The efforts made by the Germans, first, to prevent this Tondern visit being scheduled at all, and, after it was decided upon, so to delay it that the party making it should only arrive after dark and thus have limited opportunities for observation, were a revelation of Hun psychology. "The Hun," said an officer of one of the air-station parties on his return to the Hercules one evening, "is one of the most truthful individuals in the world—just as long as he knows you are in a position to find out the truth anyway. But if he thinks he can prevent your finding out the truth by lying, there seems to be no limit to the lengths he will go." Then he went on to tell of how an unusually affable and courteous young German flying officer, who had conducted his party to Norderney two days previously, had taken every occasion to point out how much trouble, and how profitless and uninteresting a visit to Tondern would be. He said that the station was a long distance out of the way, that reaching it would involve trips of some hours by both train and destroyer, that it was not in a region under the control of the Wilhelmshaven authorities, and that there was nothing to see anyway, as the sheds had been dismantled before they were bombed, and that there were no airships in them at the time they were destroyed. Pressed on the latter point, he had reiterated the statement, adding that the raid, though it was well planned and executed, had been a great waste of effort. "It will take much time, and you will see nothing, nothing at all, I assure you."

"When I told him," continued the British officer, "that we would go ahead with the visit for sentimental reasons, if for no others, he seemed a good deal upset, and this morning he did not turn up at all. The commander who came in his stead told me quite frankly that there were two Zeppelins destroyed at Tondern, and that he was to go in person with the party to see, as he put it, that it was 'properly received.' He had such an 'open-and-above-board' manner about everything that I'm inclined to think there's some 'catch' in his plan. It's probably on the score of time, or connections, or something of that kind. He says that, between destroyer, launch, and train, it is an eight-hour journey; but I have made up a schedule that will give us a good two hours of daylight there if there is no slip up on the Huns' end of the arrangements. We push off in the Viceroy at seven in the morning, and ought to be at Tondern by three. When we rejoin her again at Brunsbüttel's another matter."

Just where the "slip up" was meant to come became evident the next morning, when the German pilot was half an hour late in coming off to the Viceroy. As the sixty-mile run to Brunsbüttel was to have been covered at a rate of but fifteen miles an hour, a destroyer capable of doing close to thirty-five had no difficulty in making up the lost time, though once she was all but compelled to anchor on account of fog, which closed down just before the outer Elbe lightship was picked up. The railway station, close beside the gates of the Kiel Canal, was in plain view from the deck of the Viceroy, but the delay in sending off the promised tug to take us to the landing, with a further delay in the starting of the waiting special, set back our departure from Brunsbüttel an hour behind the time scheduled.

As all the trains previously put at the disposal of the Allied Commission had been given the right of way over everything else on the line, we had good reason to believe that this time might also be made up in the course of the run across absolutely level country which separated us from Tondern. It was little more than one hundred miles. When, far from making up time, we continued to lose it—both by waits at stations and by slow running between them—our mounting suspicions that the Germans meant to keep us hanging about till after dark seemed to be confirmed. A protest to the Korvettenkapitän conducting the party brought only a shrug of the shoulders and the assertion that the bad conditions of the track and the engine made greater speed too dangerous. As there was no doubt that the engine was clanking and banging a good deal, and that the bogey immediately under our compartment had at least one "flat" wheel, about the only reply we could make to this was to point out that the twelve-car train which had just passed us was doing at least twice our speed.

"Ah! but that train had the good engine," was the naïve reply. It hardly seemed worth while asking why our special had not also been provided with a "good" engine. Some sort of directions were given to the engineer, however, and there was sufficient acceleration of speed (at the expense, it appeared, of cutting off the steam heating the car) to bring us into Tondern station with something like three-quarters of an hour of daylight still to the good. This was so contrary to the plans of our hosts that the train was kept waiting in the station for fifteen minutes on the pretext that the party of officers from the town who were to accompany us had not yet arrived. The crowd on the platform, amongst which Danish types predominated, seemed to be genuinely friendly, but a couple of Red Cross girls who stepped forward to offer refreshments were waved savagely back by an armed guard.

