the middle ship. I was then about twelve feet under water, and got the shot off in good shape, my men handling the boat as if she had been a skiff. I climbed

to the surface to get a sight through my tube of the effect, and discovered that the shot had gone straight and true, striking the ship, which I later learned was the Aboukir, under one of her magazines, which in exploding helped the torpedo's work of destruction.

There was a fountain of water, a burst of smoke, a flash of fire, and part of the cruiser rose in the air. Then I heard a roar and felt reverberations sent through the water by the detonation. She had been broken apart, and sank in a few minutes. The Aboukir had been stricken in a vital spot and by an unseen force; that made the blow all the greater.

Her crew were brave, and even with death staring them in the face kept to their posts, ready to handle their useless guns, for I submerged at once. But I had stayed on top long enough to see the other cruisers, which I learned were the Cressy and the Hogue, turn and steam full speed to their dying sister, whose plight they could not understand, unless it had been due to an accident.

The ships came on a mission of inquiry and rescue, for many of the Aboukir's crew were now in the water, the order having been given, "Each man for himself."

But soon the other two English cruisers learned what had brought about the destruction so suddenly.

As I reached my torpedo depth I sent a second charge at the nearest of the oncoming vessels, which was the Hogue. The English were playing my game, for I had scarcely to move out of my position, which was a great aid, since it helped to keep me from detection.

On board my little boat the spirit of the German Navy was to be seen in its best form. With enthusiasm every man held himself in check and gave attention to the work in hand.

The attack on the Hogue went true. But this time I did not have the advantageous aid of having the torpedo

detonate under the magazine, so for twenty minutes the Hogue lay wounded and helpless on the surface before she heaved, half turned over and sank.

But this time, the third cruiser knew of course that the enemy was upon her and she sought as best she could to defend herself. She loosed her torpedo defense batteries on boats, starboard and port, and stood her ground as if more anxious to help the many sailors who were in the water than to save herself. In common with the method of defending herself against a submarine attack, she steamed in a zigzag course, and this made it necessary for me to hold my torpedoes until I could lay a true course for them, which also made it necessary for me to get nearer to the Cressy. I had come to the surface for a view and saw how wildly the fire was being sent from the ship. Small wonder that was when they did not know where to shoot, although one shot went unpleasantly

near us.

When I got within suitable range I sent away my third attack. This time I sent a second torpedo after the first to make the strike doubly certain. My crew were aiming like sharpshooters and both torpedos went to their bullseye. My luck was with me again, for the enemy was made useless and at once began sinking by her head. Then she careened far over, but all the while her men stayed at the guns looking for their invisible foe. They were brave and true to their country's sea traditions. Then she eventually suffered a boiler explosion and completely turned turtle. With her keel uppermost she floated until the air got out from under her and then she sank with a loud sound, as if from a creature in pain.

The whole affair had taken less than one hour from the time of shooting off the first torpedo until the Cressy went to the bottom. Not one of the three had been able to use any of its big guns. I knew the wireless of the three cruisers had been calling for aid. I was still quite able to defend myself, but I knew that news of the disaster would call many English submarines and torpedo boat

destroyers, so, having done my appointed work, I set my course for home.

My surmise was right, for before I got very far some British cruisers and destroyers were on the spot, and the destroyers took up the chase. I kept under water most of the way, but managed to get off a wireless to the German fleet that I was heading homeward and being pursued. I hoped to entice the enemy, by allowing them now and then a glimpse of me, into the zone in which they might be exposed to capture or destruction by German warships, but, although their destroyers saw me plainly at dusk on the 22d and made a final effort to stop me, they abandoned the attempt, as it was taking them too far from safety and needlessly exposing them to attack from our fleet and submarines.

How much they feared our submarines and how wide was the agitation caused by good little U-9 is shown by the English reports that a whole flotilla of German submarines had attacked the cruis

ers and that this flotilla had approached under cover of the flag of Holland.

These reports were absolutely untrue. U-9 was the only submarine on deck, and she flew the flag she still flies-the German naval ensign-which I hope to keep forever as a glorious memento and as an inspiration for devotion to the Fatherland.

