Читать книгу Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights - Kelly Miller - Страница 188

Apparently Germany modified her submarine policy for a period of upward of a year, or until in February, 1917, when to the astonished world she threw aside all pretense and declared her intention of destroying any vessel which attempted to cross or sailed into a zone which she established along the English coast and around English and French ports. America's further protests availed not; her citizens, many of them, went to the bottom of the seas, and some of them suffered almost unbelievable cruelties or neglect, when the captain of a German sea raider with some humanitarian instincts permitted these innocent passengers or seamen to be rescued from the torpedoed vessels on which they were.

Even the Red Cross vessels and Belgian relief ships carrying supplies and food to the maimed or sick at war and the starving children of Belgium did not escape the torpedo from the submarine. English hospital ships were attacked, and men unable to protect themselves were subjected to danger because the Germans feared that something might be carried on the boat which would prove valuable to the Allied forces in making war.

Dozens—even hundreds of vessels of all sorts—were sunk from week to week. Food and supplies for the Allied forces were destroyed, until both England and France were threatened with starvation.

All this was the work of the submarine.

One smiled twenty-five years ago when he read that highly imaginative story of Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and wondered if it would ever be possible for man to create such a marvelous underseas craft as that which the famous French writer described. Today the imaginative detail of the submarine which the novelist described has been crystallized, and the world has learned that dreams sometimes come true.

Marvelous things have been developed by the war which is involving the peace and security of the world, but no single device has had such an effect upon the warfare and upon the methods of waging it as the diabolical submarine, which, like an assassin in the night, sneaks upon the great ships along the water highways of the world and sends them with their human freight to the bottom of the ocean.