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Up went our captive balloon; in ten minutes it was ready to spot and at 10.15 we got off the first shot which missed the Goeben by just a few feet to the right. The enemy then quickly took cover behind the high cliffs and I was let out of my prison. Some Turkish transports remained, landing troops. Off flew the shell, seven miles it flew; over the Turkish Army from one sea into another. A miss!
Along with the Goeben and Breslau, which took refuge at Constantinople on the outbreak of hostilities, and were "sold" to Turkey, she constituted the Turk's chief naval arm. News of the feat was received with enthusiasm in England, coming as the initial achievement of the sort by a British submarine.
The colossal brigandage of Germany appealed to her freebooting instincts, although it took a corrupt, self-seeking Government and a final push from the "Goeben" and the "Breslau" to plunge her into war against her best friends. To proclaim a jihad was her obvious course, if only to keep Arabia moderately quiet, apart from its value as a weapon against her Christian foes.
It is the town of tongues, the city of nations. It is not French; it is universal. And never can Marseilles have been so universal as in the early days of August 1914. Usually a port of call only, then it was a terminus. The ships came in, but did not leave: there seemed to be a concensus of opinion amongst skippers that the Goeben was a nasty thing to meet alone on a dark night.
The Sylph had come about, and now poured a broadside into the enemy. Then, from the distance, more than a mile across the water, came the sound of many guns. The German cruisers Breslau and Goeben were returning the fire. Shells, dropping in. front, behind and on all sides of the Sylph threw up the water in mighty geysers, as if it were a typhoon that surrounded the little vessel.
Manteuffel's successor in the north was General von Goeben, with whom, on January 18, Faidherbe fought an engagement at Vermand, followed on the morrow by the battle of Saint Quentin, which was waged for seven hours amidst thaw and fog. Though it was claimed as a French victory, it was not one.
The Turkish navy, like the Austrian, kept to home waters. Scarcely a month passed that engagements were not reported between the Goeben and Breslau with vessels of the enemy. Many of these were circumstantial, one of which recounted a long range fight between the Goeben and Russian warships, in which the Goeben was said to have been severely damaged.
Among these were the Goeben, Breslau, Emden, Karlsruhe, and Leipzig, which captured or sank a number of vessels of the enemy. The German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau also operated in the Pacific, bombarding the French colony of Papeete, on the island of Tahiti, and inflicting much damage, including the sinking of two vessels.
January 5 President Wilson delivers speech to congress giving "fourteen points" necessary to peace. Jan. 20 British monitors win seafight with cruisers Goeben and Breslau, sinking latter. Jan. 28 Russia and Roumania sever diplomatic relations. February 2 United States troops take over their first sector, near Toul. Feb. 6 United States troopship Tuscania sunk by submarine, lost.
Thus it happened that the arrival of the Goeben and Breslau at the Dardanelles in August 1914 led Turkey to reopen promptly certain questions concerning the Aegean. The islands in this sea are uniformly Greek in population, but their respective geographical positions and political fortunes differentiate them into several groups.
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