GERMAN SAILORS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIII, Issue 13, 16 February 1932, Page 6

GERMAN SAILORS

TREATMENT IN NAVY.

WAR BOOK'S REVELATIONS,

A grisly picture of the lives of German seamen during the war is painted by Theodore Plivier, a former sailor, in a novel, "The Kaiser's Coolies," paralleling Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." - The illustrations include a photograph of the sinking of the Blucher, .with men crawling on the vessel's bottom. The story opens in a tavern in 1914, where merchant sailors are shanghaied for the fleet. It relates how they rot from scurvy on the equator, drown in the North I Sea, or mutiny. The threads of indijvidual tragedies are interwoven with Germany's collapse. The author represents officers as drunken and brutal, feasting while the men starved. The men, he says, were savagely punished, cruelly ill-treated, and always on the verge of mutiny. A war historian, Mr H. W. Wilson, in an article in the Daily Mail, doubts whether the conditions were as bad as Plivier represents, or the Germans would not have fought so well. Nevertheless, the book is a valuable contribution to war literature. Plivier thus describes the cruiser Ariadne collapsing under fire from the British: "There is a burst of flame. Boats, debris and fittings are torn from their places and become hurtling projectiles. "Air pressure tosses men's bodies like autumn leaves, smashing them against iron walls. Whole sections of the crew vanish. The decks are i swept clean." A close-up description of a gun turret on the Seydlitz after the battle of the Dogger Bank, when a British shell set fire to an ammunition magazine, discloses the gun crew at their posts in lifelike attitudes. "Their faces are colourless, without even the dull, phosphor-blue glow of dead eyes, but instead, burnt-out, dark hollows. Dockyard workers touch them, horror-stricken. The bodies crumble to dust and fragments of white bone."

The Kaiser arrives to inspect the fleet, and says to the lieutenant, ' 'It must have been warm work in that turret." The lieutenant replies, "Yes, Your Majesty. Several thousand degrees."