The ragged silhouettes of the bombed sheds were in plain sight, but a mile or so distant, when (the German officers having arrived and taken their places in a spare compartment) the train, with much wheezing and clanking, started up again and ran slowly out on to the spur towards the airship station. It would be but a few minutes more, we told ourselves, and there would still be light enough to see the general lay of things. The engine never increased its snail's-pace of three miles an hour all the way, and when it came to a stop at last, close beside a towering wall of steel, there was barely light enough to show the top of the wall against the dusky, low-hanging clouds of the early twilight. Our conductor had maintained his schedule to the minute. When we alighted he was voluble in his explanation of how the track of the spur was in such a state of disrepair that a greater speed would have been attended by the risk of derailment. There was nothing that we could say to refute this specious protestation, until, on our return journey an hour or two later, the engine (which had been making steam in the interim) whisked the two cars over that same spur at the giddy rate of twenty miles an hour—a good six times as fast as we had come.

The commander of the station, saying that, as the hour was late, we doubtless would desire to get the inspection over as quickly as possible, started off into the darkness at a brisk pace, the rest—British, Americans, and Germans—stumbling along in pursuit as best they could. Entering the shed by a side door near which the train had stopped, we found it so poorly lighted that the opposite wall showed but dimly, while the ends and the soaring arches of the roof were lost in dusky obscurity. At that first glimpse—probably the fresh smell of the cement under foot and the palpable newness of the pressed asbestos siding under one of the lights had something to do with it—the shed gave one the impression of being just on the point of completion. The description of the station furnished to us mentioned no such structure, so that we were rather at a loss. No explanation was volunteered, however, and our guide pushed on straight across, with the evident intention of passing out through the opposite door. But the senior Allied officer, an American, of commander's rank, stopped him with a request for more light. Half a dozen switches were then thrown over, and flooded the great structure with the brilliant radiance of countless incandescent globes. At once the huge building was revealed as a double Zeppelin shed of the largest size, just at the end of a long spell of restoration after being badly damaged. Fragments of duraluminum and charred pieces of wood and fabric, swept together in great heaps at the sides, told more of the story, and great fresh patches at several points in the roof the rest of it. This was the shed in which the two Zeppelins, which the Germans admitted losing when the station was bombed by the planes from the Furious, had been destroyed. It was the least damaged of the sheds bombed, said the German commander, and it had been rebuilt with materials from two other sheds both of which were in process of demolition.

I saw the Yankee officer's eyes glistening as the picture those words conjured up flashed before them, and heard his muttered "Some raid that, by cripes!"

"If you are zatisfied, ve vill now go on to der oder sheds," the German commander said presently, and we followed him out into the deepening twilight.

Tondern had nothing of the regularity of plan of Nordholz, nor, luckily, the latter's magnificent distances. We found the two remaining sheds, or what was left of them, at less than half a mile from the first. One was nothing but a foundation, with prostrate steel pillars and girders scattered about over it, and numerous deep pools of water. I say deep, because it took two of his colleagues to fish out one of the party who stumbled into it, and he, by the irony of fate, was a stout German officer, with a deep bass voice and a magnificent vocabulary. We had to take the German's word for it that this shed had been a small one, which they were demolishing because it had been obsolete, and not because it had been damaged by bombs.

Men were at work pulling down a section of the next shed as we came up, but they shambled away at a word from one of their officers. This one, said the station commander, was much the worst damaged of the two bombed in the raid, but, by good luck, there had been no airships in it at the time. The reason that it was more badly knocked to pieces than the other, in spite of the fact that, in the latter, the explosion of the Zeppelins was added to that of the bombs, was due to its doors having been tightly closed. This had caused the full force of the exploding bombs to be exerted against the walls and roof of the shed, whereas, in the first one, much of that force had been dissipated through the open front of the structure.

Save a flare or two by which the men had been working, there was no lights in this shed, but, picking our way over heaps of broken glass and asbestos sheeting, we managed to find a point from which the tangled and twisted girders of a still undemolished section of the roof were silhouetted against a stratum of western clouds, yet bright in the last of the sunset glow. For the most part they bulged outward, where the up-gush of the explosion had exerted its force against the roof, but in two places they bent sharply inward, and ended in jagged bars of torn metal. These were the places, the Germans told us, where two of the bombs burst through. One of them explained the remarkable fact of the great holes being almost exactly in a line down the middle of the roof by saying: "Poof! they fly so low they could not miss. Any airman could do that. But they did miss with one bomb, though," he said, brightening. "Come mit me. I show you," and he led the way to a spot forty or fifty feet in front of the wrecked building, where his electric torch revealed a round hole in the earth about five feet in diameter by four feet deep. "I think that bomb miss der top of der shed by one half-metre," he said, sighting along his outstretched arm at what was evidently reckoned the angle of a bomb from a low-flying machine. "Yes, it miss der shed by half a metre; but it kills five men chust der same. Not so bad after all, perhapds." Your Hun officer is ever a cold-blooded reckoner, and one of the reasons he is so useful is that he never lets sentiment blur his perspective.

