Scandinavia in the First World War

CHAPTER 13

Neutral merchant seamen at war

The experiences of Scandinavian seamen during the First World War

Bjarne Søndergaard Bendtsen

Seaborne trade has always played a crucial role for the three Scandinavian countries. During the First World War, with the belligerents’ escalating use of Handelskrieg as a weapon, the importance of this trade both in its own right and, no less importantly, for enabling the export of products and for supplying industry and the home markets as such, became even more significant. In spite of the increasing dependency on seaborne trade, and the fact that the Scandinavian merchant seamen suffered heavily during the war, their efforts have largely been overshadowed by nouveau riche war profiteers at home, when anything at all is remembered about the First World War in Scandinavia. The chapter offers a short survey of the neutral Scandinavian merchant seamen’s war efforts as they were depicted in memoirs and literature and on monuments, with Denmark as the central case.¹

When the monument to the seamen who lost their lives aboard Danish merchantmen during the First World War was dedicated 9 May 1928, it was an inter-Scandinavian event. The Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Finnish ministers to Copenhagen participated, along with the Danish king and other members of the royal family, shipowners, several present and former Danish ministers, politicians, and some 2,000–3,000 invited notables, not least including the bereaved families of the seamen to be commemorated.² The area around the monument was not only decorated with Danish flags but with the flags of the other Nordic countries as well—an approach to the event that was a logical consequence of the fact that of the 648 seamen commemorated by the monument, 531 were Danish, 7 Icelandic, 39 Swedish, 28 Norwegian, and 11 Finnish, while 32 came from other nations, as the chairman of Dansk Dampskibsrederiforening (Danish Steamship Owners’ Association), A. O. Andersen, stated in his speech at the dedication.³ Dansk Dampskibsrederiforening had initiated the plans for the monument and donated the funds for it; therefore, only ships owned by members of the association were included.

In addition to this inter-Scandinavian approach to the commemoration, the dedication interestingly enough did not take place on the tenth anniversary of the Armistice, but instead on the day for the Danish victory in the Battle of Helgoland in 1864, and thus connecting the loss of lives in the world war to one of the only successes in the traumatic war against Prussia and Austria, and thereby to the 1920 reunification of Northern Schleswig with Denmark, which was a direct consequence of the German defeat in the world war.

The newspapers generally described the monument and the dedication of it as a graceful and dignified memorial to the seamen’s efforts during the war,⁴ but there were also critical voices: in an otherwise positive article, Ekstrabladet mentioned en passant that it was strange that the Stock Exchange did not fly its flag—of course hinting at the enormous amounts of money earned from stocks and shares during the war, especially from shipping.⁵ Neither were the seamen themselves wholly accepting. Their union’s magazine, Ny Tid, had run critical articles since the latter part of the war regarding, among other things, the creation of a fund that could support the relatives of seamen who lost their lives or the ability to work, and take care of their families during and after a war. Now, caustic comments contrasted the spending of money on the monument with the unwillingness to compensate the seamen for risking their lives sailing in war zones: ‘The thought of a monument can be very nice, but in the light of the distress among Danish seamen, it is stones over bread.’⁶

Whereas it seems to have been a matter of opinion how the monument was regarded, there was hardly any doubt as to who was the culprit when it came to endangering the lives of the neutral seamen, or to the negative effects of the German submarine warfare on the nation’s image during the war, which meant that the Germans were regarded as cold-blooded murderers and barbarians even in the still neutral parts of the world. The interference in neutral trade was strongly criticized by the neutral world, initially led by the US, and German attacks on neutral, unarmed merchant vessels, as well as on neutral and enemy passenger liners (in particular, the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915, where 127 of the 1,198 people killed were US citizens)⁷ and ultimately the German declaration of the uneingeschränkter U-Boot-Krieg—unrestricted submarine warfare—on 1 February 1917, would lead to the US declaring war on Germany on 4 April 1917. Unsurprisingly, these topics also played a central role in the judgement of Germany in the neutral Scandinavian countries, not least since seaborne trade and shipping were highly important for these countries’ economies and the supply of their home markets. This was especially the case in Norway, whose commercial fleet was the world’s fourth largest in 1914.

Losses of Scandinavian merchant ships and seamen during the war were immense. The Norwegian merchant navy suffered especially heavily: 829 ships were lost, totalling 1,239,283 gross register tons, 30 ships suffered damage, 67 ships disappeared, and 22 were condemned, adding up to a war loss of 49.3 per cent of its 1914 tonnage.⁸ According to the Norwegian Shipping Board’s statistics, 1,162 Norwegian seamen ‘perished by acts of war, while “a large number” were wounded in the course of attacks’, as the Norwegian economist and historian Wilhelm Keilhau writes: ‘And to these figures must, undoubtedly, be added the greater part of the crews who manned the 67 ships which disappeared, crews who represented a loss of another 943 men.’⁹ Or potentially 2,105 in all.¹⁰ During the years 1914–18, Denmark lost 305 ships or 281,834 GRT, resulting in the deaths of 667 people,¹¹ and Sweden lost 280 ships or 291,549 GRT (1919–20 included), and 659 people were killed at sea.¹² Only the British ship losses were higher than the Norwegian,¹³ and the Norwegian losses meant that her merchant navy fell from fourth to sixth place in world tonnage after the war.¹⁴

Even so, at least in Denmark, the seamen’s efforts were not held in much regard—or so both contemporary and later sources claimed.

Neutrality, blockades, and contraband lists

As the war dragged on, pressure from the belligerent parties made life in the neutral countries, and the very idea of neutrality, increasingly difficult. Especially the constant addition of items to the contraband list and the expansions of the restricted zones directly influenced the conditions for neutral shipping and resulted in difficulties for the neutrals.

There were endless disputes among intellectuals in the belligerent states and neutral countries alike about who started not only the war, but also the Handelskrieg,¹⁵ which principally consisted of blockading civilian society as a weapon against the enemy. The British naval blockade of supplies to the Central Powers would, in the course of events, include the neutral European states more and more, and the German submarine blockade of Great Britain directly involved neutral ships sailing to British ports. This was more than ever the case after the unrestricted submarine war was declared on 1 February 1917, which meant that every vessel entering the German war zone around the British Isles, the English Channel, the French Atlantic and the Mediterranean coasts was considered an enemy vessel and would be sunk without warning.

