These smaller submarines must not be confused with U51, which, as the German newspapers have proudly described, made the great voyage from Kiel to Constantinople, either through the English Channel or by the northern passage round Scotland. This took place in the spring of 1915.
The U51 is a huge craft, painted a dark grey, its appearance being very suggestive of its sinister purpose. It has a big gun mounted on the forepart. The size of the craft astonished me when I saw it some days after its arrival at Constantinople, on my first visit, and I think it must be one of the largest afloat. Unfortunately, I was not allowed on board: there were limitations to the privileges that my papers were able to secure for me. Beside this leviathan the U4 and her sisters would look mere pigmies; but they are vicious little craft, hornets with sharp and painful stings.
Now that Weddigen has been killed, Captain von Hersing is the popular hero of the German submarine navy. He is the type of man that possesses a strong appeal for the English sportsman. He is of the Max Horton order, and it was he who sank the Triumph and the Majestic.
In Germany heroes are made on the slightest possible provocation and for very indifferent achievements; but Captain von Hersing certainly deserves his fame. He is modest, a rather rare quality in the present-day German.
The story of his feat, which he narrated to me during my first visit to Constantinople, has already been told time after time. As quietly as any Englishman would have done he described to me that wonderful voyage; how he picked up petrol in the Bay of Biscay at an exactly appointed time and place; how he passed by Gibraltar in broad daylight on the surface of the water; the agonies he suffered during the imprisonment of his boat for two hours in a British submarine net off Lemnos; how he eventually escaped with a damaged propeller, and arrived at Constantinople in the early days of May.
During the whole recital of his achievements the nearest thing to self-glorification that I was able to detect in his manner was a momentary flashing of the eye, which no one would deny even to Admiral Beatty himself. He was disinclined to discuss the war, and I remember that at the time I thought how correct this attitude was in an officer, and how different from many of his fellows of the land service, who will discuss nothing else.
He told me that he had spent a considerable time in England, and that he liked the English. The promptness with which he denied that it was his boat that had sunk the Lusitania left me in no doubt as to his view of that colossal outrage. In fact, I have heard from many sources that the German Navy regards this discreditable exploit as a blot upon its name. I talked to him many times at the Pera Club, where there were comparatively few Germans and plenty of food, the one fact probably explaining the other.
If all Germans were of the same type as the German naval officers and men, the word “Hun” would probably never have been applied; it certainly would not so aptly fit. In their franker moments these naval officers and men confess that they hate the horrible work they are obliged to do; but that they have no alternative but to carry out the orders received from Berlin. There are brutes among them, no doubt, but such German naval officers as I have met compare very favourably with their swaggering colleagues of the land service. German sailors are under no misapprehension as to the might and efficiency of the British Navy. It is not they who spread the tale of the British Fleet hiding in ports while German ships proudly sail the North Sea. It is not they who ask plaintively, “Will the British Fleet never come out?” They are practical men, and for the most part honest men, and they know that Germany has it in her own hands to bring out the British Fleet in no uncertain manner.
The Germans are annoyed because the valuable ships of the British Navy do not parade up and down in the neighbourhood of Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven and allow themselves to be torpedoed by German submarines. The German idea of naval warfare is sometimes childish, but it belongs to the layman and not to the expert. “Our people started the war ten years too soon,” was the remark that one German officer made to me.
It is not difficult to see that there is very little love lost between the German Army and the German Navy, which is scarcely to be wondered at. A very casual observer has only to contrast the characters of the two classes of men, as I saw them at the Pera Palace Hotel; the one swaggering and strutting about, grumbling at the lack of amusement, growling if the Liebesgabe (parcel) from Berlin, with its sausage (leberwurst) and the like, cigars, and pâté de fois gras, is a day late; the other quiet, well-mannered, accustomed to great hardship and danger from childhood, self-respecting and respecting others—the nearest approach to an English gentleman that the Germans are capable of producing. Not many naval officers hail from the Hun country of Prussia.