From various things heard and seen in the course of that hurried night visit of inspection to Tondern it would have been possible to piece out a fairly accurate picture of how the great raid must have appeared to the Germans stationed there at the time. It will be better, however, to set down a brief résumé of the connected account I heard at Nordholz from Von Butlar, Germany's most famous surviving airship pilot, who had, as will be seen, good reason for remembering what occurred on that eventful morning.

Von Butlar's2 chief claim to distinction is his notable long-distance flights, the most remarkable of which was in connection with an attempt to carry medical supplies to General Von Letow in German East Africa. The German European forces there were being decimated by malaria at the time, and Von Letow had sent word by wireless that unless a supply of quinine reached him by a certain date he would be unable to carry on. As this campaign was diverting far too much British effort for the Germans to let it come to an end while any card still remained to be played, it was decided to make an attempt to send relief by Zeppelin. A rendezvous was arranged, and after some delay an airship, under Von Butlar's command, was dispatched from a station in Bulgaria, the nearest practicable point from which a start could be made. The delay alone caused the failure of the boldly conceived project, for, flying without a hitch of any kind, Von Butlar had already crossed the Mediterranean, Lower and Upper Egypt, and was well over the Sudan when Von Letow informed him by wireless that the British had occupied the point where he was to have landed, and that, as it was not practicable to rendezvous with him in a sufficiently open region elsewhere, it would be best for him to return home. This remarkable feat was successfully accomplished, Von Butlar bringing his airship safely to earth at a point on the Turkish shores of the Black Sea.

A scarcely less remarkable flight was one in which Von Butlar claimed to have crossed the North Sea to near the Yorkshire coast, to have passed north in sight of Rosyth, Invergordon, and Scapa Flow, to have flown across to Norway, gaining useful information respecting convoy and patrol movements, and back to his home station at Tondern or Nordholz. The Admiralty, which had some information about this latter flight, had credited Von Butlar with having been in the air 104 hours, but he assured several members of the Commission that the actual time was little short of six days. He also claimed to have taken a useful photograph of the Grand Fleet at anchor at Scapa Flow.

At the time of the Tondern raid, Von Butlar was flying from there, one of the two Zeppelins destroyed being that which he commanded. As he speaks little, if any, English, the following account is a free translation of the story he related to us in German of what occurred on that occasion. "We always recognized," he said, "from the time that we learned that the British were developing swift flying-machine carriers, that Tondern was especially vulnerable to an attack of this kind, and we prepared against it as best we could. We had expected, however, that it would come in the form of a raid by seaplanes, which would, of course, have been comparatively heavy and slow, and which would have had to return to the sea to land, and against these our defence would probably have been effective. Where we deceived ourselves was in underrating the risks that your men were willing to take, such as, for instance, that of landing in the sea in an ordinary aeroplane on the chance of being picked up in the comparatively short time such a machine will float."

"We were not prepared for such a raid at any time, but especially at the moment at which it occurred. We had had a protecting flight of light fighting aeroplanes at Tondern, but the landing ground had never been properly levelled. There had been many accidents, and a number of the machines were always disabled. This trouble became so bad toward the middle of last summer that it was finally decided to withdraw the protecting flight, which was badly needed at the moment elsewhere, until the landing ground had been improved. As usual, your Admiralty seem to have learned of this within a few hours and to have decided to take advantage of it at once. From the way your machines were flying when they appeared, I am practically certain that they felt sure of being opposed by nothing worse than gun-fire.

"We received warning, of course, when the raiding planes were still over the sea, but, unless some of the machines at once sent up from the coastal stations could stop them, there was nothing for us to do but to give them the warmest reception we could with the anti-aircraft guns, in which we were fairly strong. Our gunners were well trained, and if your planes had kept high, as they would have done if they had been expecting a strong attack by a superior force of protecting machines, they would most probably have been prevented from doing much harm, instead of just about wiping the station off the map, as they did.