But, to be fair, it was the British who introduced the blockade by imposing restrictions on trade on 20 August 1914; restrictions which ‘began the erosion of the maritime laws of war’.¹⁶ In the early part of the war, Britain furthermore led the way in unilateral extensions to the list of absolute and conditional contraband—a clear breach of the London Declaration of 1909, which, of course, neither Britain nor Germany had ratified. Iron-ore was declared conditional contraband by the British on 21 September 1914, for example, which dealt a serious blow to Swedish exports. Sweden succeeded in getting iron-ore removed from the list,¹⁷ though not for long: on 29 October iron-ore was added to the category of absolute contraband.¹⁸

The Germans would soon follow suit when it came to unilateral extensions to contraband lists, and in October 1914 they began seizing neutral ships in the Baltic and taking them to German ports to search. This flouting of maritime law led to the Scandinavian countries sending identical notes to the belligerents on 12 November 1914, ‘protesting the closing of shipping routes by mines, the extensions of search, and the free interpretation of contraband.’¹⁹ Nevertheless, the escalation of the blockades and other Handelskrieg measures did not stop, and the situation for the small neutrals became increasingly difficult, especially after the US entered the war.

Danish imports from and exports to Germany, which naturally did not only rely on seaborne cargo but could take place overland, were potential breaches of the Allied blockade of the Central Powers, and a key reason behind the Allied attempts to include the northern neutrals in the blockade. Neither could Swedish trade with Germany be efficiently controlled by the Allies since Germany had power over the Baltic. Geostrategic circumstances played a significant role in the way the different belligerent parties influenced the Scandinavian countries: Denmark was so undeniably within the German sphere of interest and influence that it had to take Berlin into account in any measure it took; Swedish trade interests—iron-ore and timber exports being the most important in this context—were controlled by Germany and connected to German interests; and Norway was positioned in the Allies’ sphere of interest, not least due to its large merchant navy traditionally sailing to British Empire ports.

Thus, it soon became apparent that the geostrategic positions of the Scandinavian countries and the most important belligerent powers—Britain and Germany—combined with the way the world war almost instantly took on the character of total warfare in a way unknown before, would influence neutrality and not least neutral shipping down to the slightest detail.²⁰

Scandinavian shipmasters remember the danger zones

These details, with their many horrors, were to involve forced timecharter voyages in the danger zones and the outright requisitioning of neutral ships, as the belligerents, and especially the Allies, became more and more short of tonnage. Neutral merchantmen had to sail for the Allies to obtain bunker coal or even to be granted permission to leave Allied ports; at some points the Allies demanded a certain amount of tonnage put to their disposal to allow neutral vessels to leave ports, or that another neutral vessel should arrive before permission to leave port was granted. In short, coal was a powerful tool with which to threaten the Scandinavians, as they were all reliant on especially British coal; not only for bunker use but also for their industries and for heating purposes at home.

Still, there does not seem to have been much appreciation for the seamen’s work and the troubles they faced—at least according to the following sources. In one of the earliest articles about Danish commercial navigation during the war, State meteorologist C. I. H. Speerschneider complains about the Danish people’s lost understanding of life at sea and particularly their lack of appreciation of the seamen’s efforts:

He [the seaman] never won much recognition, however, but it is not his fault that it is so. It is society’s fault, our over-intelligent and aestheticizing society, oblivious to life’s true values, which has not understood how it stands in debt to our seafarers, and which in its eternally flourishing social aspirations looks down its nose at the plain sailor, who has the advantage over most of the males on dry land, that he has seen the world and life and is a man.²¹

This positively homoerotic glorification of the seamen’s manliness might not be what one would expect from a government official, but it clearly expresses his frustration at how to his mind the Danish public had disregarded the seamen’s sufferings and important work for the country.

Much later, in 1938, the Danish sea captain N. Th. Brinch published his memoirs En dansk Skibsførers Rejser i Farezonen under Verdenskrigen 1914–1918 (‘A Danish shipmaster’s voyages in the danger zone’), which contains a critique of the way the seamen’s efforts were regarded by the country’s non-seafaring population that largely chimes with Speerschneider’s. Here, the neutral seamen’s work during the war is explicitly equated to war work, along with bitter complaints about the lack of recognition:

No honour awaited him [the seaman], no one or perhaps just a few understood him. Of course, the seaman had to do his duty, but only a few could see his effort during the World War clearly, maybe the greatest effort made. But when the war ended, the belligerents had forgotten him, and the population ashore hardly noticed him.²²

And later in the book, when writing about the neutral seamen who were killed while on forced voyages for the Allies:

Was it for the fatherland’s sake that they fell? No, then they would have been honoured and praised. They did not even bring necessities to their country, for they were time-chartered, like we were and so many others … This was the effort of the Danish merchant seamen in the great World War, the only direct effort made by Danish trades.²³

Furthermore, Brinch complains about the unfair situation of the neutral seamen, who were forced to sail for the Allies, with the same risk of being attacked by German submarines as the Allied merchantmen, but without the protection of armaments with which the Allied ships were issued during the war. When the neutral ships were requisitioned or time-chartered, they even had to paint over the neutral flags on the hulls.²⁴

The same aspect is explicitly evident in the title of the Norwegian captain I. Øvreseth’s memoirs about his voyages during the war: Vi som var våbenløse: en skibsførers erindringer fra krigstiden 1914– 18 (‘We who were unarmed: a shipmaster’s memoirs of the war, 1914–18’) (1932). Like Brinch, Øvreseth sailed the different danger zones for almost the entire war. Øvreseth is definitely not anti-British—even though he did rescue three escaped German prisoners of war, one of whom was from Northern Schleswig, in the autumn of 1914 while sailing for Arkhangelsk.²⁵ Throughout the war, he only sailed to Allied ports, which of course soon would be a consequence of the belligerents’ attitude towards neutrals calling at enemy ports, regarding them as enemy vessels. And even though he complains about the harsh measures that were taken, especially at the east coast ports of England, where the crews were regarded with suspicion as potential spies and kept as prisoners on their own ships, he seems to understand these measures and support the Allies. The merciless brutality of the German submarines and the German mining of the seas at random would naturally evoke a strong aversion in neutral merchant sailors to the power responsible for such actions. However, the British requisitioning of Øvreseth’s and many other Norwegian and neutral ships, and particularly the way they handled the requisitioning—suspending right of ownership and refusing him the assistance of a lawyer and permission to contact his company in Norway—does lead to critical remarks.

