under embargo. Of these, eighty were British, fourteen Belgian, and two French. As all of the French and Belgian ships were small craft, their tonnage was practically negligible. Besides these embargoed ships, the Allied Commission had been directed to demand and arrange for the return of the thirty-one—twenty-one British, eight Belgian, one American, and one Brazilian—Allied ships which had been condemned in German Prize Courts since the outbreak of the war. Ten of these, it was subsequently learned when the question came up in conference, had been sunk, the Germans having made a practice of using Allied ships in their hands for all work involving great risk.
The question of the return of mercantile tonnage was taken up in the course of the first conference in the Hercules at Kiel. Admiral Goette was requested to produce a complete list of all Allied and American ships lying at the time in German ports, including all mercantile vessels which had been condemned in Prize Courts. This list was to show clearly which vessels were considered seaworthy, and if unseaworthy, from what cause. It was also requested that information should be given as to which of these ships were fitted for mine-seeking or mine-sweeping, as it was planned to leave these temporarily in German hands in order to facilitate the efforts she was supposed to be making to clear the way for navigation. It was directed that ships ready to take the sea should be bunkered and ballasted at once, and that towage should be provided for sailing ships. All explosives were to be removed, and the Germans were ordered to provide a steamer to bring back the crews from the ports at which the embargoed ships had been delivered—the Tyne, in case of British vessels, and Dunkerque for French.