"When we had the warning, most of those without special duties went to the abri, which had been provided at all stations for use in case of raids. But I was so concerned over the danger to my own ship that I remained outside. It was quite light by the time they appeared. At first they were flying high, but while they were still small specks I saw them begin to plane down, as though following a pre-arranged plan. It was all over in a minute or two after that. Part of them headed for one shed and part for the other. Diving with their engines all out—or so it seemed—they came over with the combined speed from their drop and the pull of their propellers. Down they came, till they seemed to be going to ram the sheds. Then, one after another, they flattened out and passed lengthwise over their targets at a height of about forty metres, kicking loose bombs as they went.

"Our guns simply had no chance at all with them. In fact, one of the guns came pretty near to getting knocked out itself. It was so reckless a piece of work that I couldn't help noticing it, even while my own airship was beginning to burst into flames. One of the pilots, it seems, must have found that he had a bomb or two left at about the same time he spotted the position of one of the guns that was firing at him. Banking steeply, round he came, dived straight at the battery, letting go a bomb as his sight came on when he was no more than fifteen metres above it. Then he waved his hand and dashed off after the other machines, which were already scattering to avoid the German planes beginning to converge on them from all directions. It was one of the finest examples of nerve I ever saw.

"The precaution we had taken of opening the doors of the main shed saved it from total destruction, for the airships, instead of exploding, only burned comparatively slowly; but Tondern, as an air station, had practically ceased to exist from that moment."

VIII
THROUGH THE CANAL TO THE BALTIC

The Hercules and her four escorting destroyers (the latter having been scattered during the last few days to various ports and air stations in connection with the inspection being pushed all along the German North Sea coast) were to have rendezvoused at Brunsbüttel by dark of the 10th, in order to be ready to start through the Kiel Canal at daybreak the following morning. At the appointed time, however, only the Viceroy, which had pushed through that morning with the "air" party en route to the Zeppelin station at Tondern, was on hand. The Hercules, which had got under weigh from Wilhelmshaven during the forenoon, reported that she had been compelled to anchor off the Elbe estuary on account of the thickness of the fog, and the Verdun, coming on from her visit to Borkum and Heligoland, had been delayed from a similar cause. The Vidette and Venetia, which were helping the "shipping" and "warship" parties get around the harbours of Bremen and Hamburg, signalled that their work was still uncompleted and that they would have to proceed later to Kiel "on their own."

Returning to Brunsbüttel from the Tondern visit well along toward midnight, the absence of the Hercules compelled the four of us who had made that arduous journey in the Viceroy (the accommodations in the "V's" appear to be as elastic as the good nature of their officers is boundless), to spend the night aboard, and the impossibility of rejoining our own ships in the morning was responsible for the fact that we continued with her—the first British destroyer to pass through the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal—on to Kiel. It was a passage as memorable as historic.

An improving visibility toward morning enabled the Hercules to get under weigh again before daybreak, and in the first grey light of the winter dawn she came nosing past us and on up to the entrance of the canal. At each end of the latter there are two locks—lying side by side—for both "outgoing" and "incoming" ships. The right-side one of the "incoming" pair was reserved for the Hercules, while the other was kept clear for the Regensburg—flying Admiral Goette's flag—and the two British destroyers. The difference in level between the canal and the waters of the Elbe, varying considerably with the tide, is only a few feet at most, and the locking through, as a consequence, only the matter of minutes.

The Hercules and Regensburg were already in their respective locks as the Viceroy, with the Verdun half a cable's length astern, came gliding up out of the fog, the former already beginning to show her great bulk above the side as she lifted with the in-pouring water. The attention of the score or so of Germans standing on the wall between the locks was centred, not on the Hercules, as one might have expected, but on the Regensburg, the most of them being gathered in a gesticulative group abreast the latter's bow. The reason for this we saw presently.

