This is fortunate, and doubly fortunate; for the submarine war has proved to be the main battlefield of our spiritual crusade, as well as a vital military campaign. The men engaged in it have been marked out by fate, as our champions in the contest of ideals. They are the patterns and defenders of human nature in war, against those who preach and practise barbarism. Here—and nowhere else so clearly as here—the world has seen the death struggle between the two spirits now contending for the future of mankind. Between the old chivalry, and the new savagery, there can be no more truce; one of the two must go under, and the barbarians knew it when they cried Weltmacht oder Niedergang. Of the spirit of the German nation it is not necessary to say much. Everything that could be charged against them has been already proved, by their own words and actions. They have sunk without warning women and children, doctors and nurses, neutrals and wounded men, not by tens or hundreds but by thousands. They have publicly rejoiced over these murders with medals and flags, with songs and school holidays. They have not only broken the rules of international law; they have with unparalleled cruelty, after sinking even neutral ships, shot and drowned the crews in open boats, that they might leave no trace of their crimes. The men who have done—and are still doing—these things have courage of a kind. They face danger and hardship to a certain point, though, by their own account, in the last extreme they fail to show the dignity and sanity with which our own men meet death. But their peculiar defect is not one of nerve, but of spirit. They lack that instinct which, with all civilised races, intervenes, even in the most violent moment of conflict or desperation, and reminds the combatant that there are blows which it is not lawful to strike in any circumstances whatever. This instinct—the religion of all chivalrous peoples—is connected by some with humanity, by some with courtesy, by ourselves with sport. In this matter we are all in the right. The savage in conflict thinks of nothing but his own violent will; the civilised and the chivalrous are always conscious of the fact that there are other rights in the world beside their own. The humane man forbears his enemy; the courteous man respects him, as one with rights like his own; the man with the instinct of sport knows that he must not snatch success by destroying the very game itself. The civilised nation will not hack its way to victory through the ruins of human life. It will be restrained, if by no other consideration, yet at least by the recollection that it is but one member of a human fellowship, and that the greatness of a part can never be achieved by the corruption of the whole.
The German nature is not only devoid of this instinct, it is roused to fury by the thought of it. Any act, however cruel and barbarous, if only it tends to defeat the enemies of Germany, is a good deed, a brave act, and to be commended. The German general who lays this down is supported by the German professor who adds: ‘The spontaneous and elementary hatred towards England is rooted in the deepest depths of our own being—there, where considerations of reason do not count, where the irrational, the instinct, alone dominates. We hate in the English the hostile principle of our innermost and highest nature. And it is well that we are fully aware of this, because we touch therein the vital meaning of this War.’ Before the end comes, the barbarian will find this hostile principle, and will hate it, in the French, the Italians, the Americans—in the whole fellowship of nations against which he is fighting with savage fury. But, to our satisfaction, he has singled us out first; for, when we hear him, we too are conscious of a spontaneous hatred in the depths of our being; and we see that in this we do ‘touch the vital meaning of this War.’
CHAPTER II
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUBMARINE
Many are the fables which the Germans have done their best to pass off for truth among the spectators of the present War; but not one is more wilfully and demonstrably false, than their account of the origin of the submarine. According to the story which they have endeavoured to spread among the unthinking public in neutral countries, the under-sea boat—the arm with which they claim to have revolutionised naval warfare—is the product of German ingenuity and skill. The French, they say, had merely played with the idea; their submarines were costly toys, dangerous only to those who tried to navigate them. The Americans had shown some promise half a century ago; but having since become a pacifist race of dollar-hunters, they had lost interest in war, and their boats would be found useless in practice. As for the British, the day of their naval power was past; they had spent their time and money upon the mania for big ships, and neglected the more scientific vessel, the submarine, which had made the big ships obsolete in a single year’s campaign. The ship of the future, the U-boat, was the national weapon of Germany alone.