FIGURE 1: I. Øvreseth Vi som var våbenløse (1932). The dramatic 1930s style cover illustration shows the moment a torpedo or mine strikes a neutral Norwegian ship, seemingly using the Norwegian flag on the side of the hull as a target.

Even Speerschneider, in a rare moment, criticizes the British for endangering neutral seamen’s lives by sailing under false neutral flags, logically leading to German repressions against real neutral ships.²⁶ The Allied use of false neutral flags and the use of the so-called Q-ships or ‘mystery ships’—decoy vessels used against submarines that were ‘disguised as unarmed merchantmen but carried concealed naval armament’, luring the submarines into a surface attack instead of using their expensive torpedoes—clearly made sailing in the war zones even more dangerous for the neutrals.²⁷ In the English poet Alfred Noyes’s propaganda book, Mystery Ships (Trapping the ‘U’ Boat) (1916), makes nary a mention of this unsporting approach to the game. On the other hand, a strong critique of the German lack of sportsmanship can be found in Noyes’s book, which was published in Danish and Swedish translations along with his Open Boats (1917), about the cowardly behaviour of German submarines, leaving the crews of sunken ships to their fate in open boats on the high seas.²⁸

Neutral seamen in literature

Brinch’s bitter recollections of the way the seamen were almost completely ignored in Denmark during the war are not quite true. Despite the seamen’s complaints about having been forgotten, there seems to have been a genuine appreciation of the importance of their efforts—not least financially—in the neutral countries during the war. An example is the cover of the Danish mainstream weekly Verden og Vi on 19 January 1917, which shows a photograph of the snow-covered bridge of the steamer Oscar II with four officers of the watch, solemnly steering the ship.²⁹ The photo is accompanied by the caption: ‘One of the ships that brings the money home.’³⁰

Perhaps the Danish newspapers did indeed not write much about the seamen’s fate, but quite understandably so, bearing in mind Denmark’s necessarily cautious approach to its southern neighbour, which was the primary reason for the Danish 1915 War Press Act, making it illegal to print certain criticisms of government actions. Prior to this, any mention of foreign and local warships and merchant vessels had been made illegal, not least to avoid supplying the many spies that worked in Denmark with such information, so the laconic paragraphs in Danish newspapers about torpedoed or mined ships were not only due to a lack of interest. Furthermore, some papers did criticize the situation less cautiously in longer articles. The independent conservative Vort Land, for instance, wrote about the sinking of the Danish steamer Lars Kruse in the English Channel on 4 February 1917, on a voyage from Buenos Aires to Rotterdam with provisions for the Belgian Relief Committee.³¹ The sinking led to the deaths of 17 men, and much bitterness in neutral Denmark. Vort Land quotes exhaustively from the evidence given by the sole survivor, 1st Engineer Møller, at the inquiry, without, however, going so far as to be openly critical of the incident. Still, there can be no doubt as to the intention of the article, and to the paper’s position on the sinking: the article’s last words describe the cowardly behaviour of the German submarine captain, whom the day after the sinking of Lars Kruse had picked up Møller, but later put him in the lifeboat of another torpedoed steamer that the submarine had in tow, and promised to take ashore. Eventually, Møller and the crew of the other steamer were left to their fate at sea.³²

Moreover, highly indignant poems were published—including in the newspapers—along with novels dealing with the topic. One example is journalist and author Aage Hermann (1888–1949) who worked for the pro-government yellow paper Ekstrabladet, and published numerous critical poems there about the war and the situation of the neutral seamen. His poems on this topic were later published in the collection Krigens Digte (‘The poems of the war’) (1915; 2nd rev. 1918). In a poem about the real steamer Eos, Hermann used part of a newspaper report about the wrecked ship as a kind of motto or introduction to make the indignant tone of the poem and the grieving wife of the seaman appear the more realistic, and probably also to express fairly open criticism of the war at sea—a technique that was used by other contemporary poets as well. Meanwhile, Ekstrabladet printed caustically satirical drawings by the socialist illustrator Anton Hansen about seamen paying the price for the ample and easy money the war profiteers and speculators were making.³³

Still, the war at sea was only mentioned in minor Danish works,³⁴ and, to my knowledge, only indirectly in Swedish literature, as in Selma Lagerlöf’s Bannlyst (1918; The Outcast, 1920). Here, the war sporadically appears as seen from the shores of neutral Sweden with uncanny descriptions of the many thousand dead from the Battle of Jutland on 31 May–1 June 1916, floating in their life vests towards Sweden’s west coast, used as a symbol of the horror and madness of war. In Norwegian literature, however, the topic was treated more directly in a canonical work: Vår ære og vår makt (‘Our honour and our power’) (1935) by the socialist author and journalist Nordahl Grieg (1902–1943), a play that focus on the hardships suffered by Norwegian seamen and their families during the First World War, effectively contrasted to despicable war profiteers earning millions, not least from the seamen’s sufferings. The cynical profiteers for instance greet the news that their ship Blåeggen has been torpedoed in the English Channel with the question, Has anybody been killed?—instantly followed by a discussion of the value of the ship and the lucrative insurance payout, meaning that they will earn two million kroner by the sinking.³⁵ At the same time, the profiteering shipowners bemoan the seamen’s demands for higher wages and danger money. Grieg’s play took its title from Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s poem ’Norsk sjømandssang’ of 1868 (‘Norwegian sailor’s song’), which declared that the country’s honour and power had been brought to it by the white sails of the merchant navy.³⁶

In a contemporary example of a critical attitude towards the war against neutral merchantmen, the Norwegian poet Nils Collett Vogt (1864–1937) published the poem ‘Et Ord for Dagen’ (‘A word for the day’) in the collection Hjemkomst (‘Homecoming’) (1917). The poem has the date 17 May 1917 as a parenthetical subtitle—Norwegian Constitution Day, which traditionally is celebrated by Norwegians high and low. For Collett, the celebration of his country in the year 1917 is bleak: ‘Little do I know to celebrate | in this gory age. | A greeting to those at sea | who are fighting our fight!’³⁷ As he says in the last verse, he sees the seamen’s efforts as a kind of neutral war effort, risking their lives to keep the lines of supply open.