The handling of the British destroyers on this occasion was one of the smartest things of the kind I ever saw. Indeed, under the circumstances, "spectacular" is a fitter word to describe it than "smart." Without reducing the speed of her engines by a revolution, the Viceroy continued right on into the narrow water-lane of the lock at the same pace as she had approached its entrance. Certainly she was doing ten knots, and probably a good bit over that. On into the still more restricted space between the Regensburg and the right side of the dock she drove, while the waterside loafers—scenting a smash—grinned broadly in anticipation of the humiliation of the Englanders. Straight at the loftily looming lock gate she drove, and I remember distinctly seeing men who were crossing the canal on the bridge made by the folded flaps break into a run to avoid the imminent crash. And she never did slow down; she stopped. While there was still a score of yards to go the captain threw the engine-room telegraph over to "Stop!" and "Half-Speed Astern!" and, straining like a dog in leash as the reversed propellers killed her headway, stop she did. The superlative finesse of the thing (for they had seen something before of the handling of ships in narrow places) fairly swept the gathering dock-side vultures off their feet with astonishment, and one little knot of sailors all but broke into a cheer. Then the Verdun came dashing up and repeated the same spectacular manœuvre in our wake; only, instead of bringing up a few feet short of the lock gates, it was the stern of the Viceroy, with its festoon of poised depth-charges, that her axe-like bow backed away from after nosing up close enough to sniff, if not to scratch, the paint.

"You've impressed the Huns right enough, sir," I remarked to the captain as he rang down, "Finished with the Engines," and turned to descend the ladder of the bridge; "but wasn't it just a bit—"

"Yes, it was rather slow," he cut in apologetically in answer to what he thought I was going to say; "but I didn't dare to take any chances of coming a cropper in strange waters. Now, if it had been the 'Pen' at Rosyth, we might have shown them what one of the little old 'V's' can do when it comes to a pinch."

At the time I thought he was joking—that I had seen the extreme limit that morning of the "handiness" of the modern destroyer. But the Viceroy, astonishing as that performance had been, still had something up her sleeve. A week later, in the fog-shrouded entrance to Kiel Fiord, where a slip would have been a good deal more serious matter than the telescoping of a bow on a lock gate, I saw how much.

From the vantage of the bridge I saw, just before descending for breakfast, what it had been that had deflected the attention of the lock-side loafers from the Hercules to the Regensburg. That most graceful of light cruisers had paid the penalty of being left with a most disgraceful crew. She had rammed the lock gate full and square, and—from the look of her bows—while she still had a good deal of way on. We had remarked especially the trim lissomeness of those bows when she met us off the Jade on the day the Hercules arrived in German waters. And now the sharp stem was bent several feet to port, while all back along her "flare" the buckled plating heaved in undulant corrugations like the hide on the neck of an old bull rhino. As it was the kind of repair that would take a month or more in dock to effect, there was nothing for the Germans to do but go on using her as she was. Luckily, she did not appear to be making much water. She followed us through the canal without difficulty, and—as the days when she would be called on to shake out her thirty knots were gone for ever—it is probable that she served Admiral Goette as well for a flagship as any other of her undamaged sisters would have. But they were never able to smooth out her "brow of care" during all our stay in German waters; indeed, I shall be greatly surprised if (to use the expressive term I heard a bluejacket in the Viceroy apply to it that morning) she does not come poking that "cauliflower nose" in front of her when she is finally handed over for internment at Scapa.

Although they would be dwarfed beside such great structures as the Pedro Miguel or Gatun locks of the Panama Canal, the locks at Brunsbüttel are fine solid works, displaying on every hand evidences of the great attention which had been given to providing for their rapid operation under pressure, as when the High Sea Fleet was being rushed through from the Baltic to the North Sea. Having been enlarged primarily to "double the strength of the German Fleet," expense had not mattered in the way it would have had the canal been expected to justify itself commercially. The merchant traffic of the waterway for many years to come would not have demanded the double locks at either end; but naval exigencies called for speedy operation at any cost, and they were built.

Everything about the locks was in extremely good repair. Even the great agate and onyx mosaic of the name Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal, set between the double-headed eagles of the Imperial arms, was swept and polished to display it to best advantage. The locks were only the front window display, however, for the badly eroded banks of the canal itself testified to the same lack of maintenance as the railways were suffering from. As our pilot reported that the revolutionists had spent the night obliterating all the Imperial names—such as Kaiserstrasse and Kronprintzstrasse—in Brunsbüttel, one felt safe in assuming that the gaudy mosaic on the lock wall had been furbished as a decoration, not as a symbol.

The Hercules, having been raised to the proper level, was locked out into the canal, along which she proceeded at the steady six-knot speed laid down as the limit not to be exceeded by ships of her size. Although of considerably less displacement than a number of the largest of the German capital ships, she was of greater draught than any of these, and even the burning of several hundred tons of coal in the voyage from Rosyth still left her drawing slightly more than the thirty odd feet that the German naval command had set as the limit. This had been figured out in advance, however, and an oiling all round of the destroyers before leaving Wilhelmshaven had brought her up just the few inches necessary to making the passage without inflicting injury to herself or to the canal.

