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Only the Cressy appears to have seen the submarine in time to attempt to retaliate, and she fired a few shots before she keeled over, broken in two, and sank. British naval officers by this time were beginning to wonder how long the German high seas fleet intended to remain under cover in the Kiel canal. "Our only grievance," one said, "is that we have not had a shot at the Germans.
But the Big-Admiral is unjust to France, for the French navy exerts a tyranny at sea that can by no means be overlooked, although naturally from her position in front of the mouth of the Elbe England practises the culminating insupportable tyranny of keeping the High Seas Fleet in the Kiel Canal.
"I am going to Kiel to sink one of their largest battleships, and see if that will wake them up. We shall be under way in ten minutes and should be there by eight-thirty o'clock. I have ordered 'Specs' to get under way as soon as possible."
The revolt of Boston, the massacre of Richmond, had weakened the Teuton prestige and had set American patriotism boiling, seething, from Maine to Texas, from Long Island to the Golden Gate. There were rumours of strange plots and counter-plots, also of a new great army of invasion that was about to set sail from Kiel.
Her greatest strength was concentrated in the North Sea, where the island of Helgoland, the Gibraltar of the north, and the Kiel Canal with its exits to the Baltic and North Seas, furnished excellently both as naval bases and impenetrable protection.
Meanwhile, however, the hatred of my parliamentary opponents was stronger than the interest for a German fleet, and it seemed to me that the Progressive party at that time preferred to see the newly-acquired rights of Prussia to Kiel, and the prospect of a maritime future founded on its possession, rather in the hands of the auctioneer, Hannibal Fischer, than in those of a Bismarck Ministry."
We may, then, begin the following chapter with a scene in Kiel, Zeebrugge, or any German submarine base. A first lieutenant with acting rank of commander takes the order in the gray dawn of a February day.
So one fine morning in May I shouldered my knapsack, and bade a temporary adieu to my friends in Frankfort. By night I was in Hamburg. The next day was agreeably spent in rambling about the gardens across the Alster Basin, and at 5 P.M. I left Altona for Kiel, a journey of three hours by rail across a flat and not very interesting tract of country within the limits of Schleswig-Holstein.
Horrible as had been the fate which had fallen on the great arsenal of southern England, it had not been sacrificed in vain, and very sick at heart was John Castellan when he gave the order for the two vessels, which a few hours ago had been such terrible engines of destruction, to rise into the air and wing their harmless flight towards Kiel.
We had all placed strong hopes in the part our submarines would eventually play in a great crisis, but we never dreamed that they would so successfully take the first rôle as our most effective weapon in naval warfare. With a happiness that can hardly be described, I suddenly received the order to take over the command of a fine, new U-boat which had just been built at Kiel.
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