WHAT DOES THE NATION OWE TO ITS SEAMEN?

By Archibald Hurd.

Germany by this time was to have been victorious, leaving the British people defeated, crushed, humiliated, and impoverished for a generation by huge indemnities. At the end of January, as Mr. Gerard has stated in his reminiscences which have lately appeared in The Daily Telegraph, the Gorman authorities, from the Kaiser downwards, were convinced that the submarine, employed without regard for law or humanity, would prove the instrument of a “speedy, victorious ending of the war”. The issue was thought to be in no doubt: piracy would bring us to our knees. “Give us only two months of this kind of warfare,” the Foreign Secretary remarked to Mr. Gerard, “and we shall end the war and make peace within three months.” The Imperial Chancellor and all the Kaiser’s Ministers were equally convinced of the certainty of success. Those declarations were made after many months of secret scheming and planning for the ruthless attack on the British Merchant Navy; the enemy realised that it constituted the life-line of the people of these islands – who receive four out of five loaves from overseas – and of the people of the Dominions, the Crown Colonies, and the Dependencies, and formed also the essential support of the armies on the various fronts.

If Germany could have succeeded, not in three months, but in six months, civilisation would have received a blow from which it might not have recovered in our time. We in these islands would have been brought face to face with the horrors of starvation; we should have been divorced from our kith and kin overseas; our armies would have been isolated, left without supplies of munitions and food; and we should have been unable to reap the advantage of the prodigal aid which America is now preparing to render – naval, military, and economic. On the one hand, we must endeavour to picture to ourselves the scenes which were enacted in Germany in the months preceding the determination to resort to piracy. In the great shipyards and engine-making establishments many thousands of skilled workers were engaged in building submarines of the most approved type; at the German Admiralty the most active and experienced sailors were busy elaborating plans for a coup which was to prove our undoing.