Upon St. George’s Day

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 336, 23 April 1928, Page 8

Upon St. George’s Day

ZEEBRUGGE AFTER A DECADE Memories of the Exploit Written for THE SUN by DOROTHY LITTLE VISIBLE at the ebb tide when one stands on the girder--which bridge an ominous gap in the Zeebrugge mole is a sunken twisted shape. It is the submarine 03 and the grave of heroic Englishmen. After a decade the little Belgian seaport still shows the scars of the audacious exploit of St. George s Day. April 23, 1918, which set the German submarines in a tank to fret like helpless sharks behind the concrete-filled hulls of the old cruisers.

The first thing one notices is the quantity of scrap-iron strewn everywhere, great rusty plates of steel from sides of ships, huge stacks of bolts and rivets, mounds of iron hoops. They are the broken, twisted relies of the ships which were sunk by the Germans. The town itself, which is set among the sand-dunes, is unimposing enough, and so tiny as to be considered a mere village by visitors, gaining its Importance purely from the mole and canal-mouth, which is the entrance to the great waterway to Bruges. Proudly the Belgian guide will show his party just where all the enemy’s submarines lay in hiding during those terrible years of war. Their “funk-hole” was a little siding, a few hundred yards inland from the actual mouth of the canal, and from this safe retreat they crept stealthily out on their death-dealing missions, until th British sank the concretefilled battleships Intrepid and Iphigenia right in the centre of the canal-mouth.

ground room, where the guide told us that German officers held a club. It is .a small and absolutely unventilated cellar, with a round table In the centre covered with a filthy Union Jack. This was their dining-room and tablecloth—a Union Jack being chosen that they might insult it during their revels. It was to this room that Captain Fryatt was brought to be questioned by the commanding officer of the Germans before being taken to Brussels and shot for bringing food to a hungry people. Half-way up a flight of stairs, there is a kind of landing. The wall and ceiling of this landing are completely blackened by smoke, and thick grease and dirt adhere to them. The guide informed us that it was here the Germans cured the bacon for their officers’ mess. The gap blown in the breakwater by the British submarine attached to the storming party on that fateful midnight of April 22 and 23, 1918, is merely bridged over with steel girders, and, standing here when the tide is low, one may still see the sunken submarine some yards out to sea from the mole. On the mole, twisted German guns, torn like ribbon, and bent like so much wire, still stand stark and mute reminders of that time. READY-MADE FORT Back on the mainland we walked along the sand-dunes, and realised what a wonderful ready-made fort the Germans had in the Belgian coast. The great guns even were protected by the sand, for their concrete bases, which are still in existence, were placed, some hundreds of yards apart, behind a natural hillock in the sand, merely rearing their noses over the top, thus being absolutely invisible to an approaching enemy battleship.

Up to so short a time as two years ago one could see sunken hulls just under the water’s surface—wreckage of small defenceless food-ships. Constant dredging was necessary to keep the waterway clear of wreckage and remnants of these helpless victims. Zeebrugge lies about a quarter of a mile from the mole. The great breakwater, running nearly two miles out into the sea, forms a wonderful sheltering arm, making a harbour, where, naturally, there is none. The memorial to the men of the Vindictive stands just outside the war museum, at the entrance to the mole, facing out to sea. At the war museum the Belgian guide really does himself justice. Entering on the ground-level our party was first conducted to an under-