"It is quite true the ship will be in a state to make the voyage to the Tyne by the time you say," replied Herr M——, the Director who was showing the party round, "but it will take a number of days longer to put it in the same state it was when placed under embargo. It would be a short-sighted policy on our part to send a badly repaired ship out of our yards at the present time, for it would be certain to react seriously in the matter of future orders. You must bear in mind, sir, that we have a world-wide reputation for thoroughness to maintain."
He appeared far from reassured when he was told that the condition he sent the British ships home in would have no effect whatever upon his future business with the rest of the world; moreover, he must have found that the longer he pondered that plain statement the less comfort there was to be extracted from it. It is astonishing how few Germans appear to realize that there are other things besides workmanship and quality—to say nothing of long credits, state subsidies and pushful salesmen—that will profoundly affect the future of German trade.
The inspection of the eight interned vessels at Bremerhaven brought out nothing of more than routine interest, but the visit to the great home port of the North German Lloyd on the Weser, just as had the one to that of the Hamburg-Amerika Line on the Elbe, offered an incomparable opportunity to see at first hand the staggering blow which the war had dealt to German shipping and—through shipping—to German foreign trade. Although the fact that I had been attached for the moment to the sub-commissions inspecting seaplane and Zeppelin stations prevented my visiting Hamburg and Bremerhaven with the Shipping Board, an illuminating glimpse of the latter was offered me during the passage of the Weser in the course of the journey to Nordholz.
Although the day was overcast and there was some mistiness on the water, one could still see far enough up and down stream during the passage to note the effects of the complete stagnation which had settled from the outbreak of the war upon this second of Germany's great maritime ports. The name Bremerhaven had appeared in raised gilt letters across the stern of every one of the hundreds of North German Lloyd steamers, and from New York to Shanghai, from Sydney to Durban, one was confronted with it in most of the ports of the world, but especially those of the Far East and Australia. I had seen it on the black-hulled, buff-funnelled freighters that were carrying Dutch goods from Ternate to Batavia, Chinese goods from Tientsin to Foochow, Japanese goods from Kobe to Nagasaki, British goods between Sandakan and Singapore. The "Crossed Keys" house-flag was known throughout the East as the symbol of that notorious German trade policy of heavy rate-cutting until competition had been killed and then a forcing up of tariffs to just under a figure which would be calculated to revive competition. But while the Germans had plotted thus ruthlessly to strangle foreign competition, between their own lines nothing of the kind was ever allowed to go on. The Hamburg-Amerika and the Norddeutscher-Lloyd, with three or four other German lines of secondary importance, had divided up the world into "spheres" of trade, with no line encroaching upon that of another except for certain inevitable "over-lapping" in passenger traffic on the Mediterranean and North Atlantic routes.
The lines of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd were stretched like the tentacles of an octopus over the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Pacific, and at the outbreak of the war it was sucking trade from every British, French, Dutch, and Scandinavian line that plied to the ports of Australia, Malaysia, China, and the Philippines upon which it had fastened its slimy grip. The "N.D.L." was more than a German steamship line; it was Germany itself—Germany beginning to rivet down the edges of its "places in the sun." It was Herr Heiniken, the president of this great instrument of "Deutschland Ueber Alles," who, in Hongkong in 1911, exclaimed to a diplomat with whom he was discussing the Kaiser's Agadir bluff: "War! that, sir, is the one thing I want to avoid. What do we want to spend money and men on war when—within ten years at our present rate of progress—we can win everything that the most successful war could possibly give us? War might be a short cut to German world-power; and again, it might not. But hegemony by the trade route—provided only we continue to enjoy the freedom we have today—is sure. Our ships and merchants have already won half the battle, and victory is in sight if they are only allowed to go on."
Herr Heiniken was a hard-headed, clear-seeing man, and one shudders to think how much truth there was in the words quoted. But the slower, more round-about "trade route" to world-power did not suit the hot-headed Junkers, and they forced their country to attempt to reach by the short-cut of war what was almost within the reach of their merchants and shippers. And that day at Bremerhaven we saw one of the results. There, sluddered down into the slime from which he rose, his tentacles all either severed or drawn in, was the remains of the "N.D.L." octopus. Miles and miles of what were once black-and-buff freighters and liners were lying so deep in harbour silt that it would have taken a dredger to get them out of their slips. The tangles of sagging, weed-fringed mooring cables running over and about them—for all the world as though they had been meshed in the web of a Gargantuan spider—accentuated the helpless immobility of craft that had once flaunted the arrogant red, white, and black bunting of the German merchant marine in the uttermost corners of the Seven Seas.
That river full of rotting ships was more than quiet—it was dead. The anchorage of the interned High Sea Fleet, off the inner entrance to Gutter Sound in Scapa Flow, was the first cemetery I had seen of the ships of the power whose ruler had proclaimed that its future was upon the sea. Bremerhaven was another graveyard of that ambient ambition. And the rusting hulks of the remains of the "N.D.L." fleet was not all that was buried in the port of opulent Bremen. The ships were only the tombstones. Deep in the mud beneath their keels was sunk the crumpled framework of a plan which was a long way farther on the way to consummation than most of Americans and Britons will ever realize—Germany's scheme to attain world domination by trade. Germany will, in time undoubtedly have another merchant marine, and she may even begin striving before long toward world domination by any means, fair or foul, that offers a chance of success. But there is a slight probability that she will ever again hit upon any road that will take her so far toward the goal of "Deutschland Ueber Alles" as did the "trade route," the way to which is now all but closed. There was the dankness of mould in the wind that blew across the graveyard of the high ambitions that lie buried beyond hope of resurrection in the mud beneath the weed-foul bottoms of the ships of Bremerhaven.
The whole atmosphere of the stagnant waterfront was brooding and gloomy, and as we drew near to the landing I was conscious of a pronounced depression, for no man who loves the sea can remain unmoved at the sight of neglected ships. To this mood the cheery chatter of a young American Ensign, who had just sauntered out on deck after warming his toes at the charcoal brazier in the tug's cabin, came as a welcome diversion.
"There's a lot of funny things chalked up on the walls around the docks," he said, running his eyes over the signs along the front, "but the one word that is written over the whole darn layout is 'Ichabod.' 'N.D.L.' is the only other to run 'one-two-three' with it. By the look of things I take it that stands for 'No D——m Luck.'"