The British Navy was rushed to the defense of this stronghold, and had they passed the strait a naval action would have ensued which might have saved Europe then and there from the specter of the new Byzantine Empire. But this exigency, like others, had been anticipated. As the great navy steamed into the straits, supposedly under the protection of Gibraltar, a vast battery of sixteen-inch guns mounted on railway cars opened a withering fire from the Spanish shore at Tarifa. Less than half of the capital ships passed through this barrage, and most of those, before they were well out of range, ran into a mine-field stretching across the strait, laid at night some weeks before by enemy submarines and made ready for action by wire from Tarifa as the fleet approached.
A handful of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers escaped the trap, and bravely faced their fate in the defense of Gibraltar. But the waiting enemy had now such an overwhelming advantage in numbers that their doom was sealed. Cut off by land and sea, it was of course only a matter of time before Gibraltar fell.
And now England was left with her mighty navy gone, all but the few ships that were in dry-dock and couldn’t be sent in time, and a few obsolete vessels purposely left at home.
All Northern Europe rose to fight the Constantinople Coalition. England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Poland, and the Scandinavian nations placed troops in the field. And soon two giant armies faced each other entrenched in a battle-line extending from the Pyrenees to the Alps and thence along mountain barriers where such existed, eastward to the Caspian Sea. In the development of land warfare, defensive measures had outstripped offensive measures, and especially strong were the defensive methods used by the Mediterranean forces. Consequently ground could be gained by the northern armies only at the cost of prohibitive losses. A military deadlock ensued, and the problem became one of attrition. In natural resources in the Eastern Hemisphere the Mediterranean group had slightly the better situation, but what counted still more was control of the Atlantic Ocean, and through it, access to the resources of the Western Hemisphere.
This control by the Mediterranean Powers being undisputed, virtually all commerce between North America and Northern Europe was cut off. The resources of Northern Europe sufficed to maintain the war for the present, but clearly materials from the Western Hemisphere would in time be a necessity if the war was to go on.
Through the summer months America maintained neutrality, although it was daily becoming clearer to those whose vision extended beyond the balance-sheet of the current month that, as in 1917, civilization was at stake, and the sooner America shouldered her share of the fight the better it would be for all the world, herself included.
This was the situation when on a warm sunny morning in September one of America’s newest destroyers crossed Cape Cod Bay at a thirty-knot speed, and, gliding smoothly into Provincetown Harbor, dropped anchor. As the chain rattled down, a tall, well-built man in civilian clothes stood on the bridge beside the skipper and surveyed the harbor. Presently his eye rested on a small sailboat, ketch-rigged, of some thirty-six feet over-all length, making toward them about a quarter of a mile away.
“I guess that’s my boat, skipper,” said the civilian.
“Going round the Cape in that, are you? She’s not over-roomy, but she looks like a good sea boat,” was the answer.
A boat was lowered; the civilian left the bridge, shook hands with the skipper, and was soon on his way toward the sailboat which presently shot up into the wind and, with her sails flapping, gradually lost headway as the motor-boat from the destroyer came up on her starboard quarter. The passenger clambered over the side and into the cockpit of the little ketch, a sailor handed him his suitcase, and with a parting word of thanks to the crew of the motor-boat he sat down to look about him.