The Hercules had traversed about a mile of the canal before the Viceroy was locked out to follow in her wake, and something like that interval was preserved throughout most of the passage. The Verdun kept about a quarter of a mile astern of the Viceroy, with the Regensburg—but so far back as to be out of sight—bringing up the rear. Two squat patrol launches—one on either quarter, a couple of hundred yards astern—followed the Hercules all the way, but for just what purpose we could not make out.

For the first few miles the country on either side of the canal was of the same low-lying nature as that through which all of our railway journeys from Wilhelmshaven had been made. Ditched and dyked marshland alternated with stretches of bog and broad sheets of stagnant water where the drainage system had proved unequal to carrying off the overflow in the inundations following the winter rains. Cultivation was at a standstill here, probably until the water-logged soil dried out in the spring. Like the East Frisian peninsula, the region was essentially a grazing rather than an agricultural one, and the farmers were paying the penalty of having broken up grassland that was only dry enough for cultivation during a few months of the year. Cattle were scarce, sheep scarcer, and such of the inhabitants as were visible around the dismal farmsteads had the dull, purposeless air of people with nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in.

As we fared inland only the gradually heightening banks told that the country was increasing in elevation. Ponds and bogs were still frequent, and it was not until the first low hills were reached that there appeared to be enough drainage for the land to shake itself free of water. Here the country took on a more cheerful aspect, due principally to the fact that the people, many of whom were working, seemed less "bogged down"—mentally and physically—than their countrymen in the water-logged areas near the sea. Most of them were capable of recognizing us as Allied warships (something which few of the others appeared to have done), and when this had sunk home they usually hurried down to the bank of the canal for a closer view. Most of these isolated farming people were undemonstrative, and it was not until the more sophisticated inhabitants of the villages and towns were encountered that women and children were seen to wave their hands and men to doff their hats and bow. Most of the population, both agricultural and industrial, is found toward the Kiel rather than the Brunsbüttel end of the canal.

At one point we came upon two men and a girl feverishly engaged in skinning a horse, which appeared to have dropped dead in the furrow. Or rather, they had already skinned it and were busy cutting up the carcass. Watching through my glass from the bridge of the Viceroy, I saw all three of them rush helter-skelter over a hill and out of sight as the Hercules came abreast of them, only to hurry back and resume their grisly work when she had disappeared around a bend just ahead. When they again took to their heels on sighting the Viceroy, I asked the pilot what they were afraid of. The law required, he replied, that the authorities should be notified of the death of any head of live stock in order that the meat (in case it was deemed fit for human consumption) should be distributed through the regular rationing channels. These people, he thought, were in the act of stealing their own dead horse, and doubtless their guilty consciences made them fear they would be reported and delivered up to justice.

Since witnessing this incident I have found myself rather less inclined to dwell in retrospect on that huge, juicy "beefsteak" I had devoured with such gusto when it was the pièce de résistance on the menu of our luncheon at the Nordholz Zeppelin station a couple of days previously.

Through the low country the construction of the canal had evidently been only a matter of dredging, but the multiplication in size and number of the "dumps" as the elevation increased showed that there had been places where digging on an extensive scale had been necessary, especially in connection with the widening and deepening operations. The fact that most of the "dumps" appeared to consist of earth of a very loose and sandy nature, some of them so much so that they had been planted thickly with young trees to prevent their being shifted by the winds, showed that the excavation problem had been a comparatively simple one, more of the nature of that at Suez than Panama, where so much of the way had to be blasted through solid rock.

The looseness of the earth had made it necessary to cut the banks at as low an angle as forty-five degrees in places to prevent caving, and at these points the under-water part of the channel was faced with roughly cut stone to minimize erosion. As this work was only carried a few feet above the surface of the water, it required but slight speed on the part of a large ship to produce a wave high enough to splash over on to the unprotected earth and bring it down in slides. This had doubtless happened very often in the course of the frequent shuttling to and fro of the High Sea Fleet, for the stonework was heavily undermined in many places, with few signs to indicate that much had been done in the way of repairs.