Likewise, two Danish novels published during the war condemned German submarine warfare in angry terms: Sporløst–! (‘Without a Trace’)(1917) by the painter and writer Christian Bogø (1882–1945), and Hvorfor–? Fortælling fra Undervandsbaads-Krigen (‘Why? A tale from the submarine war’) (1918) by the socialist and suffragist Olga Eggers (1875–1945). Bogø, whose father was a sea captain, strongly sympathized with the seamen—in 1922 he wrote the jubilee publication for the Danish seamen’s union, Sømændenes Forbund i Danmark: 1897–1922—and he continuously criticized the lack of security aboard the ships, not least during the war when the owners and shareholders earned vast profits from the increased freight rates. Hence, a major topic in Sporløst is that the ship’s owners did not invest in the crew’s safety by installing a wireless telegraph on board—a simple measure that would have warned the ship about the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare four days prior to its sinking. The same motif was used, though without the stinging critique, in the popular screen version of Bogø and J. Ravn-Jonsen’s play Barken Margrethe af Danmark (1934), in which one of the seamen’s home-made radio saves the ship and her crew in a storm. Furthermore, it was not only a literary theme, but also taken up in a later article by Speerschneider.³⁸

In the film Barken Margrethe af Danmark, which figures on the Danish Film Institute’s top 100,³⁹ the war is not mentioned despite the fact that it was based on the unpublished light melodrama of the same name; a play that seems to have had the submarine war as its focus. It was given its first performance at Aarhus Teater on 26 December 1918, and a review of the premiere describes the play’s topic as ‘the conditions of Danish seamen during the world war’.⁴⁰ The reviewer, with the appropriately chosen signature ‘Tremasteren’ (‘The three-master’), writes that he had feared it would be tasteless to take up this serious and tragic topic as the motif for an entertaining melodrama,⁴¹ performed before an overfed Christmas audience, so soon after the tragedies took place. But it succeeded in this delicate balancing act

if only that in spite of the Christmas goose and the roast pork and all the fun and ornaments, if only that the audience for a single moment would shudder with terror such as the one these sailors has endured, a sense of the honour and glory with which their conduct throughout the war has bedecked the flag and the nation, then the play was justified, and honour was satisfied.⁴²

The reviewer seems to have felt a genuine respect for the seamen, which also is reflected by the title of the review: ‘Folkekomedien om den danske Sømandshelt’ (The melodrama about the Danish naval hero’). One of the songs in the play, Bogø’s ‘Sømandssang’ (‘Sea shanty’), uses the same motif as Øvreseth’s title, along with the prevalent characterization of the neutral seamen as brave and conscientious, keeping supplies coming to the blockaded countries: ‘who came unarmed under fire, so tarred and salty? … It was the Danish sailors who go on …’⁴³

The 1935–6 serialized version of the story—four booklets illustrated with drawings by Bogø and stills from the film—is also set during the war, at least initially. There are descriptions of German submarine warfare as utterly reprehensible, but also explicit detestation of war profiteers and speculators. When the young hero, the future mate on the bark Margrethe, Paul Hansen, visits the stock exchange at Copenhagen, he thinks:

While the Danish seaman entered the danger zone unarmed or went on duty voyages and risked his life, a crowd of speculators were getting rich here at the stock exchange by speculating in steamship rates. Paul had a vivid sense that in these people’s eyes the seaman’s blood was not worth any more than the blood that flows when the housewife cuts the head off a fish. A deep disgust seized him.⁴⁴

The play was a big success: first it ran for 41 performances at Aarhus Teater, and then in September 1919 it was put on at Sønderbros Teater in Copenhagen, where it ran for at least 350 performances.⁴⁵

Thus, Brinch’s complaints that the seamen’s efforts during the war were soon forgotten cannot be said to be altogether true. But perhaps he would object to the kind of commemoration offered by sentimental and shallow works such as this play.

Bogø had already treated the war at sea in his début, the adventurous children’s book I Krigens Kølvand (‘In the wake of the war’) (1916). In it, the seamen’s situation is also treated in a light fashion, as the genre dictates, but the war is evident throughout the book, both because the ship the boy hero, Ole West, mistakenly boards then sails right through the Battle of Jutland, and because West sabotages an Austrian submarine, deviously based at an as yet neutral Greek island. The boy hero’s actions against an Austrian vessel reflect the author’s attitude towards the belligerents—he was clearly hostile to the Central Powers. This is even more evident in the serious novel Sporløst, which came out in November 1917, striking a mercilessly critical note on Germany’s unrestricted submarine war even in the title, with its clear reference to the Luxburg affair.⁴⁶ The book tells te story of the real steamer Lars Kruse, mentioned above, lightly disguised as Søren Kanne, by focusing on the surviving engineer, renamed Henrik Mørk.

A review in Ekstrabladet said that ‘His book is at once a eulogy to the Danish merchant navy and an accusation against those who exploit it to satisfy greedy shareholders,’ and that Bogø’s realistic art is moving, for instance in the description of the torpedoing of the ship.⁴⁷ The accusation against the speculators is evident throughout the book, but with the most chilly effect in the shorter, second part of it, in which Mørk, the sole survivor tells his eerie story to his wife: ‘Your memories and my thoughts are going to be the flowers on the graves of those who are no more—!’,⁴⁸ his wife says. Mørk’s narration gets more and more fragmented as he tells his tale about sitting on an overturned lifeboat with ‘two mates who had frozen to death by my side’,⁴⁹ nearly freezing to death himself, thinking the bitterly paradoxical situation through:

Danish seamen who did not want to go to war because they wanted to be neutral!
Danish seamen who had been to war.
But no medals for valour!
No glory!
No honour!
Just duty!
And thanks!
From whom?
From the shipowner?
From the speculators in ‘Tramp’!
From the Danish people!
From the Entente, which forced us to do duty voyages between mines and torpedoes, and taunted us for wanting to be neutral!
From the Central Powers, which torpedo the ships with our mates and sink them ruthlessly!
Without a trace—!—⁵⁰

Mørk, his thoughts rambling from cold and horror on his lonely boat, eventually wishes to take an active part in the war: ‘Oh, just once to be allowed to wring the neck of one of them, those boys— ! But to be forced to sail straight into the arms of death—with two—two Danish flags on the sides and then being shot down like sparrows!’⁵¹ He follows this outburst with the rhetorical question: ‘Is that honour?’ To suffer passively like they have done? And it is a Scandinavian matter:

Was it Denmark’s honour that was guarded!
And Norway’s!
And Sweden’s!
Guarded by their seamen!
And what did they do in return for their seamen?
Why did they not provide us with jobs and rights, when they call attention to our duty?
Why do you not protest?
Aloud, at least a little louder!⁵²

But, he concludes, the answer to the northern neutrals’ feeble protests is that might is right.

