THE MERCHANT SEAMAN IN WAR.*
Ma. COENFORD has written a wonderful book, which every landsman ought to read, and a copy of which should be placed in every school library beside Hakluyt and Purchas. It is a plain record of the part played in this war by the officers and men of the British Mercantile Marine. Their tradition for courage and endurance is centuries old ; but, as Lord Jellicoe says in his Preface, " they have founded a new and a glorious tradition in the teeth of new and undreamed-of peril, and have borne the full brunt of the enemy's illegal submarine warfare." It must have cost the author an effort to refrain, as he has done for the most part, from superlatives and literary flourishes in trying to do justice to the Merchant Service, but we may assure him that the facts, as he states them, speak for themselves and need no embellishment. He has taken his narratives from the Admiralty records, arranging them roughly in order of time, so that the sequence illustrates the course of the war which the enemy has waged, with ever-lessening success, but ever-increasing disregard of all the laws and customs of the sea, against the merchant ships which are our very life. The author's object has been " to present the character and the virtues of the British seaman rather than the wickedness of his enemies or the horror of his sufferings." This, we are sure, is right. A " Hymn of Hate " is a negative thing, foreign to British minds. We cannot find satisfaction in pondering over the criminal tendencies of the foe. But we can all take pleasure in a positive chronicle of British bravery, which is full of encouragement for the present and the future of our race. Given such qualities as are exhibited by the heroes of these pages, the British people will win the war, whatever the moral standard of the Germans may be.
The first episodes among the sixty-one which Mr. Cornford has selected remind us that in the early days of the war British merchant sailors were both unsuspicious and unprotected. They assruned that Germany would observe the recognized conventions in regard to unarmed merchantmen. The sinking of the Runo ' in the North Sea, by a floating mine that had not been rendered harmless, was an early proof that they were wrong. The sinking of the Glitra ' in October, 1914, by an enemy submarine, which made no attempt to take the ship as a prize into a German port, was another proof that a new era in sea warfare was opening. However, in this case no gun was fired on the crew and no one was injured. A fresh development came early in February, 1915, when the enemy announced that from February 18th every hostile merchantman in British waters would be destroyed, regardless of the safety of those on board. But on January 30th, before that notice was issued, the Tokomaru ' was torpedoed without warning off Havre. From that day to this every man on board a merchant ship has been exposed to the risk of instant destruction by an unseen pirate, over and above the ordinary perils of the sea. The sinking of the Lusitania ' on May 7th, 1915, made the whole world realize that the enemy would stick at nothing * The Merchant Seaman in War. By L. Cope Cornford. Witil a Foreword by Admiral Lord Jaime. London: Hodder and. Stoughton. fee. net] o effect his purpose, and that not even passenger steamers with s-omen and children on board would be spared. From the sailor's standpoint the story of " The Castaways " is specially instructive'
The steamer ` Coquet ' was stopped and sunk by an enemy sub- marine in the Mediterranean on January 4th, 1916. The crew of thirty-one men were set adrift in two leaky lifeboats, three hundred miles from land, in bad weather. On the second day the boats parted company, and the mate's boat with fourteen men was never seen again. The master's boat, after six days, during which the men had to bale incessantly to keep her afloat, reached the African coast. The men took shelter in a cave. Two days later they were attacked by Arabs, who killed several of them, left the master and two sailors for dead, and carried the rest away into captivity. As time went on, our merchant ships were gradually given guns for their own protection, but the enemy's lack of humanity was correspondingly intensified. Take the case of the untamed Cabotia,' which was attacked out in the Atlantic on October 9th, 1916, when a full gale was blowing. The captain tried hard to escape, but the submarine was the faster ship. He launched his four boats with difficulty in a heavy sea, and the ship was sunk. At that moment a neutral steamer came in sight of the boats. But the enemy submarine went alongside the steamer, and immediately afterwards the strange vessel proceeded on her course, having prestanably been ordered not to pick up the ship- wrecked crew. In the end two out of the four boats' crews came to land, having rowed for one hundred and twenty miles through an Atlantic gale. The other two boats were never heard of again. Their crews were indirectly murdered. But Tar worse things have happened since. The ' Artist,' lying hove-to in an Atlantic storm on January 27th, 1917, was torpedoed without warning. Part of the crew got away in two boats, and drifted helplessly in the gale for three days and three nights. One boat was lost ; in the other seven men died of exposure and nine out of the crew of forty-five were picked up alive. The crew of the ` Dauntless,' sunk a week later in the Bay of Biscay, were put in boats with a little biscuit and no water, and only eight out of twenty-three lived to tell the tale. Three days later, when the ` Saxonian ' was sunk in the North Atlantic, the submarine continued to fire while the crew were launching the boats, and one man died of his wounds.
The contrast between British pluck and German brutality is well illustrated in the story of the fourth officer of the ` Thracia,' torpedoed at night in the Channel on March 27th, 1917. The boy of fifteen was flung into the sea and clung to a wrecked boat. The submarine emerged, and the commander, seeing the half-drowned boy, began to ask him questions Are you an Englishman Y ' asked the German officer. The boy replied that he was. ` Then,' said the'German, ` I shall shoot you.' Shoot away,' said the fourth officer. So disrespectful an answer naturally hurt the sensitive German. ` I shall not waste powder on a pig of an Englishman,' was the German officer's majestic retort. At this point, the German seems to have per- mitted a just indignation to overcome his natural delicacy of feeling. ` Drown, you swine, drown ! ' he shouted, and sheered off." Still more dreadful is the story of the crew of the Mariston,' torpedoed in the Atlantic last July, who were left struggling in the sea amid a school of sharks. The submarine commander came up, watched the scene, and then disappeared. All but one of the crew were devoured by the German's allies. But the worst case of all is that of the ` Belgian Prince,' torpedoed on July 31st, 1917, two hundred miles from the north coast of Ireland. The forty-three men of the crew were mustered on the deck of the submarine ; their boats were sunk and their lifebelts were thrown into the sea. Then the German commander closed the hatch and submerged, leaving the forty-three men to drown. Three escaped by a miracle ; the other forty were foully murdered, Nothing in all the annals of piracy is more horrible than that crime. Mr. Coruford in his later chapters cites several cases to show how our brave merchant seamen, with the help of better guns than they had at earlier stages of the war, are often able to repel enemy attacks, and thus ends his book on a cheerful note. But the main point is that German frightfulness, though carried to extreme lengths, has never had the slightest effect on the spirit of the Merchant Service. The officers and men are unconquerable.
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