In spite of very rough seas, the converted yachts of the escort picked up the survivors and took them back to Brest. The rules were that as soon as a ship was attacked the merchantmen in the convoy should scatter and that only shallow draft yachts and destroyers, which were poor targets for torpedoes, should engage in rescue work.
Back in Brest, the crew and passengers from the Antilles were placed on the Finland, which had just unloaded and was preparing for the return trip. They had poor luck. The Finland was hardly out of Brest before a torpedo struck her under the bridge.
These transports had civilian crews. The crew of the Antilles, described by the naval officers as “the sweepings of the docks, a low class of foreigners of all nationalities,” had come on board in a state of shock from their previous experience. They communicated their terrors to the civilian crew of the Finland with the result that there was a general panic when the torpedo hit, which the officers had to quell revolver in hand. In the rush boats were lowered carelessly, some capsized. Men jumped overboard.
“The engineroom and fireroom crews left their stations and rushed on deck, which was contrary to orders,” wrote Admiral Gleaves. “These men were finally driven below, with the aid of a revolver and a heavy wooden mallet, and the engineers’ stations again manned.”
When discipline was restored it was found that only one cargo hold was flooded. The men in the water were picked up and the Finland made her way back under her own steam through the submarine nets into the harbor of Brest.
Officers and crews were learning that the submarine was not an unbeatable foe. As the autumn advanced coordination kept improving between merchantships and their escorts.
The great day for the American destroyers came in November when the U.S.S. Fanning was escorting a tardy merchantman to its position in the westbound convoy out from Queenstown. The coxswain sighted the small “finger” periscope of a submarine which seemed to be taking aim on one of the larger merchantmen. No sooner seen than gone. The Fanning took a wide turn to pass over the spot where the periscope had vanished. At the same moment her companion destroyer the Nicholson bore down on the spot from the other side of the convoy. They both dropped depth charges.
Nothing happened. They cruised around hopefully for fifteen minutes. No oil, no timbers. They were about to rejoin their positions in the convoy when all at once the stern of a submarine broke the water between them. The stern rose so high that the men could see the rear torpedo tubes.
Soon the whole submarine lay on the surface, seemingly without a scratch. The destroyer crews could read the inscription: U-58. Both destroyers were shelling it when the conning tower trap opened and out popped a German officer with his arms in the air crying “Kamerad” at the top of his lungs. He was followed by the crew, all with their arms in the air. Fearing it was a trick both destroyers approached queasily with their machineguns trained on the men. The Fanning went alongside and threw the Germans a line. At that moment the submarine sank. The Germans had opened the seacocks. The Americans had a job saving the crew. One kraut was so exhausted that he died.
When the German commander was hauled out of the water, all dripping as he was he clicked his heels and saluted Lieutenant Carpender who was in command of the Fanning. He explained in tolerable English that he was a minelayer. The ashcans had wrecked his motors, jammed his rudders and broken the fuel lines. He was sinking so fast there was nothing to it but to blow his ballast tanks and surface, and take his chance with the Americans.
The Germans were given dry clothing and fed and placed below under guard. According to the crew of the Fanning what impressed the captured squareheads most was their soap. It was the first soap they had had in three months.
Colonel House spent the hot months of the summer of 1917 as usual on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His summer home at Magnolia constituted a port of entry for the stream of European envoys such as Northcliffe, the English press lord, Tardieu, the French High Commissioner, and Sir William Wiseman, the very astute head of the British secret service. All of them were trying to thaw their way through the ring of ice that surrounded the President in Washington.
Besides being liaison man with Paris and Westminster the confidential colonel was trying to keep what he and Wilson referred to jokingly as his friend’s “one track mind” from concentrating too exclusively on military efforts “to knock the Kaiser off his perch.”
House had to remind the President that the purpose of war was peace.
House wanted to prepare for the day when Woodrow Wilson would be in a position, like Philip Dru setting the troubled republic to rights as Administrator in his fantasy, to dictate to the prostrate nations of the world a peace which would inaugurate a golden age.
House well knew that through all the massacres and countermassacres of that summer’s campaigns, the word peace would not down. The people of Europe were tired of being killed. Peace was the slogan that toppled the autocracy in Russia. All the revolutionary parties there sympathized fervently with the aims of the conference of the world’s socialists which the Second International, recovering from the paralysis into which it had been thrown by the martial ecstasy of the early years of the war, had called in Sweden. Wilson’s answer to the Stockholm convocation, like that of the British and French governments, was to refuse passports to the Socialist leaders invited. Bakhmetief, Kerensky’s envoy to Washington, had been camping on Colonel House’s doorstep in Magnolia in an effort to convince him that Mr. Wilson was making a grave mistake.
A similar agitation for peace was stirring the Catholic Church. The Reichstag resolution of July 17 was sponsored by the German Catholic Center party. This was followed on the first day of August by an appeal from Pope Benedict XV to the belligerents to negotiate a peace without victory, on approximately the terms laid down in Woodrow Wilson’s speeches before America’s entrance into the war. Associated with the Pope’s appeal, at least in the minds of Wilson’s advisers at the State Department, was the attempt by Count Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister, to use the new Emperor Charles’ brotherinlaw Prince Sixtus of Bourbon, then serving in the Belgian Army, as his private gobetween in preliminary conversations between the French, the Germans and the Italians. Wilson’s first thought was that he was too busy waging war to pay any more attention to the Pope’s appeal than he did to the mistaken exhortations of the socialists.
On August 17 Colonel House wrote from Magnolia begging him to reconsider:
“Dear Governor,
“I am so impressed with the importance of the situation that I am troubling you again … I believe that you have an opportunity to take the peace negotiations out of the hands of the Pope and hold them in your own. Governmental Germany realizes that no one excepting you is in a position to enforce peace terms. The Allies must succumb to your judgment and Germany is not much better off. Badly as the Allied cause is going, Germany is in a worse condition. It is a race now of endurance with Germany as likely to go under first as any of the Entente Powers.
“Germany and Austria are a seething mass of discontent. The Russian Revolution has shown the people their power and it has put the fear of God into the hearts of the Imperialists … A statement from you setting forth the real issues would have an enormous effect and would probably bring about such an upheaval in Germany as we desire … You can make a statement that will not only be the undoing of autocratic Germany, but one that will strengthen the hands of the Russian liberals in their purpose to mould their country into a mighty republic.