Lieutenant Körner was inconsolable over the loss of the other submarine. They had been working in partnership for several days past, sinking fishing boats more especially and using explosive bombs rather than wasting expensive torpedoes.
This use of bombs had necessitated the stopping of their intended victims. Having stopped and boarded them, there had always come the difficulty of dealing with their crews.
If you send a torpedo into an enemy ship from a discreet distance there is no question of sparing life. A submarine could not in any case encumber herself with prisoners. But when you have to speak to the vessel's skipper and have been polite to him, the matter is different. Even a German commander can hardly refuse to give him and his ship's company a chance of saving their lives.
Max Hilliger was greatly in favour of using bombs. He did not advance any serious scruples against the destruction of property; but he had been educated in England, he still retained a sense of honour and fairness, and he drew the line at taking the lives of innocent and unoffending seamen.
This was the rock upon which he and Lieutenant Hermann Körner split. Körner was not burdened with any of his subordinate's English ideas of humanity. He hated the English, and everything British. Like most Germans, he had persuaded himself that the war had been begun entirely by Great Britain; that Germany had never wanted to go to war. He resolutely closed his mind to the fact that his country had for many years been preparing for war, and seeking for a cause to pick a quarrel with Great Britain so that, being fully prepared, she might fall upon her and smash her.
Above all, he hated Great Britain because of her supremacy upon the seas. She had put a stop to German commerce and held Germany's great navy in a firm grip; therefore he considered that it was his highest patriotic duty to go about stealthily in his submarine destroying British shipping regardless of whether the ships he sank were armed for defence or were peaceful, unoffending fishing smacks.
He would have preferred it if all the vessels which came within reach of his torpedoes were ships of war; so that by sinking them he might lessen the overpowering strength of the British Navy.
But he had discovered long ago that the British naval officers and seamen were even more clever in protecting themselves from sudden attack than the Germans were in taking them by surprise.
Many times the U50 had been taken with other German submarines and torpedo boats to lie concealed in the narrow seas in the hope of being able to sink some of our transports carrying troops and munitions across to France; but they had always been frustrated or outwitted.
Lieutenant Körner found that it was much more easy to lurk submerged in the tideways of commerce and to attack undefended merchant ships or fishing boats. Had not Max Hilliger sometimes opposed him, he would never have allowed a crew to escape. Max, however, held to one unvarying argument.