October 16, 1915. 
LAND AND [JV. A T E R . 
THE NAVY AND THE BALKANS. 
By A. H. POLLEN. 
In accordance with the requirements of the Press Bureau, which does not object to the publication ai censored, and takes no 
responsibility for the correctness of the statements. 
THERE has been in the past week little 
news of purely Naval events, and what 
news there is seems to relate solely to 
naval participation in land operations. 
First, the Russian naval guns have, once more, 
successfully joined in the attack on the German 
trenches east of Riga. One British submarine 
has destroyed a German transport in the Baltic. 
Another. E19, is apparently engaged in inter- 
fering with the German supply of raw material 
from Sweden. In the Black Sea German sub- 
marines have come as far afield as the ("rimca, 
and I interpret this a',ipearan.:e to represent an 
effort to prevent the ]?ussians from sendin;;j an 
expeditionary force to Varna or some other po'.nt 
on the Bulgarian coast. 
The tension betAveen Washington and Berlin 
has apparently died down in consequence of 
Count Bernstorfts utterly illogical surrender in 
the matter of the Arabic. The Note says that 
Commander Schneider disobeyed all instructions 
in sinking that vessel, yet honestly thought that 
he must have been rammed if he had not done so ! 
It is more than suspected that the whole story of 
the commander's report is an invention, and that 
the offending submarine is one of those that has 
already paid its last penalty. But as neither 
truth nor logic seems to be expected of German 
diplomacy, the Americans may be conJ;ent with 
being promised first compensation and next in- 
structions which will in the future make the sink- 
ing of ships without warning impossible. How 
fresh instructions can do this, when the whole 
German case was that such instructions had 
already been given before the A rablc was sunk, is 
a little difficult to see. If they failed once, they 
may fail again. The reader should note, how- 
ever, that so far we only have Count Bernstorff's 
version of the stor)'. Mr. Wilson has authorised 
no publication of the American Government's 
view, and it is significant that even now there is 
no German reply to the final Lusitania Note. 
There is, so far as we know, no offer of compensa- 
tion for the murder of the five score or so Ameri- 
cans who died as a consequence of that crime, 
nor yet has any apology been made for the 
attacks on the Gulflight, the Cushinq, and the 
FaU-ba. 
Amsterdam tells us that " well-informed 
circles " in Berlin describe the boast of the British 
Press that sixty German submarines have been 
sunk as a fantastic fabrication. At most only a 
Quarter of this number are lost, and certainly 
lermany has more submarines to-day at her dis- 
posal than at the beginning of the war. Such a 
denial was fully to be expected. It is hardly 
necessary to remind the reader that it was not 
the British but the American Pre-ss that said that 
between sixty and seventy \j boats had been sunk. 
I do not believe that anyone not in the confidence 
of the Admiralty knows the probable figures; and 
no one in such confidence could publish them. If 
.Germany includes boats bnilding with boats built 
It IS quite possible the second part of the \nister- 
dam Statement may be true. The uselessness of 
the German battle fleet for offensive purposes 
must have been obvious from the first. Germany's 
only hope, then, lay in the attrition of our force 
by a vast submarine campaign. She may have, 
and probably did, arrange to lav down the.se boats 
by hundreds. She may easilV have completed 
more than fifty new boats in 'the first fourteen 
months and be producing them now at the rate of 
five or SIX a month. But she can onlv do this if 
thei^ are at least fifty or sixtv ahvavs on the 
stocks. As she is sup]iosed to have begun the 
war with only twenty-eight submarines it would 
be quite possible for her to have lost sixtv and vet 
to have, built and huiMinq, a far larger number 
than she began with. The question of whether 
her submarine losses are balanced bv the value of 
their depredations is reallv not affe-ted. 
T /i?^"7' ^^ ^^'^'^ '^^ ^ ^'^^^^f ^^ «'l to know that 
Lord Reading is not charged with a mission for 
the further whittling away of our sea rights. The 
facts now coming to light touching our neglect of 
these in the first months of the war is startling 
It IS clear that by cutting Germanv off from all 
cotton and all metals we can harass her im- 
mensely. We must not relax. 
THE ROAD TO STAMBOUL. 
The invasion of Serbia: the intervention of 
Bulgaria; the disconcerting discoverv that Greece 
is another of the countries that is "too proud to 
fight " in the cause of civilisation— and this de- 
spite the late Prime Minister's saving that no 
matter how much the Great PoAvers of Europe 
might think themselves free to break their 
plighted word, Greece was " too small a country 
to commit so great an infamy"; the sudden 
realisation that if the vast German reinforcement 
of Turkey is to be prevented, the only means of 
doing so is the landing of a fresh expeditionary 
force at Salonica, thus beginning a new land cam- 
paign by the Allies — these things have within the 
last ten days come upon the public as a succession 
of grim surprises and bitter disappointments. So 
far as ray correspondence goes, I should judge that 
two thoughts are generally uppermost. Is it con- 
ceivable that the Central Powers — with a new 
danger facing them in the West, and failure the 
only reward of their eft'orts in the East — can 
really command such force that the rehabilitation 
of Turkey and a decisive victory over its enemies 
— in the Gallipoli Peninsula, in the Euphrates 
Valley, and in Egjpt — seem rea.sonable projects? 
And, secondly, if the military strength of Ger- 
many is indeed still so overwhelmingly great as to 
permit of so daring a strategy, what share can 
the still more overwhelming sea power of Great 
Britain take in thwarting this design ? 
It is beyond my province in these columns to 
deal with the first question. As to the second, the 
first and most obvious answer is that but for the 
11 