The claim was unjustified; but, so far, it was not—to an uninstructed neutral—obviously unjustified. The Americans were not yet at war; the submarines of France and Britain were hardly ever heard of. Our boats had few targets, and their operations were still further restricted by the rules of international law, which we continued to keep, though our enemies did not. Moreover, whatever our Service did achieve was done secretly; and even our successes were announced so briefly and vaguely as to make no impression. The result was that the Germans were able to make out a plausible title to the ‘command of the sea beneath the surface’; and they even gained a hearing for the other half of their claim, which was unsupported by any evidence whatever. The submarine is not, in its origin, of German invention; the idea of submarine war was not a German idea, nor have Germans contributed anything of value to the long process of experiment and development by which the idea has been made to issue in practical under-water navigation. From beginning to end, the Germans have played their characteristic part. They have been behind their rivals in intelligence; they have relied on imitation of the work of others; on discoveries methodically borrowed and adapted; and when they have had to trust to their own abilities, they have never passed beyond mediocrity. They have shown originality in one direction only—their ruthless disregard of law and humanity. These statements are not the outcome of partisanship, but of a frank study of the facts. They are clearly proved by the history of submarine war.
That history may be said to begin with the second half of the sixteenth century, when the two main principles or aims of submarine war were first set forth—both by English seamen. Happily the records remain. Sir William Monson, one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals, in his famous ‘Naval Tracts,’ suggests that a powerful ship may be sunk much more easily by an under-water shot than by ordinary gunfire. His plan is ‘to place a cannon in the hold of a bark, with her mouth to the side of the ship: the bark shall board, and then to give fire to the cannon that is stowed under water, and they shall both instantly sink: the man that shall execute this stratagem may escape in a small boat hauled the other side of the bark.’
This is the germinal idea from which sprang the submarine mine or torpedo; and the first design for a submarine boat was also produced by the English Navy in the same generation. The author of this was William Bourne, who had served as a gunner under Sir William Monson. His invention is described in his book of ‘Inventions or Devices’ published in 1578, and is remarkable for its proposed method of solving the problem of submersion. This is to be achieved by means of two side-tanks, into which water can be admitted through perforations, and from which it can be blown out again by forcing the inner side of each tank outwards. These false sides are made tight with leather suckers, and moved by winding hand-screws—a crude and inefficient mechanism, but a proof that the problem had been correctly grasped. For a really practical solution of this, and the many other difficulties involved in submarine navigation, the resources of applied science were then hopelessly inadequate. It was not until after more than three hundred years of experiment that inventors were in a position to command a mechanism that would carry out their ideas effectively.
The record of these three centuries of experiment is full of interest; for it shows us a long succession of courageous men taking up, one after another, the same group of scientific problems and bringing them, in spite of all dangers and disasters, gradually nearer to a final solution. Many nations contributed to the work, but especially the British, the American, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Swedish, the Russian, and the Italian. The part played by each of them has been, on the whole, characteristic. The British were the first, as practical seamen, to put forward the original idea, gained from the experience of their rivalry with Spain. They have also succeeded, at the end of the experimental period, in making the best combined use of the results of the long collaboration. A Dutchman built the first practical submarine, and achieved the first successful dive. The Americans have made the greatest number of inventions, and of daring experiments in earlier wars. The French have shown, as a nation, the strongest interest in the idea, and their navy was effectively armed with submarines ten years before that of any other Power. To them, to the Dutch, and to the Italians, the credit belongs of that indispensable invention, the optic tube or periscope. The Swedes and Russians have the great names of Nordenfelt and Drzewiecki to their credit. The Germans alone, among the eight or nine nations interested in the science of naval war, have from first to last contributed almost nothing to the evolution of the submarine. The roll of submarine inventors includes about 175 names, of which no less than 60 belong to the English-speaking peoples, but only six to Germany. Among these six, the name of Bauer is remembered as that of a courageous experimenter, persevering through a career of repeated failures; but neither he, nor any of his fellow countrymen, advanced the common cause by the suggestion of a single idea of value. Finally, when the German Admiralty, after the failure of their own Howaldt boat, decided to borrow the Holland type from America, it was no German, but the Franco-Spanish engineer d’Equevilley, who designed for them the first five U-boats, of which all the later ones are modifications. The English Admiralty were in no such straits. They were only one year before the Germans in adopting the Holland type; but the native genius at their disposal has enabled them to keep ahead of their rivals from that day to this, in the design, efficiency, size, and number of their submarine vessels. And this result is exactly what might have been expected from the history of submarine invention.