This fragmented prose style almost resembles modern poetry, with a tinge of German O-Mensch expressionism when Mørk is saved by the submarine that probably torpedoed his ship, and his German saviour says, with the deepest compassion: ‘Mensch, wie siehst du aus!’ Mørk takes his hand—the hand that possibly killed his crewmates, and thus the book ends on a note of forgiveness.⁵³

Olga Eggers’s book is even more indignant and strongly anti-German—in 1916 she wrote the book De derhjemme (‘Those at home’), which is set in Paris and seen from a woman’s perspective, and her sympathies are clearly with the Allies. Hvorfor–? is likewise written from the viewpoint of women, passively suffering at home while their men are at sea.

‘Danes’ in the Kaiserliche Marine

Perhaps because of the Danish use of privateers in the wars against Britain in the early 1800s,⁵⁴ Danish Schleswigers in the German navy who took part in this kind of warfare were not completely ignored or condemned during the interwar years. There was even some pride taken in their efforts. The journalist Christen P. Christensen (1898–1956) wrote a fairly popular series of fictionalized memoirs of these seamen—Kejserens sidste Kaperkrydser (‘The Kaiser’s last privateer cruiser’) (1934) and the sequel Fire Aar paa Quiriquina (‘Four years at Quiriquina’) (1935)—based on the experiences of blacksmith Christian Støckler from Tønder, who had already published his own version of his experiences in eight small books: Mine Oplevelser (‘My experiences’) (1932–3). Støckler sailed with the famous German light cruiser SMS Dresden, which took part in the battles at Coronel (1 November 1914) and Falkland (8 December 1914), and was eventually sunk by British cruisers in neutral waters off the Chilean Juan Fernandez Isles on 14 March 1915. Interestingly, Christensen focuses on German and Danish bravery during the battles, and ‘the ambition and urge to bring order from chaos which dominates the Northern European’ during the internment, as his preface to the second book says,⁵⁵ whereas Støckler himself was highly critical of war and militarism. An explanation can be sought in the fact that during the German occupation of Denmark, Christensen came into the open by writing for the Danish Nazi press.

FIGURE 2: Cover illustration of Olga Eggers’s Hvorfor–? Fortælling fra Undervandsbaads-Krigen (1918). The sky below the threatening clouds and the striking lightning is a bloody red, as is the drowned seaman—killed by the surfacing U-boat, the illustration seems to say.

His racist bias and admiration of Germany is also evident in the book Sønderjyder forsvarer Østafrika 1914–18 (1937) (Blockade and Jungle, 1941) about Nis Kock from Sønderborg, who sailed with the German blockade runner SS Kronborg to East Africa. The book offers no condemnation of Danish-speaking soldiers being used to run the Allied blockade by sailing under false Danish colours—SS Kronborg was really the British cargo ship SS Rubens, which had been seized by Germany at the outbreak of war and turned into a ‘Danish’ ship.⁵⁶ The crew of this ship were handpicked, Danish-speaking soldiers from Northern Schleswig. It left Wilhelmshaven on 18 February 1915, going north of The Faroe Islands to run the blockade, with coal and ammunition for Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops in East Africa and for the cruiser SMS Königsberg, blockaded by British men-of-war in Tanganyika. Here, Kronborg eventually was attacked and sunk by the British. Kock survived and took part in Lettow-Vorbeck’s adventurous African campaign, until he wound up in a POW camp in Egypt.

Whereas Christensen’s version of Kock’s story sold fairly well even in the late 1930s—it was reissued five times—Danes who had served in the German submarines quite understandably did not publish their memoirs in post-war, reunited Denmark. Their war experiences were not included in the story about the Danes in the German army, fighting for a cause that was not their own, as the prevailing collective narrative about the Northern Schleswigers’ participation in the war would have it.⁵⁷ Yet, at least one example does exist: Johannes Ingwersen’s short description of his time with UE19: ‘Admiralitetet melder “UE 19” er ikke vendt tilbage! ’ (‘The Admiralty announces: “UE 19” has not returned! ’), published in the 1956 yearbook of the Northern Schleswigers’ veterans’ organization.⁵⁸ Ingwersen does not, however, tell a story about sinking Allied or neutral vessels, but instead a rather innocent though highly dramatic story about an accident that happened to his submarine and led to its capture by the British. In the middle of June 1917, when UE 19 was patrolling off the east coast of England, it hit and got stuck in the hull of a wreck while submerged. Ingwersen was ordered to crawl out of one of the torpedo tubes to find out why the boat cannot surface. Sitting on the wreck, stark naked, and enjoying the nice weather for a moment while he tries to find out how to rescue his comrades below, he notices a fishing boat and signals to it. When it arrives, it emerges that it is a camouflaged warship, and submarine and crew are taken prisoner—one of the crew of the British ship is actually Danish, for which the story does not offer explanation. The story ends with a sarcastic comment on German heroism, as represented by German newspapers’ reports of the incident: ‘After an heroic battle with the enemy, submarine E-19 has not returned!’ Ingwersen’s approach to his wartime experiences, of course, may be instances of rationalizing and of his need to distance himself from the submarines’ poor reputation in neutral Denmark, especially as shown by his choice of telling this comparatively innocent story.

Commemoration and popular memory

The Danish monument for its seamen killed during the war was dedicated in May 1928, nearly a decade after the armistice. The critical voices—claiming that bread would have been preferred to stones, and that the survivors were still suffering in order to make a living—could also have pointed to the rather belated commemoration. Still, the monument had been in preparation since 1923, but questions of its design postponed its realization. The Norwegian monument: Minnehallen at Stavern was dedicated nearly two years earlier on 1 August 1926.⁵⁹ The crypt of the memory hall contains eleven tablets with the names of 1,892 perished seamen, and later the names of the casualties in the Second World War were added: no fewer than 5,670 names. The crypt furthermore contains the poem Hermann Wildenvey (1885–1959) wrote to the seamen, written for the monument in 1926, which strikes a note similar to Øvreseth’s later title: ‘Without sword, without weapon, | without the edge of enmity | they kept open the road at sea | for the Norwegian flag.’⁶⁰ And in the last stanza of the poem, he calls the seamen ‘warriors of peace’, echoing the widespread Scandinavian self-perception of being of a more enlightened, rational, and peaceful breed than the belligerents.

