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"I might march north, colonel, as if to join General Goeben. Then I could turn down this road which I see upon your map, and get to Chateau Noir before they could hear of us. In that case, with twenty men " "Very good, captain. I hope to see you with your prisoner to-morrow morning."
The command of the sea was, in fact, abandoned by the Germans when on 26 July 1914 their fleet was recalled from the Norwegian fiords; and the cruisers which the outbreak of war found beyond reach of German territorial waters were in turn and in time destroyed. One Dreadnought, the Goeben, and a light cruiser, the Breslau, escaped to play a chequered part in the war.
The former German warship Goeben, renamed the Sultan Selim, shelled Tournose, a Russian Black Sea port, on July 3, 1916, and did considerable damage. One steamship in the harbor went down as a result of shell fire and large oil works near the city broke into flames. The Breslau, called the Midullu by the Turks, bombarded Scotchy, a near-by port, about the same time.
In addition to these first-class battleships, Germany had certain others, individual in type, such as the Von der Tann, Moltke, Goeben, Seydlitz, Derfflinger, Fürst Bismarck, Prinz Heinrich, Prinz Adalbert, Roon and Yorck, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Blücher, Magdeburg, Strassburg, Breslau, Stralsund, Rostock, and Karlsruhe.
Among the German ships which were separated from the main fleet in the North Sea, and which were left without direct communication with the German admiralty after the cutting of the cables off the Azores by the Drake, were the cruisers Goeben and Breslau. When England declared war these two German ships were off the coast of Algeria.
A Jehad against the Christian might stir the honest fanatic; well-to-do Turks had invested some of their savings in two Turkish Dreadnoughts under construction in England which the British Government had commandeered; and two German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, had arrived at the Golden Horn to impress or to encourage the Ottoman mind.
The artillery was awakening to its evening activity, field guns could be seen firing, and shells bursting on high crests. Heavy shells, learned later to be those from the Goeben in the Dardanelles Channel, shrieked occasionally out of the unknown, and sent up great geysers of water near a four-funnelled cruiser to the right. A steady staccato of rifle fire floated faintly from the heights.
We again steamed ahead towards our destination and were soon sailing into smooth and calm waters, the temperature becoming quite genial and warm as we approached the Straits of Gibraltar. As we passed through the Straits the message was signalled that those two notorious vessels, the "Goeben" and the "Breslau," were roaming loose in the Mediterranean.
"A pretty shot, my man." By this time the Gloucester had come within striking distance, and her heavy guns began to breathe defiance to the Germans. But the Breslau and the Goeben had no mind to engage this new enemy, and quickly turned tail and fled. Lord Hastings immediately got into communication with the captain of the Gloucester by wireless.
The Breslau was a former German ship, and was said to have been purchased by the Turkish government, with the German battleship Goeben, when they sought refuge in the Dardanelles at the beginning of the war, from the French and British fleets in the Mediterranean.
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