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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



littled and how carefully the British and 

 the French refrained from exaggerating 

 the significance of the great retreat from 

 the Somme. 



The moral to be drawn is, I think, this : 

 that you can cut all Prussian boastings 

 and all British lamentations in half, and 

 that when the Prussians are silent it is a 

 sign of failure and when the British are 

 silent it is a proof that all is going well. 

 One could easily multiply instances of 

 this. 



Take, for example, our intelligence serv- 

 ice. You never hear anything of it. It 

 works as a secret service ought to work — 

 in secret. It enjoys not one-half of the 

 reputation, it attracts not one-tenth of 

 the notoriety, of the German intelligence 

 service. Yet those who are at all behind 

 the scenes know very well that there is 

 precious little hidden from it in any part 

 of the world where it is at work and, 

 least of all, at the front. "What our men 

 do not find out about the numbers, dis- 

 tribution, equipment, and morale of the 

 German troops along the Somme may 

 safely be left out of the reckoning. 



Similarly, without saying much about 

 it, we quietly at the beginning, or, rather, 

 before the beginning, of the war, rounded 

 up all the Prussian spies in the British 

 Isles, and have so handled matters that 

 none of their successors, to the best of 

 my knowledge and belief, has done us 

 any appreciable harm. 



This policy of leaving what we do well 

 to speak for itself has been closely fol- 

 lowed in the case of our flying corps and 

 our submarines. We have no aviation 

 heroes. In fact, we rather make a point 

 of having as few heroes of any kind as 

 possible. There are at least a dozen of 

 our flying men whose records in bringing 

 down enemy machines would compare 

 quite favorably with those of the much- 

 trumpeted German champions — Immel- 

 mann and Boelcke. 



But we never hear of them. Their 

 doings are merged in the general record 

 of our armies at the front, where divi- 

 sions are very rarely named, regiments 

 and battalions scarcely at all, and indi- 

 viduals practically never. Instead of the 

 flashy prominence of a few men here and 

 there, we are quite content to shelter be- 



hind the anonymous but incontestable 

 superiority of our flying corps as a 

 whole — a superiority so great that during 

 the latter months of the battle of the 

 Somme the Germans were virtually fight- 

 ing blindfold. 



PRUSSIAN SUBMARINES INEFFECTIVE 



And just as we never advertise the 

 feats of our armies, so we allow the 

 world to think that the Prussians are hav- 

 ing it pretty much their own way with 

 their submarines. As a matter of fact, 

 the German submarines have scored very 

 few legitimate successes — ■ by which I 

 mean successes that conform to the 

 usages of civilized warfare. It must be 

 nearly two years since they sank any 

 British men-of-war of any importance. 



As pirates preying upon fishing smacks, 

 trawlers, Atlantic liners, and the mer- 

 chantmen of all nations, they have added 

 a new and infamous chapter to naval his- 

 tory. Otherwise it is, I believe, the opin- 

 ion of most naval men that in German 

 hands the submarine has proved disap- 

 pointingly ineffective. 



What the British submarines have ac- 

 complished in the Dardanelles, in the Sea 

 of Marmora, and in the Baltic has been 

 far more remarkable, though far less 

 known, than the exploits of the German 

 U-boats. 



Moreover, it has to be remembered that 

 the Germans have something like a hun- 

 dred chances to our one ; that our fleets 

 are constantly cruising in the North Sea, 

 where the German dreadnoughts and 

 cruisers very rarely venture ; and that if 

 our submarines had been offered any- 

 thing like the opportunities we are cease- 

 lessly dangling before the Germans, and 

 if by now they had not sent several Ger- 

 man battleships to the bottom of the sea, 

 the world would have justly said that 

 they had bungled their business. 



People, I remember, were thrown into 

 a state of quite unbalanced admiration 

 when the Deutschland appeared in Amer- 

 ican waters. It was spoken of as one of 

 the most remarkable achievements of the 

 war. Few stopped to remember — even 

 indeed if they ever knew — that the war 

 Avas only a few months old when ten 

 British submarines crossed the Atlantic 



