It is a hideous negation of all that the word “navy” has stood for in every country that has ever possessed one. In nothing does Raemaekers show his Dutch blood more than in his savage anger at this gruesome perversion of the sea tradition. For the Dutch have a great naval history and know the meaning of a seaman’s honour.
The true sailor is great in his bravery because he is still greater in his chivalry. What will history say of these debauched brutes who revel in their hangman’s task?
ARTHUR POLLEN
“We have better luck with passenger boats than with war ships, for they cannot shoot.”
The “Katwyk”
In this one picture is the whole story of German submarine war, which heeds the presence of neither women nor children, but strikes swiftly, secretly, and without giving its victim the opportunity of defence. Not that in war it is demanded that the opponent should be given chance of a fight on equal terms; for in sea war the whole object of a naval commander is to concentrate an overwhelming superiority of fire on his enemy, and to destroy.
It remained for Germany, however, to apply this doctrine of destruction to mercantile craft and to neutral shipping, and to conduct war on the principle that war justifies any means, any barbarity, even the indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants. This assassin striking from behind has called the British blockade barbarous; but that blockade at least gives the nation against whom it is exercised a choice between evils, so much so in fact that all nations recognise it, and for ages have recognised it, as part of the procedure of war—no accusation of barbarity was made against Germany in 1871 for the starvation of the civilian population of Paris. But this sea-murder is a different thing, a thing that does not advance the end of the war, and a sign of a claim on the part of its authors that civilisation cannot allow. It is as if they questioned: “Since we have a certain power of destruction, shall we not use it as pleases us?”
And the answer? There were, after the sinking of the Lusitania, rows of bodies of women and children laid out for identification; there were many other instances, almost equally tragic, and the answers that they afford are eloquent enough. May they be well remembered in the day of settlement.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN