"While steaming away from Penang he met the tramp Glen. Instead of capturing her, he sent her into Penang with the message: 'I tried not to hit the town. If I did so, I am very sorry, indeed.' Well, he 'played the game,' and he has made me, for one, feel extremely doubtful whether the much-talked-of German 'atrocities' are true, except where the exigencies of war have made them unavoidable."
Here you have the story of an engagement which will go down in history as a demonstration that, even under the conditions of modern naval warfare, it is possible for two ships of almost equal armament to fight by daylight at almost point-blank range without resulting in the disabling of both. A sight similar to that witnessed yesterday would be considered by most naval critics as impossible, or, rather, suicidal.
The sad, or, rather, disgraceful, part of the story has yet to be told. It was true that the Jemtchug was caught unprepared. Her Captain was spending the night ashore, her decks were not cleared, she was slow to get into action, and when she did so her marksmanship was poor. All this could hardly be excused, but it becomes insignificant when we consider the case of the French torpedo boats and the D'Iberville, whose help the Jemtchug had a right to expect. Here they lay in a harbor with fully ten minutes' warning that a hostile ship was approaching, yet they allowed that ship to enter the harbor, steam around it, turn, and make her escape without so much as firing a shot, when, if they had gone into action, the Emden could hardly have escaped. The range was everything they could have desired.
What was the matter? Why did they remain silent? The answer is this: Although it was a time of war, a large percentage of the officers of these ships had been allowed to remain ashore over night. Not one of the ships had steam up. Their decks were not even cleared for action. Yet, even taking this into consideration, it is inexplicable that, when two or three torpedoes from any one of them would have saved the day, none was fired. The ships need not have moved an inch to have done so. The range was ridiculously short—less than 200 yards at one time. But surprise, lack of discipline, and general inefficiency seemed to hold them paralyzed.
The prevailing opinion here is that they did not wish to draw the Emden's fire on themselves—although one did use her machine gun toward the end of the engagement. Whatever is said, however, it is impossible to get away from the fact that the French Navy yesterday sustained a blow to its efficiency that it will take a long time to wipe out. Theirs was a "masterly inaction" caused by something which they do not attempt themselves to define. Both army and navy commanders here are one in their contemptuous condemnation of such a spectacle.
The Belgian Soldier
[From The London Times, Oct. 17, 1914. By its Special Correspondent lately in Antwerp.]
BEFORE it fades I would like to record my impression of the Belgian soldier as I have seen him day after day through the two months ending with the fall of Antwerp.
I have seen him on every kind of duty and off, on the roads, in cabarets, in camp and barrack, on the march, in trenches, fighting from behind all sorts of cover or from none, on foot, on horseback, on bicycles, mounted proudly on his auto-mitrailleuse, or running behind his gun-team of dogs, each dog pulling and barking as if it would tear the whole German Army to pieces. I have seen him wounded on battlefields, by the roadside, and in hospitals; I have seen him, in the later days at Antwerp, brought back from the forts and from those terrible advanced trenches unwounded, but from sheer exhaustion in almost more serious plight than any of his comrades whom the shells had hit. And I have seen him dead.