The Swedish Sjömanstornet—the Seamen’s Tower—in Gothenburg was dedicated on 14 July 1933, nearly seven years after Minnehallen, commemorating 684 Swedish seamen, 36 of whom were women, who lost their lives on Swedish ships during the war, and whose names are inscribed on the base of the tower;⁶¹ 103 foreigners lost their lives, most of whom were Scandinavians, but also Russians, Germans, Americans, Greeks, and at least one Arab, yet these foreigners and the 434 Swedes who were killed aboard foreign ships are not commemorated by the monument.

As for the belatedness of the Danish monument, even the British Mercantile Marine Memorial on Tower Hill, London, was dedicated later—on 12 December 1928—so the amount of time spent on creating the monument was not unusual. And, as was the case with the official Danish monument for the soldiers who fought for Germany and the Allies, dedicated in 1934, local monuments had already been erected for the killed seamen at Fanø, Marstal, Hirtshals, and other seaports. Still, the dilapidated state of the monument at Copenhagen—at least until its restoration in 2011—in many ways reflects the commemoration of the seamen’s efforts during the war.

One explanation for the neglect of the merchant seamen’s efforts and sacrifices in the war might be their transnational character. After all, the Danish monument to the seamen does not only commemorate Danes, but also seamen from many other nations. This, in the still highly nationalistic interwar era, probably did not sit well with the bias of collective memory. Another possible explanation is the very nature of sailing: the sea was an extremely dangerous place to work, even without the additional dangers of war. The British historian F. J. Lindop has calculated the death rate in the period 1901–10 as 1 in 76 for sailing ships and 1 in 163 for steam, making seafaring under sail ‘roughly four times more dangerous than coalmining.’⁶² Seamen were used to working under dangerous conditions, without necessarily being classified as heroes.

A further explanation is connected to the dishonourable and shameful aspects of earning money from other people’s misery: the fact that, taken as a whole, the neutrals made a fortune out of the war without actively participating. This side of the war has left it predominantly remembered as the stalking-ground of the nouveau riche war profiteer: gullaschbaronen—the goulash baron—even became a popular topos in the Scandinavian light literature and cabaret of the day. In Norway, Johan Falkberget’s bestseller Bør Børson jr. (1920), is not completely forgotten; the Swedish examples, which were the most numerous, included Henning Berger’s Gulaschbaronerna (‘The goulash barons’) (1916) about wartime Copenhagen (where the author had lived for several years), which was serialized in the largest Danish newspaper at the time, Politiken; and in Denmark, the earliest example was Palle Rosenkrantz’s Gullasch-Hansens Rejse til Petrograd under Verdenskrigen (‘Goulash-Hansen’s journey to Petrograd during the Great War’) (1915), while the same year the cabaret singer Frederik Jensen’s hit ‘Gullask!’⁶³ gave a humorous recipe for the foul slop that gave the war profiteers their Scandinavia-wide sobriquet. Even in the late 1920s and early 1930s the topos continued to appear in Danish literature, from a canonical writer’s work, Martin Andersen Nexø’s Midt i en Jærntid (1929) (In God’s Country, 1930), to one of the more popular entertaining examples, Niels Kjøngsdal’s Bankegaarden (1931). The novel by this forgotten author has the subtitle ‘A Novel from the Age of Goulash’, indicating its evergreen status: even so soon after the war, the goulash baron had become its dominant memory in the Scandinavian countries, even giving the period its name, leaving little or no space for the seamen’s sacrifices.

Wartime speculation was closely linked to the sea, of course, as the shares of steamship and other shipping companies were among the most profitable. Danish steamship shares peaked at an astonishing 632 in October 1916 (1 July 1914 = 100), whereas another usually profitable business, banking, only reached 186, in October 1918.⁶⁴ In satire and literature, speculation was often linked to the cynicism of profiteers more concerned with insurance payouts than the fate of the seamen on ships that foundered, of which especially Grieg’s play is an example. However, there were also other views on this side to neutrality: take the shipowner, poet, and patron of the arts Hugo Marx Nielsen, complaining about the shipowners’ reputation in Christian Bogø’s magazine Viking:

In literature and melodrama, the shipowner has almost always suffered the sorry fate of acting the villain;—God knows why,—but there is hardly a mean trick played on the poor man and the seaman that is not ascribed to him, and thus he has entered the public mind as a necessary appendage to a cold and calculating brain. No wonder then, that he was regarded as a bloodsucker during the war, latching onto the work of the poor without doing anything but count the gold that poured into his lap.⁶⁵

By the end of 1924, the shipowners, profiteers, or goulash barons had already become the scapegoats for what happened during the war in the neutral countries, whereas, at least in Denmark, the role of passive sufferer had been filled by the many ‘real’ victims of war: the soldiers from Northern Schleswig who had been forced to fight for the old enemy, and now had become a rather paradoxical element in the reunited country. Still, despite the fact that the First World War has not played a significant role in Scandinavian historiography and literary history, and the war at sea even less so, there was still indignant literature being written about the treatment of the neutral seamen.

Notes

1 The article is principally based on my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Mellem Fronterne. Studier i Første Verdenskrigs virkning på og udtryk i dansk kultur, med særligt fokus på litterære skildringer, 1914–1939’ (University of Southern Denmark, 2011).

2 The short article about the dedication in Social-Demokraten, 10 May 1928, 3, reverses this list and mentions the relatives of the victims first. For the history of the monument, see Jens Peter Munk, ‘“At gøre sin Pligt, om saa Døden træder i vejen”: Søfartsmonumentet på Langelinie’, in Årbog. Handels- og Søfartsmuseet på Kronborg, 70 (2011), 9–42.

3 See, for example, Medlemsblad for den alm. danske Skibsførerforening, 19/5 (May 1928), column 144. The reason that the Icelandic seamen are mentioned second, thus breaching the numeral logic of the list, was probably that they were Danish citizens at the time.

4 See, for example, Nationaltidende, 9 May 1928, evening issue, and 10 May 1928, morning issue, or Politiken, 10 May 1928.

