"THE KAISER'S COOLIES"

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3444, 17 March 1932, Page 7

"THE KAISER'S COOLIES"

«n GRISLY TALES OF THE GERMAN BATTLE FLEET. (By H. W. Wilson, the War Historian) A grisly picture of existence below decks in the German Navy during the war is painted by Theodore Pliver, who is understood to have been a German sailor, in "The Kaiser's Coolies." It is obviously meat to supply the naval parallel to Demarque's revolting account of life in the German Army in his now famous "All Quiet on the Western Front." On the jacket of the English edition is the wonderful photograph of the Blucher sinking, which was taken in the battle of the Dogger Bank for the Daily Mail. Pliver writes with extraordinary vigour, but one cannot help doubting the fairness of his attitude. Many years ago I spent four days as guest in a German battleship, and certainly saw no ill-treatment of the men then. Conditions in the Germany Navy cannot have been as bad as Plivier represents, or it would never have fought so well as it did. The officers, according to him, were brutal and drunke'n; they feasted while the men starved. The men were cruelly illtreated, savagely punished for small offences, and they are represented as always ready for mutiny, which sounds to me nonsense. Cruiser Charnel-house. The book is a series of episodes in the naval war culminating in the final mutiny on the eve of the Armistice. It is 'not a connected story. We are shown the light German cruiser Ariadne at Heligoland, collapsing under the fire of the British battle cruisers: "A burst of flame. Boots, debris, fittings torn from their places become hurtling projectiles. . The air

pressure sweeps the men's bodies away like autumn leaves, smashes them against the iron walls. .... The repair party has vanished; so have the wounded, who have been placed on stretchers on deck. . . . Compartments are smoked out, decks swept clean." Then there is a "close-up" of a turret in the battle cruiser Seydlitz, after the Battle of the Dogger Bank, in which a British shell set her magazine on fire and the flames swept the turret. ' "There stands No. 1 of the gun's crew, exactly as during the action, his eyes to the sights .... No. 2 and the other sailors stand as if alive. . . . But yet it's quite different. It is the rigidity of figures in a china cabinet. Their faces have lost their colour, they have not even the dull phosphor-blue glow of the dead. Their eyes are burnt-out, dark hollows." The dockyard men touch them with horror, and at the touch they crumble to "dust and fragments of white bone." The Kaiser arrives, and we have this fragment of conversation. He said to a sub-lieutenant: "Well, it must have been warm work in the turret?" "Yes, Your Majesty; several thousand degrees." At Jutland there is a vision of the fleets in battAe and of the Wiesbaden perishing in flame—- " Still over the slaughter-houses lie the oppressive heat of blood and the hot smoke of overloaded intestines. The dazed bullock bleeds to death in a few minutes. But to die like a splinter drifting in the ocean!" It will be seen that "The Kaiser's Coolies" does not provide cheerful reading. Its theme is slaughter and death. Finally, as everyone knows, the fleet was ordered out to deal one last blow of the Allies, and it was proceeding to sea when for a second time a mutiny broke out — "Like a torrent the crew rushed aft. No resistance; the officers have barricaded themselves in'(below?) the

armoured deck; Fourteen hundred men and stokers, over their heads flies the ensign. ... The halyards part. Down with the ensign. .... 'The swab—tie it on!' 'Ready. ; . . . all of you. Up with it!' The swab rises in the air. .... On board the other ships the flags go down; swabs, coal sacks, red flags go up." Only in one ship is there bloodshed, in the Konig—"The Captain, the Commander and the Adjutant, a sub-lieutenant of 20 .... stand pistol in hand on the quarter-deck. ... A sailor falls at their fire. Then they are overwhelmed by a rush of men, a grey wave. Blows of rifle butts, shots. Captain and Commander wounded. The Adjutant dead." This book will hold an important place in the naval literature of the war, though, as we have said, its value as evidence is weakened by the author's obvious prejudice against the officers.