Part 17

On Christmas Day, 1916, the British patrol vessel Highland Scot met and hailed a sailing vessel which declared itself without ceremony to be the three-masted Norwegian schooner Irma, bound from Christiania to Sydney with a cargo of lumber. As nothing was more natural, the vessel was allowed to pass, and soon disappeared on the horizon.

A few days later, in the Atlantic, running before a northerly gale, this neat-looking, long-distance freighter threw its deck load of planks and beams into the ocean, brought from their hiding places two four-inch guns, six machine guns, two gasoline launches, and a motor powerful enough to propel the vessel without the use of sails on occasion. Then a wireless dispatch sent in cipher from aerials concealed in the rigging announced that the German raider Seeadler was ready for business. On the bow the legend, "Irma, Christiania," and at the masthead the flag of Norway remained to lure the raider's victims to destruction.

The Seeadler had formerly been the American ship Pass of Balmaha, 2,800 tons, belonging to the Boston Lumber Company. In August, 1915, while on its way from New York to Archangel, it was captured by a German's submarine and sent to Bremen, where it was fitted out as a raider. Under the name of the Seeadler it left Bremerhaven on Dec. 21, 1916, in company with the Möwe, ran the British blockade by the ruse indicated above, and began its career of destruction on two oceans. While the Möwe waylaid its twenty-two victims along the African coast, the Seeadler turned southwest and preyed on South American trade.

One by one the Seeadler sent to the bottom the British ships Gladis Royle, Lady Island, British Yeoman, Pinmore, Perse, Horngarth; the French vessels Dupleix, Antonin, La Rochefoucauld, Charles Gounod, and the Italian ship Buenos Aires. On March 7, 1917, it encountered the French bark Cambronne two-thirds of the way between Rio de Janeiro and the African coast and forced it to take on board 277 men from the crews of the eleven vessels previously captured. The Cambronne was compelled to carry these to Rio de Janeiro, where it landed them on March 20, thus first revealing the work of the Seeadler to the world. On March 22 the German Government announced the safe completion of the second voyage of the Möwe. (See CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE for May, 1917, p. 298.)

Having thus ended its operations in the Atlantic, the Seeadler rounded Cape Horn with the intention of scouring the Pacific. In June it sank two American schooners in that ocean, the A. B. Johnson and R. C. Slade, adding another, the Manila, on July 8, and making prisoners of all the crews. Captain Smith of the Slade afterward told the story of his experiences. His ship had been attacked on June 17, and he had at first tried to escape by outsailing the raider; but after the ninth shell dropped near his ship he surrendered. He continued:

They took all our men aboard the raider except the cook. Next morning I went back on board with all my men and packed up. We left the ship with our belongings June 18. We were put on board the raider again. Shortly after I saw from the raider that they cut holes in the masts and placed dynamite bombs in each mast, and put fire to both ends of the ship and left her. I saw the masts go over the side and the ship was burning from end to end, and the raider steamed away.

After six months of hard life at sea the raider was in need of repairs and the crew longed for a rest on solid land. Casting about for an island sufficiently isolated for his purpose, the Captain, Count von Luckner, decided upon the French atoll of Mopeha, 265 miles west of Tahiti; he believed the little island to be uninhabited. The Seeadler dropped anchor near its jagged coral reefs July 31, 1917. On Aug. 1 Captain von Luckner took possession of the islet and raised the German flag over what he called the Kaiser's last colony. But the next day, during a picnic which he had organized "to entertain his crew and prisoners," leaving only a few men on board the Seeadler, a heavy swell dropped the ship across an uncharted blade of the reef, breaking the vessel's back. The Germans were prisoners themselves on their own conquered islet!

Von Luckner had been incorrect in believing the island entirely uninhabited. Three Tahitians lived there to make copra (dried cocoanut) and to raise pigs and chickens for the firm of Grand, Miller & Co. of Papeete; this firm was shortly to send a vessel to take away its employes, a fact which the Germans learned with mixed emotions.

They brought ashore everything they could from their wrecked ship, including planks and beams, of which they constructed barracks; also provisions, machine guns, and wireless apparatus. The heavy guns were put out of commission--likewise the ship's motor. The wireless plant, a very powerful one, was set up between two cocoanut trees. It was equipped with sending and receiving apparatus, and without difficulty its operator could hear Pago-Pago, Tahiti, and Honolulu.

On Aug. 23 Count von Luckner and five men set out in an armed motor sloop for the Cook Islands, which they reached in seven days. There they succeeded in deceiving the local authorities, but a few days later they and their boat were captured in the Fiji Islands by the local constabulary and handed over to the British authorities. Thus ended the Captain's hope of seizing an American ship and returning to Mopeha for his crew.

