The deeds here enumerated form a small but characteristic part of the German submarine record. The total number of women, children, and non-combatants, murdered in the course of the U-boat blockade, is more than seventeen thousand. It has been a failure as a blockade; nine million tons of British, and six million of allied and neutral shipping have been sunk; but the U-boats have never, for a day, held the control of the sea. The policy was a device of savages, and of a nation of savages. There is no escape from this charge; for the policy was approved and deliberately adopted, by the representatives of the whole German people, with the exception only of the few despised and detested Minority Socialists. In October 1918, Herr Haase testified in the Reichstag: ‘Most of the Parties are now trying to get away from the accentuated submarine war ... in reality all the Parties, except the Socialist Minority, share the guilt. The first resolution in favour of submarine war was drafted by all the leaders, including Herr Scheidemann and Herr Ebert. The accentuation of submarine warfare was a natural consequence. You Socialists are also guilty because, to the very last, you gave the old _regime_ the credits for carrying on the War.’ The Germans do not yet realise the crime they confess; they have corrupted one of the oldest and noblest bonds in human life--the brotherhood of ‘them that go down to the sea in ships, and have their business in great waters.’ And this they have done because they are, by nature, not seamen but savages. CHAPTER XI TRAWLERS, SMACKS, AND DRIFTERS Our Destroyer Service is perhaps as efficient, and as dashing, as anything ever seen in the way of organised human activity. It is long established, and its very perfection seems almost to stand in the way of our wonder at its achievement. The performance of our trawlers and drifters, on the other hand, is the more astonishing because it was an afterthought, the work of a service called into being--suddenly created, as it were, out of nothing--to meet the need of a grave moment which no imagination could well have provided against. When the moment came, everyone knew what might be expected from our Navy. It had not occurred to anyone that our fishermen might help to keep the sea against an outbreak of piracy, not only with courage but with marked success. Yet this they did; and of all the disappointments which the War has brought our enemies this must have been one of the most unexpected and unpleasant.