Except in the locks (and even there the concrete was cracking badly in places, particularly at the Kiel end), the canal shows many evidences of the haste of its construction and the serious deterioration it has suffered from heavy use and poor maintenance. It will require much money and labour to put it in proper condition, and neither of these is likely to be over plentiful in Germany for some years to come.

Our first glimpse of Allied prisoners in their "natural habitat" occurred at a point about twenty miles inland from Brunsbüttel, where a new and very lofty railway viaduct was being thrown across the canal. The extensive groups of huts along the bank in the shadow of the half-completed final span of steel looked, from the distance, like ordinary workmen's quarters. As we drew nearer, however, broad belts of barbed wire surrounding those on the right side suggested that they were used as a prison camp even before our glasses had revealed the motley clad group on the bank waving to the Hercules. As the Viceroy came abreast the excited and constantly augmenting crowd, we saw that the uniforms were mostly French and Russian, though there were three or four men in the grey of Italy and at least one with the unmistakable cap of the Serbs. A hulking chap in khaki, whom I was making the object of an especially close scrutiny on the chance that he might be British or American, put an end to doubt by slapping his chest resoundingly and announcing proudly, "Je suis Belge!" From the fact that they were all in good spirits, we took it that they were getting enough to eat and that prospects for repatriation were favourable.

We had quite given up hope of sighting any British when suddenly, from behind a barbed-wire barrier fencing off the last groups of huts, rang out a cry of "'Ow's ol'Blighty?" Sweeping my glass round to the quarter from whence the query came, I focussed on a phiz which, despite its mask of lather, I should have recognized as Cockney just as surely in Korea or Katmandu as on the banks of the Kiel Canal. Waving his brush jauntily in response to the salvo of delighted howls boomed out by the bluejackets lining the starboard rail, he turned back to the little pocket mirror on the side of the hut and resumed his interrupted shave.

"Can you beat that, I ask you?" gasped an American Flying officer who had just clambered up to the bridge. "Here it is the first time that 'Tommy' has seen his country's flag in anywhere from one to four years; and yet, even when he must know he could get a lift home for the asking, all he does is to—go on scraping his face! I say, can you beat it?"

The captain did not reply, but his indulgent grin indicated a sympathetic understanding of "British repressiveness."

But if this particular "Tommy" had been somewhat casual in his greeting, there was nothing to complain of on that score in the reception given us by the next British prisoners we encountered, a few miles further along. The incident—one of the most dramatic of the visit—occurred just after the Hercules had passed under the great railway viaduct which crosses the canal almost midway between Brunsbüttel and Kiel. Wherever practicable, I might explain, all railways have been carried across the canal at a height sufficient to allow even the lofty topmasts of the German warships to pass under by a comfortable margin. Not one of the several viaducts runs much under two hundred feet above the canal, and to attain this height at an easy grade long approaches have been necessary. Some of these—partly steel trestle, partly embankment—stretched beyond eyescope to left and right; but at the viaduct in question the ascent was made by means of two great spiral loops at either end.

A segment of the loop on the left ran close beside the canal in the form of a steep embankment, and as the Hercules glided under the viaduct I saw (we had closed up to within a few hundred yards of her at the time) a long train of passenger cars, drawn by two puffing engines, just beginning the heavy climb. Suddenly I caught the flash of what I took to be a red flag being wildly waved from one of the car windows, and I was just starting to tell the captain that we were about to pass a trainload of revolutionaries when the gust of a mighty cheer swept along the waters to us and set the radio aerials ringing above my head.

"You can't tell me that's a 'Bolshie' yell," observed the American officer decisively. "Nothing but Yanks or Tommies could cough up a roar like that, believe me."

Then I saw that all the canal-ward sides of the dozen or more coaches were wriggling with khaki arms and shoulders (for all the world as though a great two-hundred-yard-long centipede had been pinned up there and left to squirm), and that what I had taken for the red flag of anarchy was only the mass effect of a number of fluttering bandannas. Again and again they cheered the Hercules and the White Ensign, with a fresh salvo for the Viceroy, which they sighted just before the curve of the loop the train was ascending cut off their view of the canal. That was all we ever heard or saw of them. We were never even sure whether they were British or American. We felt certain, however, that the fact that most of them were still in khaki indicated that their stay in the "Land of Kultur" had not been a long one, and, moreover, that they were already on the first leg of their journey home.

