A slight hitch which occurred in the arrangements of the "seaplane station" party one morning, when the officer who was to have accompanied it failed to turn up on the landing at the appointed hour, showed how slender was the thread by which the authority of the once proud and domineering German naval officer hung. After cooling their heels in the slush of the dockyard for half an hour, the party returned to the _Hercules_ to await an explanation. This came an hour later, when the officer in question, very red in the face, came bumping up to the gangway in a madly driven motor-boat, and clambered up to the quarter-deck to make his apologies.
"I am very sorry," he ejaculated volubly, "but it was not understood by the _Arbeiter und Soldatenrat_ that it was I who was to go with you today. In consequence, the permit to wear my sword and epaulettes and other markings of an officer was not sent to me, and so I could not be allowed to travel by the tramway until I had made known the trouble by telephone and had the permit sent. It was even very difficult for me to be allowed to speak over the telephone. You must see how very hard life is for us officers as things are now."
It appears that even the officers going about with the Allied naval sub-commissions were only allowed to wear their designating marks for the occasion, and that, unless a special permit from the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council was shown, these had to be removed as soon as they went ashore. The constant "self-pity" which the officers kept showing in the matter of their humiliating predicament was the one thing needed to extinguish the sparks of sympathy which would keep flaring up in one's breast unless one stopped to think how thoroughly deserved--how poetically just--it all was.
With one or two exceptions, all the best of Germany's capital ships were known to have been surrendered, and this applied to light cruisers and destroyers as well. The U-boat situation was somewhat obscure, but it was supposed--incorrectly, as transpired later--that a fairly clean sweep of the best of the under-water craft had also been made. The most interesting ships which the Allied Commission expected to see in German waters were the battleship _Baden_, sister of the surrendered _Bayern_, and the battle-cruiser _Mackensen_, sister of the surrendered _Hindenburg_. The _Regensburg_ and _Königsberg_, which had been left to the Germans to "get about in," were also considered worthy of study at close range as examples of the latest type of German light cruiser. The _Mackensen_, still far from completed, was in a yard on the Elbe at Hamburg. The others were inspected at Wilhelmshaven.