SURE OF VICTORY

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2335, 17 December 1914, Page 7

SURE OF VICTORY

/ . ; : .«_ NATION TRUE TO ITS TRADITIONS ;MR O« A. EWEN INTERVIEWED The New Zealand Shipping Company's eteamer Rotorua km on Sierra Leone when at 2 o'clock in the morning a wireless message was picked up to the effect that war had broken out between England and Germany. Mr. C. A. Ewen, general , maußger of the Commercial ' Union Assurance Company, who was a passenger, stated that all on board took the news very calmly. When they reached Teneriffe they-found the bay crowded with French, and English vessels, which .were awaiting developments. Tho German vessels jvero afraid of being captured by the British and French fleets, and most of them were still there.-. On arrival at Plymouth on August 15 they found tho place under military, law; and \ their wireless was dismantled, and they were ordered to fly certain flags by day and show certain lights after dark. "You-would have felt proud that you were British," said Mr. Ewen, "to see the calm, cool way the people at Home accepted the situation, There wae no frantic word or foolish boaet, but all seemed to be imbued with the one idea i. —to see the thing through. There is only one opinion—England and her Allies must winl .It is that or •, go

under, and we're not going under just >yet. Look at what our troops have ' done and are doing I Man for man the Germans don't begin to compare with our Tommies! ' The retreat at Mons has been the finest thing in the campaign. It is believed in many quarters that • it was the gallant stand made by our arms in that action , which prevented the Germans reaching. Paris. The i French forces were ■ unprepared, and would not have been' able, to check the onward march of a victorious army, but the grand defence the English Expeditionary Force put up at Mons took the sting out of tho German, advance at that point, and gave the French time to get into fighting trim as far as equipment was concerned." ■ The Work of Spies, "The opinion was held at Home .that accurate information had been conveyed to the German authorities about the movements of the cruisers Aboiikir, Cressy, and Hogue, which were blown up by German submarines in the North. ' Sea. These three vessels had only been out of port three_ or four days • when • the calamity occurred. Some of -the crew ... of, the Cressy were men who were taken off the Psyche and Pyramus here, and travelled to London by the Athenic, having served their allotted term, out here. The German submarines, it must be conceded, had done good work. Their officers were very daring and plucky, but it must be remembered. that thoy always had something to attack, whilst our brave fellows could not get at the bottled-up fleet of- the Germans. The German harbours are said to be wonderfully protected, and there were said to. be wire entanglements under wa'ter ' across the entrance to , " the Kiel Canal. Lieutenant-Commander.. Renwick, ' who was out here, aid ■', who. -married Miss ■Paterson, of : Dunedin, • was on the Hogue when she went down. The news of that great disaster was received with stoical calmness in London. It was taken as a little twist in the fortune of. war, and the expressed determination, was' that they must build more ships. . . '■' . ■ No Cerman Trusted. ~,■■;■„ "The higher the social position of ft German and'the greater his respectability the more he is distrusted in England,, continued Mr. •Ewen.:i>;t"lt.:made. one sick to, learn of. the treacherous acts of Germans who had been living under and enjoying all the privileges or free Englishmen. They one and all believed that this boasted 'day' of theirs had come, and imagined that' England would crumble away at the sound of' tho guns. The manager of a big hotelnear the Sandwich golf links, a German well known to all the prominent golf players, was found to have rifles, ammunition, and bombs stored in the hotel waiting for the!- time when the German troops would arrive to blow the people to perdition, whom he for years bad been battening on. Then there was another very respectable, well-to-do, retired German gentleman at Harwich, whom people said could not be suspected of disloyalty, yet a- wireless plant was discovered on the premises, and it was known that ihe had been giving information to the enemy. No German will ever be trusted in London again—they know the Germancharacter, too well I"

Insurance Business Hit. Mr. Ewen was questioned as'to how the war had affected the relations between the British insurance companieg and belligerent companies. He states that all agreements ceased between English and the enemy companies on the declaration of war. ■ English companies owed a considerable amount of money to German and Austrian companies, and wero likely to owe it, but the German companies owed England Borne millions more than we owed them so that they got the best of it. Here again one sees that the German idea of commercial honour is about on a par rath its idea of-national honour. A number of German companies have pushed their business into India and the _East under the protection of the British flag. The insurance companies were very hard hit, top, by the exploits of the Emden, Dresden, and Karlsruhe, end there will be great rejoioing at Home over the destruction or the German Pacific squadioh. The magnificent offices of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company in London are now being used as recruiting offices by-the military authorities. On the Home Track. Mr. Ewen travelled from London by the P. and 0. steamer Morea. When the vessel called at Gibraltar (on November 5) she found the armed merchantman Carmania there effecting repairs. She had sunk the Gorman armed merchantman Cap Trafalgar in an action off the A'frican coast, and in the course of tho engagement had been pierced in no fewer than twenty places, but owing to faulty German ammunition the shells had passed clean through the vessel from side to side .without bursting. The wonderful resources of England were nowhere more apparent than in making the passage of the Suez Canal. As scon as Turkey became involved in the war, Ghurka troops mysteriously appeared along the banke of the canal, and their camps can be seen from the deck of the steamer dotting the desert at regular intervals. Mr. Ewen said that the Turks bad entered into tho fray in a very half-hearted manner, and would not have been in it at all but for the German influences at work and tho German officers who were on the spot ready to take charge of tho Turkish forces, , Between Aden and Colombo the , Morea passed H.M.S. Sydney, and sent a congratulatory wireless on her good work in settling the Bmden. The New Zealand Expeditionary Force had left Colombo three days before the Morea. arrived. .