To Kiel in the 'Hercules'

eared copy of "The Riddle of the Sands" on a table in the "Commission Room" of the Hercules that it dawned upon me where I had heard them before. There was no time at the mom

ar the top of the page facing a much-pencilled chart. "... The mainland is that district of Prussia that is known as East Friesland." (I remember now that it was "Carruthers," writing in the Dulcibella, off Wangerogg, who was describing the "lay of the land.") "It is a short, flat-topped peninsula, bounded on the west by the Ems estuary and beyond that by Holland, and on the east by the Jade estuary; a low-lying c

ands," was the "take off" for the German army which was to cross the North Sea in barges to land on the sands of "The Wash" for the invasion of England. And this very line over which our rickety two-car special was clinkety-clanking-I wished that "Carruthers" could have seen what a pitiful little old single-track it had become-was the "strategic tr

th the railway track" which "Carruthers" had followed by midnight, with "fleecy clouds and a half moon overhead," in search of the Benser Tief. There was even a string of mighty barges towing down the narrow canal of the "Tief" when we crossed its rattling bridge a few minutes later. And just as "Carruthers" described, the road and railway clung closely together all the way to Dornum, and about halfway were joined by a third companion in the shape of a puny stream, the Neues Tief. "Wriggling and doubling like an eel, choked wi

psen, who insisted on accompanying him on a detour to Dornumersiel, where he had planned to do a hasty bit of spying. From the right-hand window I caught a brief glimpse of the ribbon of the coastwa

three miles from the nearest station and had nothing suggestive of a telephone line running to it, she must have had her banzai party standing by in readiness a good part of the forenoon session. Hurriedly dropping a window (they work rather hard on account of the stiffness of the thick paper strap), I was just able to gather that the burden of the greeting was "Good morning, good morning, sir!" repeated many times in guttural chorus. If any of them were shouting "Welcome!" as one or two of our party thought they heard, it es

Emden, to the south, and Norddeich, to the north, is a good-sized town, and we noticed here that the streets were beflagged and arched with evergreen as at Wilhelmshaven, doubtless in expectation of returning troops. While our engines were being changed, a couple of workmen, standing back in the depths of

A few steps across the slippery moss-covered stones, where the falling tide had bared the sloping landing, took us to where a small but powerfully engined steam launch was waiting to convey the party to Norderney. Manned by naval ratings, it had the same aspect of neglect which characterized all of the warships we had visited. The men saluted smartly, however, and on our expressing a w

r of the "seven islands" strung their attenuated lengths in a broken barrier to seaward, and between them and the mainland we were leaving astern stretched the amazing mazes of the sands, alternately bared and covered by the ebb and flow of the tides. Two-thirds of the area, according to "Carruthers," were dry at low water, when the "remaining third becomes a system of lagoons whose distribution is controlled by the natural drift of the North Sea as it forces its way through the intervals between the islands. Each of these intervals resembles the bar of a river, and is obstruct

upon sand-spits. To reassure myself, I leaned back and asked one of the German officers if boats didn't run aground pretty often on that run. "Oh, yes, most often," was the reply, "but only at low water or when the fog is

n a real optimist would have done under similar circumstances. But then, I told myself, i

buoyed fairway. Standing on northward until the red roofs and white walls of the town sharpened into ghostly relief on the curtain of the mist, course was altered five or six points to starboard, and we skirted a broad stretch of sandy beach, from the upper end of which the even slopes of concret

blends of sullenness and subserviency we had encountered in meeting the officers in the German warships. He saluted each member of the party as he landed, but tactfully refrained from offering his hand to any but the attached German officers. It was this attitu

walks to the hangars. As we came out upon the "tarmac"-here, as with all German seaplane and airship stations, the runs for the machines in front of the hangars are paved with concrete instead of the tarred macadam which is used so extensively in England and France-the men of the station were seen to be drawn up by companies, as for a review. Each company stood smartly to attention at the order of its officers as the party came abreast of it, and w

on. All other men had been cleared out of the sheds in conformity with the stipulations of the armistice. Some unauthorized individual-apparently a mechanic-who, halfway through the inspection, was noticed following the party, was summarily ordered out by th

érite." As Norderney was the "star" seaplane station, that body of keen-eyed, square-jawed young flying officers undoubtedly included the cleverest naval pilots at Germany's disposal. What their many decorations had been given for there was, of course, no way of learn

ne German colony or foreign settlement after another, trying to find the scene into which that florid face (with its warm, wide-set eyes and its full, sensual mouth) fitted. Dar-es-Salaam, Windhoek, Tsingtau, Yap, Apia, Herbertsh?he-I scurried back through them all without uncovering a clue. Where else had I met Germans? The southern "panhandle" of Brazil, the south of Chile, Bagdad- That was the first name to a

gineering staff of the Bagdad Railway, were among the guests, the former very smitten with a sloe-eyed sylph of a Greek Levantine, whose mother (so a friendly gossip told me) had been a dancer in a café chantant in Beirut before she married the Smyrna hairdresser who afterwards made a fortune buying licorice root from the Arabs. The girl (there was no denying the lissome grace of

fever-wrecked anatomy I had dragged into Aleppo in 1912, for I noted that his eyes had passed over me impersonally twice or thrice without a flicker of recognition. The explosiveness o

den reckless impulse, "but I would like to ask if you knew when Lieu

ptly, stepping back beside me. Then, as the somewhat surprising nature of the query burst upon him, a look of astonishment

e one with the scar on his cheek and the top o

the prompt answer. "But" (blurting it o

. uniform to regularize my position of "Keeper of the Records" of the Allied Naval Armistice Commission. No, I couldn't do that. Indeed, everything considered, I am inclined to think

," sighed the young officer resignedly. "The English Int

er to make a note of the fact that the machine-gun mou

felt certain from the fact that when, missing X-- from the group of officers who saluted us from the doorway of the Casino on our departure, I cast a furtive glance at the upper windows, it surprised him in the act of withdrawing behind one of the lace cur

in new surroundings. The very next day, in the course of the vis

e sub-commission for seaplane stations arranged that the British and American officers included in it should take turn-and-turn about in active inspection and checking the result of the latter with the lists furnished in advance by the Germans. At Norderney the "active service" side of the program fell to the lot of the two American officers to carry out. The swift pace they set at the outset slowed down materially toward the fi

nstruction to which the Germans had given much attention, and with notable success-came in for especially favourable comment. (The Commander of the station, by the way, showed us one of these pontoons which he had had fitted with an engine and propeller and used in duck-shooting.) The general verdict seemed to be that the Germans had little to learn from any one in the building of seaplanes, and that this was principally due to the fact that they had concentrated upon it for oversea work, where the British had been going in more and more for swift "carrier" ships launching aeroplanes

its huge breadth of wing gave it a plane area of enormous size. The boat itself was as large-and apparently as seaworthy-as a good-sized steam launch, and so roomy that one could almost stand erect inside of it. It quite dwarfed anything of the kind I had ever seen before. Nor was the boat, spacious as it was, the only closed-in space. T

to his country before he died. He was terribly disappointed by the failure of the Zeppelin airship as an instrument for bombing, and the last months of his life were spent in designing something to take its place. He realized that the size of the mark the airship offered to the constantly improving anti-aircraft artillery, together with t

elgian coast, as near as possible to the Front, and from here it was to go for bombing flights behind the enemy lines. But before it was completed experience had proved that it was quite practicable to land big machines on the earth, and so the 'Giant' found itself superseded as a bomber. It was then that it was brought to the atte

ch less likely to get smashed up by heavy waves. He admitted that this machine had proved extremely difficult to fly-or rather to land-and that it had been employed exclusively for "school" purposes, for the training of pilots

somewhat removed from the ebb and flow of the tide of inspection. I discovered it while passing along to the machine shops in the rear of one of the hangars, and later contrived to man?uvre myself back to it for a confirmatory survey. It was nothing more or less than a map of the United States which some angry pilot had thoroughly strafed by stabbing with a penknife

Belgian, French, and Portuguese possessions. This may have been (I have since thought) a copy of the famous map of "Africa in 1920," issued in Germany early in the war, but I h

y defeated me to account for. The fact that it ran through Asia Minor, Northern Syria, and down into Mesopotamia seemed to point to some connection wi

that all arrangements had been made for serving us with mittagessen, our senior officer, acting under orders, replied that we had brought our own food and that this, with a pitcher of wate

one threw open a piano in the room above our heads and struck three ringing chords. "Bang!"-interval-"Bang!"-interval-"Bang!" they crashed one

, as he waited with eye alight and ear acock fo

rape of feet on the floor, and the slam of a closed piano, followed by the co

achmaninoff on the ivories," observed Lieutenant-Commander L--, U.S.N., after which he and Major N-- began di

we were planning to reach by destroyer) the next morning by launch. It was the difficulty in securing a prompt confirmation of what would have been a time-saving change of schedule which led Captain H-- to reject the plan and decide in favour of making an attempt to reach Norddeich in, and in spite of, the fog. The Commander shook his head dubiously. "My men who know the passage best have

ouble the size of the one in which we had crossed, I asked one of the German officers

bin will also be much more comfortable if w

uch consummate skill through just such a fog ("five yards or so was the radius of our vision," wrote "Carruthers") to Memmert to spy on the conference at the salvage plant on that desolate sand-spit. I turned up the chapter headed "Blindfold to Memmert," and read how, sounding with a notched boathook in the shallows that masterly young sailor had felt his way across the Buse Tief to the eastern outlet of the Memmert Balje, the only channel deep enough to carry the dinghy through the half-bared s

f steel-grey sand that came creeping out of the fog. For the next ten minutes, with bare steerage way on, she nosed cautiously this way and that, like a man groping for a doorway in the dark. Then a hail from the lookout on th

Tief, that "Carruthers" had brought off his crowning exploit, the running aground of the tug and "invasion" lighter-with Von Brunning, Boehme, and the mysterious "cloaked passenger"-as they neared the end of the successful night trial trip in the North Sea. Substituting himself for the man at the wheel by a ruse, he had edged the tug over to starboard and was just thinking "What the Dic

, one of the Germans reckoned; but whatever the cause, there we were-stuck fast. Or, at least, we would have been with any less resourceful and energetic a crew. If their very lives had depended on it, those four or five German seamen could not have worked harder, nor to better purpose, to get that launch free. At the end of a quarter of an hour their