Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/21

1917] submarine campaign. In these they generally scouted the idea that this new form of piracy really threatened in any way the safety of the British Empire. They accompanied these rather cheerful outgivings by weekly statistics of submarine sinkings; figures which, while not particularly reassuring, hardly indicated that any serious inroads had yet been made on the British mercantile marine. The Admiralty was publishing tables showing that four or five thousand ships were arriving at British ports and leaving them every week, while other tables disclosed the number of British ships of less than sixteen hundred tons and more than sixteen hundred tons that were going down every seven days. Thus the week of my arrival I learned from these figures that Great Britain had lost seventeen ships above that size, and two ships below ; that 2,406 vessels had arrived at British ports, that 2,367 had left, and that, in addition, seven fishing vessels had fallen victims to the German submarines. Such figures were worthless, for they did not include neutral ships and did not give the amount of tonnage sunk, details, of course, which it was necessary to keep from the enemy. The facts which the Government thus permitted to come to public knowledge did not indicate that the situation was particularly alarming. Indeed the newspapers all over the British Isles showed no signs of perturbation; on the contrary, they were drawing favourable conclusions from these statistics. Here and there one of them may have sounded a more apprehensive note ; yet the generally prevailing feeling both in the press and in general discussions of the war seemed to be that the submarine campaign had already failed, that Germany's last desperate attempt to win the war had already broken down, and that peace would probably not be long delayed. The newspapers found considerable satisfaction in the fact that the "volume of British shipping was being maintained"; they displayed such headlines as "improvement continues"; they printed prominently the encouraging speeches of certain British statesmen, and in this way were apparently quieting popular apprehension concerning the outcome. This same atmosphere of cheerful ignorance I found everywhere in London society. The fear of German submarines was not disturbing the London season, which had now reached its height ; the theatres