I reached the home port on the afternoon of the 23d, and on the 24th went to Wilhelmshaven, to find that news of my effort had become public. My wife, dry eyed when I went away, met me with tears. Then I learned that my little vessel and her brave crew had won the plaudit of the Kaiser, who conferred upon each of my co-workers the Iron Cross of the second class and upon me the Iron Cross of the first and second classes.

[Weddigen is the hero of the hour in Germany. He also wears a medal for lifesaving. Counting himself, Weddigen had twenty-six men. The limit of time that his ship is capable of staying below the surface is about six hours.]

The following story of conditions in Belgium, Germany, France, Holland, and England was sent by Irvin S. Cobb of The Saturday Evening Post to the American Red Cross, to be used in bringing home to Americans urgent need for relief in the countries affected by the great

war:

R

ECENTLY I have been in four of the countries concerned in the present war-Belgium, France, Germany, and England. I was also in Holland, having traversed it from end to end within a week after the fall of Antwerp, when every road coming up out of the south was filled with Belgian refugees.

In Belgium I saw this:

Homeless men, women, and children by thousands and hundreds of thousands. Many of them had been prosperous, a few had been wealthy, practically all had been comfortable. Now, with scarcely an exception, they stood all upon one common plane of misery. They had lost their homes, their farms, their workshops, their livings, and their means of making livings.

I saw them tramping aimlessly along wind-swept, rain-washed roads, fleeing from burning and devastated villages. I saw them sleeping in open fields upon the miry earth, with no cover and no shelter. I saw them herded together in the towns and cities to which many of them ultimately fled, existing God alone knows how. I saw them-ragged, furtive scarecrows-prowling in the shat

tered ruins of their homes, seeking salvage where there was no salvage to be found. I saw them living, like the beasts of the field, upon such things as the beasts of the field would reject.

I saw them standing in long lines waiting for their poor share of the dole of a charity which already was nearly exhausted. I saw their towns when hardly one stone stood upon another. I saw their abandoned farm lands, where the harvests rotted in the furrows and the fruit hung mildewed and ungathered upon the trees. I saw their cities where trade was dead and credit was a thing which no longer existed. I saw them staggering from weariness and from the weakness of hunger. I saw all these sights repeated and multiplied infinitely —yes, and magnified, too—but not once did I see a man or woman or even a child that wept or cried out.

If the Belgian soldiers won the world's admiration by the resistance which they made against tremendously overpowering numbers, the people of Belgium-the families of their soldiers-should have the world's admiration and pity for the courage, the patience, and the fortitude they have displayed under the load of an affliction too dolorous for any words to describe, too terrible for any imagination to picture.

In France I saw a pastoral land overrun by soldiers and racked by war until it seemed the very earth would cry out for mercy. I saw a country literally stripped of its men in order that the

regiments might be filled. I saw women hourly striving to do the ordained work of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, hourly piecing together the jarred and broken fragments of their lives. I saw countless villages turned into smoking, filthy, ill-smelling heaps of ruins. I saw schools that were converted into hospitals and factories changed into barracks.

I saw the industries that were abandoned and the shops that were bare of customers, the shopkeepers standing before empty shelves looking bankruptcy in the face. I was the unburied dead lying between the battle lines, where for weeks they had lain, and where for weeks, and perhaps months to come, they would continue to lie, and I saw the graves of countless numbers of other dead who were so hurriedly and carelessly buried that their limbs in places protruded through the soil, poisoning the air with hideous smells and giving abundant promise of the pestilence which must surely follow. I saw districts noted for their fecundity on the raw edge of famine, and a people proverbial for their light-heartedness who had forgotten how to smile.

In Germany I saw innumerable men maimed and mutilated in every conceivable fashion. I saw these streams of wounded pouring back from the front endlessly. In two days I saw trains bearing 14,000 wounded men passing through one town. I saw people of all classes undergoing privations and enduring hardships in order that the forces at the front might have food and supplies. I saw thousands of women wearing widow's weeds, and thousands of children who had been orphaned.

I saw great hosts of prisoners of war on their way to prison camps, where in the very nature of things they must forego all hope of having for months, and perhaps years, those small creature comforts which make life endurable to a civilized human being. I saw them, crusted with dirt, worn with incredible exertions, alive with crawling vermin, their uniforms already in tatters, and their broken shoes falling off their feet.

