DEAD MEN'S HANDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 August 1916, Page 10

DEAD MEN'S HANDS.

CRIMES OF VON TIRPITZ. RETRIBUTION AT HIS HEELS. Mr. Lloyd 1). Lewis, an American writer of repute, shows in a New York paper how inexorable punishment has overtaken Admiral von Tirpitz, for the many submarine crimes which he has ordered. Mr. Lewis points out that "whether dead men stalk through the conscious or the subconscious mind of him who is held responsible matters not; the fact remains that the dead seem to be reaching always up and ever pulling down him at whose order a they have died." Admiral von Tirpitz, broken and nervewrecked by the constant and ever-recur-ring submarine horrors which he, with stern patriotism, ordered carried out, is gone from his desk and his friends, trying to bury his eyes from the headlines which shriek of further U-boat horrors on the sea, trying to cover his ears from the wails of those friends and enemies whose men have gone down to the sea in boats. The destruction by and of the submarines has been a Frankenstein to von Tirpitz. That he knew and the world recognised exactly why lie had ordered the deadly work made no difference. The lost souls under the sea seemed to Admiral von Tirpitz to be blaming him. He was an old man when the break came, and for a generation he had been Minister of Marine for the German Empire. When the war broke out he saw victory in the submarine destruction of England's sea power. Under his orders the little undersea craft began the deadly work. The Lusitania went down carrying 1250 non-combatants to death by drowning. The Arabic bore forty people to a watery grave. The Ancona, stabbed in the vitals by a torpedo, held 300 souls tight to her breast a» she disappeared. The Falaba took under 110 persons who had been a moment before peaceful and happy. The total deaths of non-combatants ran into the thousands. Actual lists were impossible. Ship after ship vanished. Neutral countries denounced the admiral passionately. After the Lusitania horror von Tirpitz aged years. The magnitude of the tragic deaths out on the sea grew in his mind. Sleep, it is said, failed him. He brooded, but he held fast to his orders. It was his duty, he said. Then the news began to sift in of U boat losses. The English, awakened to the peril which menaced their rule of the sea, contrived destruction for the submarines. They strung thousands of feet of wire deep in the channel, catching the prying submarines and hiding them there to perish. Flocks of destroyers scoured tho surface of the North Sea, pouncing upon newly arisen U boats and sending them to the bottom with well aimed shells. Passenger and freight ships boro quick-firing guns which suddenly went into action, often wrecking the submarine which leaped up at their sides. The tide has turned. No less than 105 U boats, with their crews, were sunk or captured. Every submarine officer and crewsman solemnly bade his friends good-bye when he went down into the iron boinb-fish for a raiding journey. Von Tirpitz saw these young men, the flower of his country, «oing out to their deaths, one by one. Little by little these ranks of German lads, English sailors, neutral women and children, who stood in ghost array beside his bed at .night, wore him down. Political disputes arose over the ruthlessness of his campaign. Imperial Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg was his enemy. He could have borne the criticism of men well enough, but of dead men—that was another question. So he resigned-—an old, old man, with sad eyes and a slow, despairing heart. He slipped within his castle to grieve. The Kaiser called him forth to decorate him with high honor, which from a national standpoint he had surely earned. But von Tirpitz was still in the hands of dead, iiot live, men, and no tribute from the hand of the latter could remove the reproach of the former. It is aii old story, this tale of dead men's hands. Victor Hugo, the world's greatest master of imagination, says: "When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear. "Napoleon had'been denounced in the infinite, and his fall had been decided upon.

"Probably the principles and the elements on which the regular gravitations of the moral as well as the material world depend had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries', mothers in tears—these were formidable pleaders." Did these dead men's hands pull Napoleon down? Had his nerve failed him in the crisis? asks Lloyd Lewis. Many historians agree that the' Emperor behaved most strangely in the battle. He committed the blunder which he had always avoided—he forgot. He did not sleep the night before the fray. When the battle! was at its height he neglected his infantry. He forgot the military weapon which had made him famous. He forgot to call up his waiting legions to the support of his cavalry at the time when they were necessary. Napoleon fled the field of Waterloo with his genius dead. He was played out. The weight of 2,000,000 of dead Frenchmen and as many enemies was upon him. They were too many for him. They were a foe against whom there were no weapons. Now and then he threw off the lethargy and flamed forth for a minute with demands for new men and a fresh assault, but despair returned and with it resignation. ,Ho became stupefied and signed his abdication with never a murmur of protest. At the last moment before he boarded the English ship Bellcrophon, which was waiting to carry him to exile, friend 3 conspired to carry him to America, where he might be free, but the old daring was gone, and ho would not make the effort. Sittting on the lonely isle of St. Helena, as in Delaroche'a famous painting, he spent the remainder of his life staring out over the ocean, a broken man. Who will say that it was not the "smoking blood, tho overfilled cemeteries, and the mothers in tears" more than Wellington or Bluchcr who brought him there? Why should the nerve of von Tirpitz the stern, unemotional iron man of an iron Cabinet, have gone to pieces, rather than that of von Hindenburg, or Jofl're, or French? Each of these leaders has given orders that sent many times more men to death than ever von Tirpitz enunciated. The answer probably lies in the fact that the deaths at sea contained more imagination, more visual clarity of tragedy, more concreteness of sheer horror. The soldiers of the field died en masse and obscurity; they were part of a general and accepted catastrophe, while the sinking of ships were single, dramatic, blood-chilling affairs. The thought of a huge boat filled with passengers suddenly halting and reeling and sinking lays hold of the mind far more than a long-drawn-out series of trench attacks and counter-attacks. There i? mystery, more finality in deaths at sea, for the ship, passengers and all are simply gone and me waves roll on unaffected.