Prisoners working on the land—mostly Russian—were more and more in evidence as we neared the Kiel end of the canal. The majority of them still wore their army uniforms, but otherwise there was little to differentiate them—a short distance away at least—from the native peasant labour. None of them appeared to be under guard, and in many places they were working side by side with German farm hands of both sexes. At a number of points I saw Russians lounging indolently in groups consisting mostly of Germans (several of which included women) that had gathered along the banks of the canal to watch us pass, and two or three times I observed unmistakable Russian prisoners (or perhaps ex-prisoners) walking arm-in-arm and apparently in animated conversation with German girls. They seem quite to have taken root in the country. Indeed, the pilot of the Viceroy for the first half of the passage through the canal—he was a Schleswig man, strongly Danish in appearance and probably in sympathies—assured me that the Germans had had the greatest difficulty in getting Russian prisoners to leave the country at all, and that there had been frequent "desertions" from trains and boats whenever it had been attempted. This may well have been true, though—with labour in Germany as much in demand as it was throughout the war—I doubt very much if a great deal in the way of repatriation of Russians had ever been attempted.

With the towns and villages increasing in size and number as we came to the fertile rolling country toward the Baltic end of the canal, evidences multiplied that the population expected our coming and that, directly or indirectly, they had been instructed to adopt a "conciliatory" bearing. In the farming region toward the North Sea end their bearing had been more suggestive of indifference than anything else; but in the crowds that came down to line the railed "promenades" along the banks an ingratiating attitude was at once apparent. Some of these people, of course, were of Danish extraction and probably sincere, especially a number who waved their hands from well inside their doorways, as though to avoid being observed by their neighbours; but for the most part it was the same nauseating exhibition we had already seen repeated so often at railway stations all over the North Sea littoral.

The only individual we saw in the whole passage who thoroughly convinced me of his sincerity was a bloated ruffian who hailed us from the stern of the barge he had edged into a ferry slip to give us room to pass. "Go back to England, you English swine!" he roared to the accompaniment of a lewd gesture. We learned later that he gave both the Hercules and Verdun the same peremptory orders. Yes, he was quite sincere, that old bargee, and for that reason I have always thought more kindly of him than of all the rest of his grimacing brethren and sistern we saw along the canal that day. A spectacled student (though it is quite possible he was trying to put the same sentiment in politer language) was rather less convincing. "English gentlemen," he cried, drawing his loose-jointed frame up to its full height and glaring at the bridge of the Viceroy from under his peaked cap, "why do you come here?" That may have been intended for a protest, or, again, he may merely have been "swanking" his linguistic accomplishments.

The bluejackets were splendid. There were places—notably at several industrial establishments where crowds of rather "on-coming" girls in trousers exerted their blonde witcheries to the full in endeavours to "start something"—when the least sign of friendliness from the ship would have undoubtedly been met with loud acclaim. But not a British hand did I see lifted in response to the hundreds waved from the banks, while many a simpering grin died out as the moon-face behind it passed under the steady stare of the imperturbable matelots lining the rails of the steadily steaming warships.

The length of the Kiel Canal is just under a hundred kilometres (about sixty miles), so that—at the speed of ten kilometres an hour to which we were limited—the passage required about ten hours, exclusive of the time spent in locking in and out. As it was an hour after dawn when we began the passage at Brunsbüttel, the short winter day was not long enough to make it possible to reach the other end in daylight. By five o'clock darkness had begun to settle over the waters, and the grey mists, piling ever thicker in the narrow notch between the hills, deepened through violet to purple before taking on the black opacity of the curtain of the night. Then the lights came on—parallel rows of incandescents narrowing to mist-softened wedges of blurred brightness ahead and astern—and we continued cleaving our easy effortless way through the ebony water.

The blank squares of lighted villa windows heralded the approach to Kiel; then factories, black, still, and stagnant, with the tracery of overhead cranes and the bulk of tall chimneys showing dimly through the mists; then the locks. As the difference between the canal level and the almost tideless Baltic is only a matter of inches, locking-out was even a more expeditious operation than locking in from the Elbe at the other end. There was just time to note that the "Kaiser Wilhelm" mosaic, there as at Brunsbüttel, had been scrubbed up bright and clean, when the gates ahead folded inward and the way into the Baltic was open. Half an hour later, after steaming slowly across a harbour past many moored warships, we were tying up alongside the Hercules, where she had come to anchor a mile off Kiel dockyard.