5 Ekstrabladet, 9 May 1928, 1.

6 The magazine of the Danish Seamen’s Union (Sømændenes Forbund i Danmark), Ny Tid, 22/4 (April 1928), n.p., ‘Tanken om et Monument kan være meget pæn, men paa Baggrund af Nøden blandt danske Sømænd, er det dog Sten for Brød.’

7 The figures vary: 128 in most sources, 127 in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich & Irina Renz (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), 689.

8 Wilhelm Keilhau, ‘Norway and the World War’, in James T. Shotwell (ed.), Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 360. It is not quite clear if the disappeared and condemned ships are included in the 49.3 per cent. See also Sjøforklaringer over norske skibes krigsforlis, v (Oslo, 1918), preface & 96–7; and Atle Thowsen, Bergen og sjøfarten, iv (Bergen: Bergens Rederiforening og Bergens Sjøfartsmuseum, 1983), 560–1.

9 Ibid.

10 The Norwegian monument for the seamen gives the number 1,892, see below.

11 Samling af Søforklaringer over krigsforliste danske Skibe i Aarene 1914–1918 med et Tillæg, (Copenhagen, 1921), Tables A and B in the appendix; C. Bloch, ‘Danmark under Verdenskrigen’ in ‘Verdenskrigen’, Salmonsens Konversationsleksikon (2nd edn., Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz, 1928), xxiv, 873.

12 Svenska handelsflottans krigsförluster åren 1914–1920 (Stockholm, 1921), 117; and A. Örnberg, ‘Världskriget’ (‘Kriget till sjöss’), Nordisk Familjebok, ed. Yngve Lorents (3rd edn., Stockholm: Aktiebolaget Familjebokens Förlag, 1934), xx. column 911–2. C. Ernest Fayle, Seaborne Trade (London: John Murray, 1924), iii. 466 gives 1,180,316 GRT for the Norwegian losses, 243,707 for the Danish, and 201,366 GRT for the Swedish, figures also used by Franklin D. Scott, The United States and Scandinavia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 218.

13 Substantially higher: 7,830,855 GRT; see Fayle 1924, 466.

14 Keilhau 1930, 360.

15 The use of a German phrase for this side of the war, even today—see, for example, Stephen Pope & Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, The Macmillan Dictionary of The First World War (London: Macmillan, 1995)—gives a clear hint at an answer to this question, at least regarding the Anglo-Saxon parts of the world and as seen from an Allied point of view.

16 Franklin D. Scott, Sweden: The Nation’s History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 471.

17 Ibid.

18 See Lance Edwin Davis & Stanley L. Engerman, Naval Blockades in Peace and War: An Economic History since 1750 (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 13.

19 Ibid.

20 See C. I. Speerschneider, ‘Vor Handelsskibsfart under Verdenskrigen’, Tidsskrift for Søvæsen, 91 (1920), 56.

21 Speerschneider 1920, 114, ‘Stor Anerkendelse har han [sømanden] dog aldrig vundet, men det er ikke hans Skyld og Skam, at det er saa. Det er Samfundets Skyld, vort overintelligente, æstetiserende og for Livets virkelige Værdier slappede Samfund, der ikke har forstaaet i hvilken Taknemmelighedsgæld det staar til vor Sømandsstand, og som i sin stadig blomstrende honette Ambition rynker paa Næsen ad den jævne Sømand, der har det forud for det meste Hankøn paa Landjorden, at han har set Verden og Livet og er en Mand.’

22 N. Th. Brinch, En dansk Skibsførers Rejser i Farezonen under Verdenskrigen Juli 1914—Oktober 1918 (Esbjerg: no publisher given, 1938), 4, ‘Ingen Hæder ventede ham, ingen eller maaske kun faa forstod ham. Naturligvis maatte Sømanden gøre sin Pligt, men kun faa havde klart Syn for hans store Indsats under Verdenskrigen, maaske den vægtigste Indsats, som blev ydet. Men da Krigen sluttede, havde de krigsførende glemt ham, og Landbefolkningen havde næppe bemærket ham.’

23 Brinch 1938, 38, ‘Var det for Fædrelandets Skyld de faldt? Nej, saa vilde de senere være blevet hædret og lovprist. De førte end ikke Fornødenheder til deres Fædreland, thi de var timechartret, ligesom vi og saa mange andre … Dette var den danske Sømandsstands Indsats i den store Verdenskrig, den eneste direkte Indsats, som blev ydet af danske Stænder.’

24 Ibid. 37.

25 I. Øvreseth, Vi som var våbenløse: en skibsførers erindringer fra krigstiden 1914–18 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1932), 16.

26 Speerschneider 1920, 108.

27 Cf. Pope & Wheal 1995, 381. Here, no mention of the use of neutral colours is made.

28 The war at sea predictably played a central part in the propaganda war in the neutral countries—see, for example, the translation of William Archer’s The Pirate’s Progress (1918): Sørøverens Færd (Copenhagen: Pio, 1918) and parts of his polemics against the Danish critic Georg Brandes; or, in a different genre, the German submarine captain von Spiegel’s diary, which sold fairly well in the Norwegian translation, ‘U 202’ Krigsdagbok (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1917).

29 Even though there did exist a Danish steamer by the same name, owned by DFDS, the ship on the magazine’s cover probably is the famous Norwegian steamer—Henry Ford’s ill-fated peace ship. For the Danish steamer, see <http://www.maritime-museum.dk/videnscenter/documents/1917.pdf>, accessed 2 June 2012.

30 ‘En af dem, der sejler Pengene ind’.

31 See Samling af Søforklaringer over krigsforliste danske Skibe i Aarene 1914– 1918 med et Tillæg (Copenhagen, 1921), 271–5.

32 Vort Land, 13 February 1917, 4; see Bendtsen 2011, 198.

33 See Anton Hansen’s memoirs, Ung kunstner (Copenhagen: Fremad, 1954), 151–5.

34 One recent Danish bestseller, Carsten Jensen’s Vi, de druknede (2006; We, the Drowned, 2010), treats the seamen’s war experiences thoroughly.

35 Nordahl Grieg, Samlede verker, iv (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1947), 310.

36 ‘vor ære og vor magt | har hvide seil os bragt.’

37 ‘Litet jeg vet at feste for | i denne bloddryppende Tid. | En Hilsen til dem, som paa Havet | kjæmper vor Strid!’