On the day before I quit German soil -the war being then less than three months old-I counted, in the course of a short ride through the City of Aix-laChapelle, two convalescent soldiers who were totally blind, three who had lost an arm, and one, a boy of 18 or thereabout, who had lost both arms. How many men less badly injured I saw in that afternoon I do not know, I hesitate even to try to estimate the total figure for fear I might be accused of exaggeration.

In Holland I saw the people of an already crowded country wrestling valorously with the problem of striving to feed and house and care for the enormous numbers of penniless refugees who had come out of Belgium. I saw wornout groups of peasants huddled on railroad platforms and along the railroad tracks, too weary to stir another step.

In England I saw still more thousands of these refugees, bewildered, broken by misfortune, owning only what they wore upon their backs, speaking an alien tongue, strangers in a strange land. I saw, as I have seen in Holland, people of all classes given of their time, their means, and their services to provide some temporary relief for these poor wanders who were without a country. I saw the new recuits marching off, and I knew that for the children many of them were leaving behind there would be no Santa Claus unless the American people out of the fullness of their Own abundance filled the Christmas stockings and stocked the Christmas larders.

And seeing these things, I realized how tremendous was the need for organized and systematic aid then and how enormously that need would grow when Winter came when the soldiers shivered in the trenches, and the hospital supplies ran low, as indeed they have before now begun to run low, and the winds searched through the holes made by the cannon balls and struck at the women and children cowering in their squalid and desolated homes. From my own experiences and observations I knew that more nurses, more surgeons, more surgical

necessities, and yet more, past all calculating, would be sorely needed when the plague and famine and cold came to take their toll among armies that already were thinned by sickness and wounds.

The American Red Cross, by the terms of the Treaty of Geneva, gives aid to the invalided and the injured soldiers of any army and all the armies. If any small

word from me, attempting to describe actual conditions, can be of value to the American Red Cross in its campaign of mercy, I write it gladly. I wish only that I had the power to write lines which would make the American people see the situation as it is now-which would make them understand how infinitely worse that situation must surely become during the next few months.

ON

N Friday night the Grand Boulevards were alive with people, motors, voitures, singing, dancing, and each café thronged by the gayest light hearts in the world.

On Saturday night the boulevards were thronged with growling, ominous, surging crowds, with faces like those of the Commune, speaking strong words for and against war.

On Sunday night mobs tore down signs, broke windows, shouted the "Marseillaise," wreaked their vengeance on those who belonged to a nation that France thought had plunged their country into ghastly war. Aliens sought shelter; hotels closed their massive doors intended for defense. Mounted troops corralled the mobs as cowboys round up belligerent cattle. Detached groups smashed and mishandled things that came in the way.

Monday night a calm so intense that one felt frightened. Boulevards deserted, cafés closed, hotels shuttered. Patrols of the Civil Guard in massed formation. France was keeping her pledge to high civilization. Yellow circulars were pasted on the buildings warning all that France was in danger and appealing by that token to all male citizens to guard the women and the weak.

At daylight only was the dead silence broken; France was marching to war

at that hour. Will any one who was here forget that daily daybreak tramp, that measured march of the thousands going to the front? Cavalry with the sun striking the helmets; infantry with their scarlet overcoats too large; aviators with their boxed machines, the stormy petrels of modern war; and the dogs, veritably the dogs of war, going on the humanest mission of all, to search for the wounded in the woods of battle.

And, side by side with the marching millions on the pavement, were the women belonging to them, the women who were to stay behind.

Aз though the Judgment Trumpet had sounded, France was changed in the twinkling of an eye. And added to the subconscious terror of another revolution which lurked in every American soul-a terror that was dispelled after the third day, when France reached out her long arm and mobilized her people into a strong component whole with but one heart-was an inexplainable dread of this terrible calm.

We knew about trained armies going to war, but here was a situation where the Biblical description of the Last Day was carried out, the man at the wheel dropped his work and was taken; he who was at the plowshare left his furrow. * * *

First we were afraid we would not