On Sept. 5 the French schooner Lutece from Papeete arrived at Mopeha to get the three Tahitians and their crops. First Lieutenant Kling took a motor boat and a machine gun and captured the schooner, which had a large cargo of flour, salmon, and beef, with a supply of fresh water. Kling and the rest of the Germans, after dismantling the wireless, left the island that night, abandoning forty-eight prisoners, including the Americans, the crew of the Lutece, and four natives. Before going they destroyed what they could not take with them, cut down many trees to get the cocoanuts more easily, and left to the prisoners very scant provisions, and bad at that. The few cocoanuts that remained were largely destroyed by the great number of rats on the island. There was plenty of fish and turtles.

After the flight of the Germans the French flag was hoisted on the island and the twentieth-century Robinson Crusoes organized themselves under Captain Southard of the Manila and M. Fain, one of the owners of the Lutece. The camp was rebuilt, the supplies rationed out, the catching of fish and turtles arranged, and the question of going in search of help discussed. On Sept. 8 Pedro Miller, one of the owners of the Lutece, set sail in an open boat with Captains Southard and Porutu, a mate, Captain Williams, and three sailors, hoping to reach the Island of Maupiti, eighty-five miles to the east; but after struggling eight days against head winds and a high sea he returned to Mopeha with his exhausted companions. Two days later, Sept. 19, Captain Smith of the Slade, with two mates and a sailor, left the island in a leaky whaleboat dubbed the Deliverer of Mopeha and shaped their course toward the west; in ten days they covered 1,080 miles and landed at Tutuila, one of the Samoan Islands, where the American authorities informed Tahiti by wireless of the serious plight of the men marooned on Mopeha. The British Governor at Apia--Robert Louis Stevenson's last home--also offered to send a relief ship; but the Governor of the French Establishments of Oceania, declining this offer with thanks, dispatched the French schooner Tiare-Taporo from Papeete on Oct. 4.

Two days later the relief expedition sighted Mopeha by means of a column of smoke that rose from the island, for the Robinson Crusoes had organized a permanent signal system to attract the attention of passing vessels. The arrival of the rescuers was greeted with frantic acclamations. By evening the last boatload of refugees was aboard the Tiare-Taporo, and on the morning of Oct. 10 the schooner reached Papeete, where the prisoners at last were free.

The fate of the Lutece with the main body of the Seeadler's crew was indicated, though not fully explained, by a cable dispatch from Valparaiso, Chile, March 5, 1918, stating that the Chilean schooner Falcon had arrived there from the Easter Islands with fifty-eight sailors formerly belonging to the crew of the Seeadler. The sailors were interned by the Chilean Government. Count Felix von Luckner, commander of the Seeadler, who, with five of his men, had been captured by the local constabulary of the Fiji Islands, was interned by the British in a camp near Auckland, New Zealand. In December he and other interned Germans escaped to sea in an open boat and traveled nearly 500 miles, suffering from lack of food and water, but were recaptured after a two weeks' chase.

Treatment of British Prisoners

Shocking Brutalities in German War Prisons Revealed in an Official Report

A report issued by an official British Investigating Committee, known as the Justice Younger Committee, appointed to investigate the treatment of British soldiers by their German captors, made public in April, 1918, presents a shocking record of barbarities. The commission reported as follows:

There is now no doubt in the minds of the committee that as early, at the latest, as the month of August, 1916, the German Command were systematically employing their British as well as other prisoners in forced labor close behind the western firing line, thereby deliberately exposing them to the fire of the guns of their own and allied armies. This fact has never been acknowledged by the German Government. On the contrary, it has always been studiously concealed. But that the Germans are chargeable, even from that early date, with inflicting the physical cruelty and the mental torture inherent in such a practice can no longer be doubted.

Characteristically the excuse put forward was that this treatment, not apparently suggested to be otherwise defensible, was forced upon the German Command as a reprisal for what was asserted to be the fact, namely, that German prisoners in British hands had at some time or other been kept less than thirty kilometers (how much less does not appear) behind the British firing line in France. This statement was quite unfounded.

Furthermore, at the end of April, 1917, an agreement was definitely concluded between the British and German Governments that prisoners of war should not on either side be employed within thirty kilometers of the firing line. Nevertheless, the German Command continued without intermission so to employ their British prisoners, under the inhuman conditions stated in the report. And that certainly until the end of 1917--it may be even until now--although it has never even been suggested by the German authorities, so far as the committee are aware, that the thirty kilometers limit agreed upon has not been scrupulously observed by the British Command in the letter as well as in the spirit.

