The Death Trap

From 1900 onwards relations between Germany and the United Kingdom moved from less than cordial to open hostility. That crucial shift in the European power system was reflected and projected in a new kind of Zukunftskrieg and in many tales of ‘The Next Great War’. The change came rapidly. Previously writers had been in two minds about the other side in tomorrow’s war. France appeared as the expected enemy in six future-war stories, and Germany in three. ¹ In 1900, however, the first outright declaration of hostilities on the German side came from Dr Karl Eisenhart. The day would come, he declared in Die Abrechnung mit England, when the German Navy ‘could take on the hated English’, and he proved that hope by describing a naval war in which the Germans destroy two British fleets. On the British side the first considered and candid statement on the possibility of a war between Britain and Germany came in 1903, in Erskine Childers’s classic tale The Riddle of the Sands. There the principal actors in the war-to-come made their first appearance: Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Hochsee-flotte. The Emperor had announced on New Year’s Day 1900 that he intended to reorganise the German Navy so that ‘with its help, the German Empire shall reach the place which it has not yet attained’. Those intentions are the key to the riddle in Childers’s story, since the Emperor is present on the tug when it makes the mysterious trial trip through the waterways in the gap between Langeoog and Baltrum. In one of the most telling incidents in the future-war fiction of that time Carruthers suddenly realises what is afoot:

I was assisting at an experimental rehearsal of a great scene, to be enacted, perhaps, in the near future - a scene when multitudes of sea-going lighters, carrying full loads of soldiers, not half loads of coal, should issue simultaneously, in seven ordered fleets, from seven shallow outlets, and, under escort of the Imperial Navy, traverse the North Sea and throw themselves bodily upon English shores. ²

Childers had generated the German invasion myth. He presented his reasons for believing the worst by reasserting the common British expectation of German enmity - ‘our great trade rival of the present, our great naval rival of the future’ and he revealed the first stages of Die ‘Offensiv-Invasion’ gegen England in a series of most convincing episodes.