It cannot be maintained that England disregarded or Germany respected the spirit of the agreement. Technically, the Convention held good, in the first instance, for only seven years from the date of signing; and it might, on a quibble, have been considered lapsed. Unasked, however, Germany, on the first day of the war, both announced her intention of observing the Convention and issued, as her own Admiralty documents prove, secret orders to the opposite effect.
Anyone who had roof the concluding speech which Baron von Bieber-stein, the German plenipotentiary, made at the Hague conference might have prophesied that Germany would, when next engaged in war, scatter, "in those higher interests of the State" to which the baron referred, "long-life," unanchored, contact mines inthe world's fairways. Kipling, in verse, Corbett, in the workaday prose of the "Admiralty History of the War" (IT, 48) have praised the fishermen who swept clear the deeps and shallows:
We have been taught to be proud of how, in days gone by, the sea spirit of the nation answered the call in the hour of danger: but never in all our long story had there been such an answering as this.
In a footnote Corbett reminds us of the retired high flag officers who were proud to volunteer for dangerous duty again, with the trawlers, taking whatever lesser rank in the MR. the Admiralty cared to grant o them, Before the war ended German mines had sunk over 1,000,000 tons Allied and neutral shippin is no single known case any neutral ship from a British mine.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.