"Prisoners of Respite"

The German excuse is embodied in different official documents, some of which enter into detailed descriptions of the reprisals alleged to be in contemplation because of it. These descriptions are in substantial accord with treatment which the committee, from the information in their possession, now know to have been in regular operation for months before either the threat or the so-called excuse for it, and to have continued in regular operation after the solemn promise of April that it should cease. These documents definitely commit the German Command to at least a threatened course of conduct for which the committee would have been slow to fix them with conscious responsibility. Incidentally they corroborate in advance the accuracy, in its incidents, of the information, appalling as it is, which has independently reached the committee from so many sides.

As a typical example, the committee set forth a transcript in German-English of one of these pronouncements, of which extensive use was made. It is a notice, entitled, "Conditions of Respite to German Prisoners." As here given, it was handed to a British noncommissioned officer to read out, and it was read out to his fellow-prisoners at Lille on April 15, 1917:

Upon the German request to withdraw the German prisoners of war to a distance of not less than thirty kilometers from the front line, the British Government has not replied; therefore it has been decided that all prisoners of war who are captured in future will be kept as prisoners of respite. Very short of food, bad lighting, bad lodgings, no beds, and hard work beside the German guns, under heavy shellfire. No pay, no soap for washing or shaving, no towels or boots, &c. The English prisoners of respite are all to write to their relations or persons of influence in England how badly they are treated, and that no alteration in the ill-treatment will occur until the English Government has consented to the German request; it is therefore in the interest of all English prisoners of respite to do their best to enable the German Government to remove all English prisoners of respite to camps in Germany, where they will be properly treated, with good food, good clothing, and you will succeed by writing as mentioned above, and then surely the English Government will consent to Germany's request, for the sake of their own countrymen. You will be supplied with postcard, note paper, and envelope, and all this correspondence in which you will explain your hardships will be sent as express mail to England.

Starved to Death

It seems that the prisoners, from as early as August, 1916, were kept in large numbers at certain places in the west--Cambrai and Lille are frequently referred to in the evidence--but in smaller numbers they were placed all along the line. Their normal work was making roads, repairing railways, constructing light railways, digging trenches, erecting wire entanglements, making gun-pits, loading ammunition, filling munition wagons, carrying trench mortars, and doing general fatigue work, which under the pain of death the noncommissioned officers were compelled to supervise.

This work was not only forbidden by the laws of war, it was also excessively hard. In many cases it lasted from eight to nine hours a day, with long walks to and fro, sometimes of ten kilometers in each direction, and for long periods was carried on within range of the shellfire of the allied armies. One witness was for nine months kept at work within the range of British guns; another for many months; others for shorter periods. Many were killed by these guns; more were wounded; deaths from starvation and overwork were constant. One instance of the allied shellfire may be given. In May, 1917, a British or French shell burst among a number of British and French prisoners working behind the lines in Belgium. Seven were killed; four were wounded.

But there is much more to tell. The men were half starved. Two instances are given in the evidence of men who weighed 180 pounds when captured. One was sent back from the firing line too weak to walk, weighing only 112 pounds; the other escaped to the British lines weighing no more. Another man lost twenty-eight pounds in six weeks. Parcels did not reach these prisoners. In consequence they were famished. Such was their hunger, indeed, that we hear of them picking up for food potato peelings that had been trampled under foot. One instance is given of an Australian private who, starving, had fallen out to pick up a piece of bread left on the roadside by Belgian women for the prisoners. He was shot and killed by the guard for so doing.

Some Merciful Guards

It was considered, so it would seem, to be no less than a stroke of luck for prisoners to chance upon guards who were more merciful. For instance, one of them speaking of food at Cambrai says:

If it had not been for the French civilians giving us food as we went along the roads to and from work we should most certainly have starved. If the sentries saw us make a movement out of the ranks to get food they would immediately make a jab at us with their rifles, but conditions here were not so bad as at Moretz, where if a man stepped out of the ranks he was immediately shot. I heard about this from men who had themselves been working at Moretz, and had with their own eyes seen comrades of theirs shot for moving from the ranks.

