Seafarers: Navigator and Raider

THERE was a time not long since when no German could have been presented to the American public in an heroic or even romantic aspect. It would not have been allowed by the British press bureaus, and since these amiable organizations controlled and dictated all foreign news matter published in the United States from August 1914 until the close of the recent unpleasantness, we were forced to put up with whatever makeshift or even imaginary heroes our sometime allies could furnish. And it was indeed a lean week when we were unable to read of the British Battalion Commander who led his gallant boys to victory by dribbling a soccer ball over No Man's Land. So frequently was this astounding fruitery perpetrated that one might reasonably have been lead to believe it to have been a maneuver included in the Field Manual. All these preposterous and gaudy fabrications being based, of course, on the supposition that the American reading public was as gullible and popeyed as the late lamented Walter Hines Page. Which it was.

To some extent, however, the pendulum has swung back, and already a popular magazine of large circulation has chronicled the exploits of Von Richthofen, the great German ace, with a surprising degree of authenticity. Now Lowell Thomas, author of "With Lawrence in Arabia," has told the amazing and almost unbelievably romantic story of Count Luckner's raids upon the Allied shipping of two oceans, and has given us a full-length portrait of this outstanding adventurer of the war.

Like the no less charming pirates of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera who undertook careers of brigandage rather.

Than play a sanctimonious part

With a pirate's head and a pirate's heart,

Count Luckner seemed to have a penchant for disorderly conduct on the high seas from the time he first became cabin boy after running away from the patrician respectability of his home. Like the hero of the Aeneid, he suffered many hardships upon land and sea, at one time even becoming, as did John Masefield and an equally August Figure in American poetry, interested in keeping a saloon. It might be ungracious to continue the parallel of Mr. Masefield and the A. F. further, but it would appear that Count Luckner drank up most of his profits and even part of his capital in this undertaking, and soon went to sea again.

The assassination at Sarajevo found him an officer in the Kaiser's navy, but it was not until 1916 that his voyage upon the auxiliary cruiser. Seeadler took him through the midst of the British North Seas Fleet into the Atlantic shipping lanes.

How he sank over $25,000,000 worth of allied shipping without killing a man, how he entertained his prisoners on seized luxuries and costly wines so that they protested against being set ashore, how he fled on his armed schooner through the ice floes of Cape Horn and eluded a waiting enemy squadron by fabricated wireless messages are details which read like the imagined adventures of the veriest romancer. The loss of the Seeadler and his further adventures in the Pacific, the description of the life-boat armed and converted into a raider crossing a thousand miles of open ocean to the wheezing and blaring of an antique accordion, and his ultimate escape from the English in a stolen officer's uniform would tax a reader's credulity if they were not already matters of record.

Suffice it to say that those who mourn the passing of romance will find in this tale adventures compared to which many of more classic stories of battle and exploration pale to insignificance. Already it is being noised abroad that the German fleet performed far more creditable exploits during the war than we were allowed to suppose at the time. The true accounts of the Battle of Jutland and Count Luckner's narrative have gone far to explode the myth of British naval supremacy. And, as it becomes less and less treasonous to believe facts, we will come to know that the English as a fighting race are only superior where they are present in overwhelming numbers with tremendous allied support or else where they are in complete control of the telegraph lines