"In the matter of the losses at Horn Reef, we have never had any doubt that those of the English were much heavier than ours, even on your own admissions. And since we inflicted those losses with a fleet of not much over half the size of yours, we have always felt justified in claiming the battle to have been a German victory. The Lützow was our only really serious loss, though the other battle-cruisers—especially the Derfflinger and Seydlitz—were of little use for many months, so badly had they been battered by gun-fire. The battleship and cruisers sunk were out of date, and we lost only one modern light cruiser. We may have lost as many destroyers as you did, though yours would have footed up to a greater tonnage, as they average larger than ours. We made a great mistake in concealing the loss of the Lützow for several days, for, after that, the people never stopped thinking that there were other and greater losses not announced.
"But although the English losses must have been much greater than ours, I am not sure that they were enough greater to offset the loss of morale in the men of the German fleet. As I have said, I do not think—unless we had tricked them into it, as we tried so hard to do at the end—that we could ever again have got them to take their ships out in the full knowledge that they were in for a fight to a finish with the English battle fleet. It would have been better that they had all been lost fighting at Horn Reef than that they should have survived to bring upon themselves and their officers a disgrace the like of which has never been known in naval history."
[XI]
BACK TO BASE
The German Naval Armistice Commission, perhaps as a reaction from its belligerent attitude at the first conference at Kiel, manifested an increasing amenability to reason with every day that passed, as a consequence of which the work of the Allied Commission was pushed to a rapid completion. The search of the warships was completed in a couple of days, and the decision to limit the inspection of air stations to those west of Rügen reduced the visits of this character to three, all easily reached by destroyers. Of the town of Kiel, nothing was seen at close quarters, visits in that vicinity being limited to the dockyard, ships in the harbour, and the seaplane station of Holtenau, near the entrance to the canal.
Although the Allied ships under embargo hardly arrived at Kiel for inspection at the rate promised, there was little to indicate that the Germans were endeavouring to evade their promise of doing everything possible to facilitate the return of these to the Tyne at the earliest possible moment. The City of Leeds, a powerfully engined little packet which had been on the Hamburg-Harwich run before the war, furnished the only glaring instance of deliberate bad faith. The German Shipping Commission, declaring that her crew had ruined her engines and boilers by pouring tar into them when she was seized, claimed that she had been quite useless since that time, and disclaimed any responsibility for reconditioning her. On inspection by the Allied Shipping Commission, the statement that the engines had been damaged by anything but use and neglect was proved to be absolutely false. Why the Germans should have told so futile a lie was not fully explained, though as a possible reason it was suggested that some private party, desiring to keep the ship in his hands, had made a false report of her condition to the Shipping Commission.
The arrival and departure of Allied prisoners of war was one of the most interesting features of the week in Kiel. The most of these were British—picked up by one or another of the destroyers at this or that port touched at—but there was one large party of French, from a camp near Kiel, and several Belgians, Serbs, and Italians from heaven knows where. These were all made as comfortable as possible in the Hercules, and dispatched to England in the next mail destroyer. Except for a man now and then who was suffering from a neglected wound, they were in fairly good condition, a fact, however, which did not lessen their almost rapturous enjoyment of the heaping pannikins of "good greasy grub" (as one of them put it) that was theirs for the asking at any hour of the day they cared to slip up to the galley. Their delight in the band, in the ship's kinema, in "doubling round" for exercise in the morning, in anything and everything in the life in this their halfway station on the road home was a joy to watch.
Some of the British prisoners came from the same towns or counties as did men of the ship's company, and the exchange of reminiscences often went on far into the night. Passing across the flat between the ward-room and the commission-room late one evening, I heard a Lancastrian voice from a roll of blankets on the deck protesting to a bluejacket in the hammock above that "Jinny X——" of Wigan didn't have yellow hair when he (the owner of the voice) used to know her, and that, in fact, he'd always thought her rather a "shy 'un."
"Thot was afore she worked in a 'T.N.T.' fact'ry," replied the "hammock," with an intonation suggesting that he felt that was sufficient explanation of both changes.