At Ervillers in February, 1917, a prisoner's allowance for the day consisted of a quarter of a loaf of German black bread, (about a quarter of a pound,) with coffee in the morning; then soup at midday, and at 4:30 coffee again, without sugar or milk. On this a man had to carry on heavy work for over nine hours. The ration of the German soldier at the same time and place consisted of a whole loaf of bread per day, good, thick soup, with beans and meat in it, coffee, jam, and sugar; two cigars and three cigarettes. The food conditions at Marquion a little later are thus described:

We used to beg the sentries to allow us to pick stinging nettles and dandelions to eat, we were so hungry; in fact, we were always hungry, and I should say we were semi-starved all the time. While we were here our Sergeants put in for more rations, but the answer they got was that we were prisoners of war now "and had no rights of any kind; that the Germans could work us right up behind their front lines if they liked, and put us on half the rations we were then getting."

Flogged with Dog Whip

The ration was coffee and a slice of bread at 4:45 A. M., soup of barley and horseflesh at 2 P. M., eight pounds of barley and ten pounds of meat between 240 men. And they were compelled to work hard for eight or nine hours a day on this diet. The frequent cruelty of the guards generally is a matter constantly referred to:

The German Sergeant in charge at Ervillers (says one prisoner) was very harsh. Twice I saw him (this prisoner was there for a month only) using a dog whip, and heard of him doing so on another occasion. He used it mostly on men who were slow in getting out to work owing to weakness.

The description by a body of these men on their arrival at a camp in Germany, after being withdrawn from the front, may be taken as another example of this:

We were forced to work; we were given hardly any food, and when we fell down from sheer exhaustion we were kicked until we got up again, and it was not until we absolutely could not get about that we were sent back.

To add to their miseries, the accommodation provided for these prisoners was in many cases pathetically inadequate. The witnesses recur to this again and again. One sleeping place, for instance, for a large party was a barn with no roof. The rain poured in upon the men. They had to sleep in their wet clothes and work in the same clothes. They had no change of any kind. And some of these prisoners, if they survived so long, were kept behind these enemy lines for over a year. Their quarters at Cambrai are thus described by two of the men:

our uniforms, without either greatcoats or blankets. There was no fire, and it was very cold. We lay on loose straw, which was full of vermin, and we consequently became verminous. We could only wash in a bucket of cold water, without either soap or towels.

The Germans did not supply us with any clothing, and as we had to work in all weathers, conditions were very hard. Our clothes used to get drenched through, but still we had to go back to barracks and sleep in them. It was terribly cold also, especially without our fur coats. We asked for clothing, but never got any.

No Parcels or Letters

But, added to all these hardships, it was the total absence of parcels and the fact that letters or communications from their friends rarely reached them that placed these prisoners, for misery, in a class apart. Instances are on record where the very existence of some of them was undisclosed by their captors for many months. In March, 1917, for example, a body of these prisoners who had been captured as long before as August, 1916, and had been kept at work by the Germans behind their lines ever since, were returned to a parent camp in Germany weak and emaciated. On arrival there they found a number of their own names in the lists of missing men that had been sent from our War Office through Switzerland and posted in the camp. * * *

It seems almost incredible, but the committee do not doubt it to be the fact, that as late as November, 1917, there were at Limburg-am-Lahn undelivered between 18,000 and 20,000 parcels for British prisoners on the German western front. In July, 1917, the German delegates at The Hague plainly recognized that no distinction in respect of the receipt of parcels could be properly made between prisoners of war in occupied territories and others. The agreement then concluded contains provisions on that subject. Having regard to the condition of things at Limburg as late as November, 1917, the committee can only regret that the effect of that agreement was certainly at that date not so manifest as it ought to have been. The matter, they add, is of tragic importance to the prisoners concerned. It made and makes just the difference between starvation and existence to the unfortunate sufferers.

Extracts from Evidence

The committee extract from the great mass of evidence now in their possession statements as to the impression produced upon those who actually saw our men upon their escape to the British lines or after their transfer to camps in Germany. These statements, they believe, must convince every impartial mind that it is impossible in terms of exaggeration to describe the sufferings these prisoners had undergone.

In April, 1917, three of them escaped over "No Man's Land." They were received by a British General Staff officer, a Major in the 1st Anzac Corps. This is what he says of them, under date April 18, 1917:

Three men escaped from behind the German lines to us the other day. They had been prisoners three months, and were literally nearly dead with ill-treatment and starvation. One of them could hardly walk, and was just a skeleton. He had gone down from 182 pounds to less than 112 pounds in three months. I fetched him back from the line, and it almost made me cry. All that awful January and February out all day in the wet and cold; no overcoat, and at night no blanket, in a shelter where the clothes froze stiff on him; no change of underclothing in three months, and he was one mass of vermin, no chance of washing. The bodies of all of them were covered with sores. "Beaten and starved," one of them said, "sooner than go through it again I'd just put my head under the first railway."

The following is the substance of statements by two witnesses from a German camp: