WILLIAM LE QUEUX: 15 Dystopian Novels & Espionage Thrillers (Illustrated Edition). William Le Queux

Consols were at 50; bread was still 1s. 6d. per loaf; and the ravages of the German commerce-destroyers had sent up the cost of insurance on British shipping sky-high. Money was almost unprocurable; except for the manufacture of war material, there was no industry; and the suffering and distress among the poor could not be exaggerated. In all directions men, women, and children had been starving.

      The mercantile community were loud in their outcry for “peace at any price,” and the pro-German and Stop-the-War Party were equally vehement in demanding a cessation of the war. They found excuses for the enemy, and forgot the frightful devastation and loss which the invasion had caused to the country. They protested against continuing the struggle in the interests of the “capitalists,” who, they alleged, were really responsible for the war.

      They insisted that the working class gained nothing, even though the British Fleet was closely blockading the German coast, and their outcry was strengthened when a few days after the blockade of the Elbe had begun two British battleships were so unfortunate as to strike German mines, and sink with a large part of their crews. The difficulty of borrowing money for the prosecution of the war was a grave obstacle in the way of the party of action, and preyed upon the mind of the British Government.

      The whole character of the nation and the Government had changed since the great days when, in the face of famine and immense peril, the country had fought Napoleon to the last and overthrown him. The strong aristocratic Government had been replaced by a weak Administration, swayed by every breath of popular impulse. The peasantry who were the backbone of the nation had vanished, and been replaced by the weak, excitable population of the towns.

      Socialism, with its creed of “Thou shalt have no other god but Thyself,” and its doctrine, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” had replaced the religious beliefs of a generation of Englishmen taught to suffer and to die sooner than surrender to wrong. In the hour of trial, amidst smoking ruins, among the holocausts of dead which marked the prolonged, bloody, and terrible battles on land and at sea, the spirit of the nation quailed, and there was really no great leader to recall it to ways of honour and duty.

      Seven large German commerce-destroyers were still at sea in the Northern Atlantic. One of them was the splendid ex-Cunarder Lusitania, of 25 knots, which had been sold to a German firm a year before the war, when the British Government declined to continue its subsidy of £150,000 per annum to the Cunard Company under the agreement of 1902. The reason for withdrawing this subsidy was the need for economy, as money had to be obtained to pay members of Parliament. The Cunard Company, unable to bear the enormous cost of running both its huge 25-knot steamers, was compelled to sell the Lusitania, but with patriotic enterprise it retained the Mauretania, even though she was only worked at a dead loss.

      The Mauretania, almost immediately after the outbreak of war, had been commissioned as a British cruiser, with orders specially to hunt for the Lusitania, which had now been renamed the Preussen. But it was easier to look for the great commerce-destroyer than to find her, and for weeks the one ship hunted over the wide waters of the North Atlantic for the other.

      The German procedure had been as follows: — All their commerce-destroyers had received orders to sink the British ships which they captured when these were laden with food. The crews of the ships destroyed were collected on board the various commerce-destroyers, and were from time to time placed on board neutral vessels, which were stopped at sea and compelled to find them accommodation. For coal the German cruisers relied at the outset upon British colliers, of which they captured several, and subsequently upon the supplies of fuel which were brought to them by neutral vessels. They put into unfrequented harbours, and there filled their bunkers, and were gone before protests could be made.

      The wholesale destruction of food, and particularly of wheat and meat, removed from the world’s market a large part of its supplies, and had immediately sent up the cost of food everywhere, outside the United Kingdom as well as in it. At the same time, the attacks upon shipping laden with food increased the cost of insurance to prohibitive prices upon vessels freighted for the United Kingdom. The underwriters after the first few captures by the enemy would not insure at all except for fabulous rates.

      The withdrawal of all the larger British cruisers for the purpose of defeating the main German fleets in the North Sea left the commerce-destroyers a free hand, and there was no force to meet them. The British liners commissioned as commerce-protectors were too few and too slow, with the single exception of the Mauretania, to be able to hold their adversaries in check.

      Neutral shipping was molested by the German cruisers. The German Government had proclaimed food of all kinds and raw cotton contraband of war, and when objection was offered by various neutral Governments, it replied that Russia in the war with Japan had treated cotton and food as contraband, and that no effective resistance had been offered by the neutral Powers to this action. Great Britain, the German authorities urged, had virtually acquiesced in the Russian proceedings against her shipping, and had thus established a precedent which became law for the world.

      Whenever raw cotton or food of any kind was discovered upon a neutral vessel bound for British ports, the vessel was seized and sent into one or other of the German harbours on the West Coast of Africa. St. Helena, after its garrison had been so foolishly withdrawn by the British Government in 1906, remained defenceless, and it had been seized by a small German expedition at the very outset. Numerous guns were landed, and it became a most useful base for the attacks of the German commerce-destroyers.

      Its natural strength rendered its recapture difficult, and the British Government had not a man to spare for the work of retaking it, so that it continued in German hands up to the last week of the struggle, when at last it was stormed after a vigorous bombardment by a small force despatched from India.

      The absurd theory that commerce could be left to take care of itself was exploded by the naval operations of the war. The North Atlantic had continued so dangerous all through September that British shipping practically disappeared from it, and neutral shipping was greatly hampered. All the Atlantic ports of the United States and the South American seaboard were full of British steamers, mainly of the tramp class, that had been laid up because it was too dangerous to send them to sea. The movement of supplies to England was carried on by only the very fastest vessels, and these, as they ran the blockade-runners’ risks, demanded the blockade-runners’ compensating profits.

      In yet another way the German Government enhanced the difficulty of maintaining the British food supply. When war broke out, it was discovered that German agents had secured practically all the “spot wheat” available in the United States, and had done the same in Russia. Germany had cornered the world’s available supply by the outlay of a modest number of millions, and its agents were instructed not to part with their supplies except at an enormous price. In this way Germany recouped her outlay, made a large profit, and caused terrific distress in England, where the dependence of the country upon foreign supplies of food had been growing steadily all through the early years of the twentieth century.

      The United Kingdom, indeed, might have been reduced to absolute starvation, had it not been for the fact that the Canadian Government interfered in Canada to prevent similar German tactics from succeeding, and held the German contracts for the cornering of Canadian wheat, contrary to public policy.

      The want of food, the high price of bread and meat in England, and the greatly increased cost of the supplies of raw material sent up the expenditure upon poor relief to enormous figures. Millions of men were out of employment, and in need of assistance. Mills and factories in all directions had closed down, either because of the military danger from the operations of the German armies, or because of the want of orders, or, again, because raw materials were not procurable. The British workers had no such accumulated resources as the French peasant possessed in 1870 from which to meet distress. They had assumed that prosperity would continue for all time, and that, if it did not, the rich might be called upon to support them and their families.

      Unfortunately, when the invasion began, many rich foreigners who had lived in England collected what portable property they possessed and retired abroad to Switzerland, Italy, and the United States. Their example was followed by large numbers of British subjects who had invested abroad, and now,