A Belgian maid, compelled to slave for
officers of German submarines at Zeebrugge, kept count of those who
returned alive. The same number, twenty, always boarded in the house.
But, before the British came and drove the Germans out, no less than
sixteen of her twenty masters had stepped into dead men's shoes.
Finally, in the early morning of November the 3rd, when, in wild
despair, the Kaiser ordered the whole Fleet out for one last fight, the
men of aircraft, surface craft, and submarines alike refused point
blank to go; and the German Revolution then and there began. It was
the German Navy that rose first, brought to its senses by the might of
British sea-power. The Army followed. Then the people.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month (the
11th of November, 1918) the _Cease fire!_ sounded on every front by sea
and land and air; for that supremely skilful hero, Marshal Foch, had
signed the Armistice as Commander-in-Chief of all the Allied Armies on
the Western Front. One of the terms of this famous Armistice was that
Germany should surrender her Fleet to the Allies in the Firth of Forth,
where the British Grand Fleet was waiting with a few French and
American men-of-war.
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