Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie Read Free Book Online Page B

dark-haired man, fifty years old, who sometimes wore and sometimes shaved off a thick black mustache. Of French Huguenot ancestry and, like many officers in the Imperial Navy, lacking the ennobling “von,” he appeared on first acquaintance a curious kind of sea dog. “A droop-jawed, determined little man in an ill-fitting frock coat, looking more like a parson than an admiral”: so an American diplomat in Constantinople described him.
    Souchon and
Goeben
were visiting Haifa, in the eastern Mediterra-nean, when the the news of Sarajevo arrived. The assassination, the admiral knew, would agitate Europe; this quickly led him to worry about
Goeben
’s leaking boiler tubes. He telegraphed Berlin, asking that new tubes be sent to the Austrian base at Pola, then sailed from Haifa for the Adriatic. The ship arrived on July 10; for the next eighteen days, the crew worked to locate and replace defective tubes. The work was done while the sun burned down from a cloudless sky, creating almost unbearable heat inside the steel hull. The battle cruiser had twenty-four boilers; from them, 4,000 defective tubes had to be extracted and replaced. The work was still unfinished when a signal from Berlin warned that war was imminent.
    While the crew cheered the news, waved their caps, and tapped their feet to marching music by the ship’s band, Souchon pondered his next move. Neither Austria nor Italy seemed ready for naval war, and Souchon rejected the thought of remaining in the Adriatic, subordinate to an Austrian admiral not inclined to fight Britain and France. Assuming that he was alone in the Mediterranean, Souchon considered steaming west, inflicting what damage he could on the French troop transports, then forcing his way past Gibraltar and into the Atlantic to attack Allied trade. If he could make it to the North Sea, he knew that Admiral Franz Hipper, commander of the High Seas Fleet battle cruiser force, would welcome his powerful ship. But the uncertain condition of
Goeben
’s boilers prohibited the sustained high speed that this move would require. By July 29, Souchon had made up his mind. Leaving Pola,
Goeben
sailed down the Adriatic, and on August 1—the day Germany declared war on Russia—anchored off Brindisi, on the heel of Italy. There,
Breslau
joined her. Souchon’s ships needed coal, but the Italians refused to bring colliers alongside, saying that the sea was too rough. Souchon accurately interpreted these excuses as evidence that Italy was about to renounce the Triple Alliance. He moved on to Taranto and then, his need for coal now acute, to Messina, in Sicily, where he could rendezvous with German merchant ships from which coal could be commandeered. During the morning,
Goeben
and
Breslau
steamed past the rugged cliffs of the Calabrian coast, jagged against the intense blue of the sky. At noon, they passed beneath the volcano of Mount Etna, its perpetual plume of smoke issuing from the summit. By midafternoon, they had anchored in Messina harbor, where the German East Africa Line passenger steamer
General,
bound for Dar es Salaam, and a number of other German merchant ships awaited them.
    On the day Souchon reached Messina, Italy declared her neutrality. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia on July 28 without consulting Rome, and it did not take the Italians long to remember that they had agreed to join in the Triple Alliance as a strictly defensive arrangement. The Italian government’s decision had the wholehearted support of the Italian navy; the Italian Naval Staff repeatedly had warned that the fleet could not protect Italy’s long coastline and seaboard cities from the French and British fleets. The news, justified or not, was a blow for Souchon. Italy’s neutrality eliminated the Triple Alliance, the naval assembly at Messina, and the prospect of any support for
Goeben
and
Breslau.
    The Italians at Messina were prompt to implement their new neutrality. Again, Souchon was refused coal.