LUCKNER, SEA-RAIDER, AVOWS LOVE FOR PEACE

"Only a tramp knows how big your country is," Count Felix von Luckner told a capacity audience at the Harvard Union yesterday afternoon. "I travelled 21,000 miles to find your Buffalo Bill, and when I got to his house I was told he was in Germany with a circus."

The Captain of the "Seeadler" has been making a lecture tour of the United States on what he calls a peace mission, as he told a CRIMSON reporter yesterday at his apartment in the Copley. "What difference does it make what country we come from?" he said. It is the politicians who make the wars, not the people. What's the reason of hatred? An American mother and a German mother, they all suffer the same. The American God and the German God are all the same God. All of us are his children."

Loves To Fight Storms

His chief love is the sea, but only in sailing ships. He hates steamers. "I love to fight the storm," he continued, "and I love my boat. I am going back to it in a few days; I'm not at home on land. Sailors are the greatest fraternity, and the sailors of wind-jammers are the aristocrats of the bunch. I've been six times around the world, and sailing men are the same all over."

Asked as to what his most thrilling experience has been, the Count told of a time when he was hedged in by a blockade of British ships. "Luck was with me. Tremendous hurricane, and it was the shortest day of the year, December 21. It was dark from 4 in the afternoon till 9.30 the next morning. It was only a pirate's chance. We run. Then we get out of the blockade and thank God for our escape when we meet an 18,000 ton cruiser and were examined by her for two hours. I was a Norwegian captain, but the name of my ship was wrong. It was my hardest examination, and it took a bottle of 100-year-old brandy to help me pass it."

Tears Telephone Books in Two

Again he stopped talking, this time to tear up two phone books at once for a little afternoon exercise. Asked why he had run away from home, he answered. "I wanted to meet Buffalo Bill. All German boys read about Buffalo Bill. He gave me confidence when all my teachers said I would be a burn. So I sold my pet rabbits, changed my name, and started for Hamburg. I sailed on a Russian ship, thinking I would reach American. I landed in Australia and found that the world is round."