Berlin's Seerets at Length Revealed: Heavy Destruction of Cruisers, Destroyers avd Submarines~ out of port without incurring the almost certain risk of losing one, or more of its units through mie explosion. Every German chronder of the naval war has remark-
A special correspondent writing to "Lloyd's Weekly List"? says:—Throughout the war Germany took great pains to conceal the exact sum of her casualties, naval no less than military. Only those losses that were too patent to be hidden were admitted, the others being carefully suppressed. The concealment or minimizing of casuallies' is, of course, a perfectly legitimate artifice of war, and one, indeed, which is almost invariably practised. It has the two-fold object of keeping the public at home in good heart and of deceiving the enemy. During the late war, however, the British Admiralty took the unconventional course of publishing—with one exception—every naval loss as it occurred. The ception was the sinking of H.M.S. Audacious, which was kept from the public at the direct request of the Commander-in-Chief, Grand Fleet, for weighty reasons since explained.
Apart from this gjngle instance, however, the casualties suffered by the Navy were communicated to the Press without delay. As these were fairly severe, and apparently not balanced by enemy losses in.anything like the same proportion, the public naturally assumed that the war of attrition was exacting a heavy toll from our side while leaving. the German Fleet more or less immune- Needless to say, the German Government did its best to encourage this impression, and succeeded so well that when, shortly after the armistice, the German papers were permitted, for the first time, to reveal what the fleet had actually suffered in respect of material damage, there was something of an outcry against what the " Berliner Tageblatt" termed the "'colossal and unheard-of deception" of the Imperial naval authorities
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.