38 C. I. H. Speerschneider, ‘Den danske Skibsfart under Verdenskrigen’, in P. A. Rosenberg (ed.), Verdenskrigen 1914–1918 og Tiden der fulgte, xi (Copenhagen: Forlaget Danmark, 1935), 142–3.

39 See <http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/nationalfilmografien/nffilm.aspx?id=14428>, accessed 1 April 2012. Unfortunately, there is no information as to an actual position on the list, or the number of tickets sold, etc.

40 Aarhus Stiftstidende, 27 December 1918, ‘et Emne som danske Sømænds Kaar under Verdenskrigen.’

41 ‘Folkekomedie’ has less tragic connotations than melodrama.

42 Aarhus Stiftstidende, 27 December 1918, ‘naar blot der trods Julegaas og Flæskesteg og alle Løjerne og Staffagen, naar blot der et eneste Øjeblik vilde gaa et Gys gennem Tilskuerne, en isnende Følelse af den Rædsel, disse Søgutter har gennemgaaet, en Fornemmelse af den Hæder og Ære, de ved deres Optræden hele Krigen igennem har dækket Flag og Folk med, saa fik Folkeskuespillet sin Berettigelse, og saa var Æren reddet.’

43 Christian Bogø & J. Ravn-Jonsen, Sangene af Folkeskuespillet Barken Margrethe af Danmark (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen Musik Forlag, 1919), 6–7, ‘hvem stod vaabenløs for Skud, saa tjærede og salte? … Det var de danske Sømænd, som gaar paa.’

44 Christian Bogø & J. Ravn-Jonsen, Barken Margrethe af Danmark (Copenhagen: Vikingens Forlag, 1935–6), 16, ‘Medens den danske Sømand vaabenløs gik i Farezone eller i Pligtrejse og vovede sit Liv, stod her paa Københavns Børs … en Flok Spekulanter og tjente sig rige ved at jobbe med Skibskurserne. Paul havde en levende Følelse af, at Sømandens Blod i disse Menneskers Øjne ikke var mere værd end det, der flyder, naar Husmoderen skærer Hovedet af en Fisk. En dyb Væmmelse bemægtigede sig ham’.

45 According to Bogø’s magazine Vikingen, 1/3 (1925), 50–51 announcing a new production, noting that it had run for about 1,000 performances in Denmark thus far. Supposedly, it had run for more than 2,000 performances in Denmark and Sweden (see <http://www.danskefilm.dk/index2.html>, accessed 31 March 2012).

46 The telegram about Argentinean steamers sunk without trace—an affair that threatened to drag Sweden into the war (see Steven Koblik, Sweden: The Neutral Victor (Lund: Läromedelsförlagen, 1972), 95–130).

47 Ekstrabladet, 30 November 1917, 3, ‘Hans Bog er paa én Gang en Lovsang til den danske Handelsmarine og en Anklage imod dem, der udnytter den til graadige Aktionæreres Tilfredsstillelse, og han hæver sig f. Eks. i Skildringen af Torpederingen til en Højde af realistisk Kunst, som virker betagende.’ Actually, there was no proof that the ship was torpedoed; it might also have struck a mine.

48 Christian Bogø, Sporløst –! (Copenhagen: P. H. Fergo, 1917), 160, ‘Dine Minder og mine Tanker skal være Blomsterne paa deres Grave, som ikke er mere – !’

49 Bogø 1917, 196, ‘To ihjelfrosne Kammerater ved Siden’.

51 Bogø 1917, 197, ‘Aah, bare een Gang at faa Lov til at dreje Halsen om paa een af dem, disse Drenge –! Men dette at skulle sejle lige lukt ind i Dødens Arme – med to – to Dannebrogsflag paa Siden og saa blive skudt ned som Graaspurve!’

53 Bogø 1917, 200.

54 Parallels were drawn with the early 1800s by, for example, the stockbroker Alfred Horwitz, Pengeoverflodens Udskejelser i Fortid og Nutid (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1917), 10–22.

55 Chr. P. Christensen, Fire Aar paa Quiriquina (Copenhagen: Martins Forlag, 1935), 6, ‘den Opdrift og Trang til at bringe Orden i Kaos, der behersker Nordeuropæeren’.

56 The Germans also sailed under Norwegian flag, for example to disguise the auxiliary cruiser Greif that was sunk in battle with the British armoured ship Alcantara on 29 February 1916 (see Knut Utstein Kloster, Krigsår og gullflom. Skibsfarten under verdenskrigen (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1935), facing 112; and <http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twoships-sink-in-north-sea-battle>, accessed 2 June 2012).

57 See, for example, the inscription at the entrance of the official Danish monument for the war dead, Marselisborgmonumentet in Aarhus; Bendtsen, ‘Marselisborgmonumentets mytekonstruktion’, 1066 Tidsskrift for Historie, 38/2 (June 2008), 3–12.

58 Foreningen af Dansksindede sønderjydske Krigsdeltagere (Society of Danish-minded Northern Schleswig Veterans), D.S.K. Aarbog (1956), 38–47.

59 See the long article on ‘Minnehallens indvielse’, Aftenposten, 2 August 1926.

60 ‘Uten verge, uten våpen, | uten avinds agg | holdt de vei på bølgen åpen | for det norske flagg.’

61 <http://www.goteborg.se/wps/portal/sjofartsmuseet>, accessed 2 June 2012.

62 See Tony Lane, ‘The British Merchant Seaman at War’, in Hugh Cecil & Peter H. Liddle (eds.) Facing Armageddon. The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), 159.

63 The spelling was not yet agreed on.

64 Einar Cohn, ‘Denmark in the Great War’, in James T. Shotwell (ed.), Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 557.

65 Hugo Marx Nielsen, ‘Skibsfarten og Rederne’, Viking. Havets, Havnens, Handelens og Hjemmets illustrerede Magasin, 1/2 (December 1924), 9, ‘Skibsrederen har i Litteraturen og i Folkekomedierne næsten altid haft den kranke Skæbne at skulle spille Skurk; – Guderne maa vide hvorfor, – men der er næsten ikke den Nedrighed overfor Fattigmand og Sømand, der ikke er tillagt ham og derigennem er gaaet ind i Befolkningens Bevidsthed som et nødvendigt Appendix til en kold og beregnende Hjerne. Intet Under derfor, at han under Krigen blev betragtet som en Blodsuger, der mæskede sig ved Fattigmands Arbejde uden selv at bestille andet end at tælle det Guld, der regnede ned i hans Skød.’