THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

In the July issue of the World's Work begins the narrative of Count Felix von Luckner, one of those stray adventurers on the fringe of the Great War who prevented even that mechanical conflict from being without its heroes. The only officer in the German Navy who had served under sail, he was chosen to command a raider which, disguised as a neutral schooner, was to break through the Allied blockade. The Sea Eagle, like the Confederate cruisers during the Civil War, carried the flag of a beleagured nation around the seas; like them, she destroyed enemy commerce while guarding the safety of each crew. When she was wrecked at last upon a South Sea island her commander surrendered rainer than shoot his way to safety through a civilian population.

There is an obvious contrast between the warfare of Count von Luckner and that of the average U-boat commander, which marks emphatically the contrast between the scientific and the personal in war. One submarine did ten times the damage done by the Sea Eagle; but it is not to the deadly reptiles of the under-ocean but to the daring sailing-vessel of the surface that the pain for valor goes.