"Did it satisfy the Admiralty?"
"No. Nothing satisfies the Admiralty but certainties. They count the minimum losses of the enemy, and the maximum of their own. Very proper, too. Then you know where you are. But, mind you, I don't believe we finished him off that morning. Oil don't prove that. It only proves we hit him. I believe it was the 'Maggie and Rose' that killed him, or the 'Hawthorn.' No; it wasn't either. It was the 'Loch Awe.'"
"How was that?"
"Well, as Commander White was telling you, we'd shot out nets to the north and south of him. There were two or three hundred miles, perhaps, in which he might wriggle about; but he couldn't get out of the trap, even if he knew where to look for the danger. He tried to run for home, and that's what finished him. They'll tell you all about that on the 'Loch Awe.'"
So the next day I heard the end of the yarn from a sandy-haired skipper in a trawler whose old romantic name was dark with new significance. He was terribly logical. In his cabin—a comfortable room with a fine big stove—he had a picture of his wife and daughters, all very rigid and uncomfortable. He also had three books. They included neither Burns nor Scott. One was the Bible, thumbed by his grandfather and his father till the paper had worn yellow and thin at the sides. The second, I am sorry to say, was called The Beautiful White Devil. The third was an odd volume of Froude in the Everyman edition. It dealt with the Armada.
"I was towin' my nets wi' the rest o' my group," he said, "till about 3 o'clock i' the mornin' on yon occasion. It was fine weather wi' a kind o' haar. All at once, my ship gaed six points aff her coorse, frae S. E. to E. N. E., and I jaloused that the nets had been fouled by some muckle movin' body. I gave orders to pit the wheel hard a-port, but she wouldna answer. Suddenly the strain on the nets stoppit.
"I needna tell you what had happened. Of course, it was preceesely what the Admiralty had arranged tae happen when gentlemen in undersea boats try to cut their way through our nets. Mind ye, thae nets are verra expensive."
A different situation, however, has lately developed in the more unequal fight between submarines and merchant vessels. There the submarine unquestionably has gained and maintained supremacy. Two factors are primarily responsible for this: lack of speed and lack of armament on the part of the merchantman. Of course, recently the latter condition has been changed and apparently with good success. But even at best, an armed merchantman has a rather slim chance at escape. Neither space nor available equipment permits a general arming of merchantmen to a sufficient degree to make it possible for the latter to attack a submarine from any considerable distance. Then, too, what chance has a merchant vessel unprotected by patrol boats to escape the torpedo of a hidden submarine? How successfully this question will finally be solved, the future only will show. At present it bids fair to become one of the deciding factors in determining the final issue of this war.
The first authentically known case of an attack without warning by a German submarine against an allied merchantman was the torpedoing of the French steamship Amiral Ganteaume on October 26, 1914, in the English Channel. The steamer was sunk and thirty of its passengers and crew were lost. A number of other attacks followed during the remainder of 1914 and in January, 1915. Then came on February 3, 1915, the now famous pronouncement of the German Government declaring "all the waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, a war zone," and announcing that on and after Feb. 18th, Germany "will attempt to destroy every enemy ship found in that war zone, without its being always possible to avoid the danger that will thus threaten neutral persons and ships." Germany gave warning that "it cannot be responsible hereafter for the safety of crews, passengers, and cargoes of such ships," and it furthermore "calls the attention of neutrals to the fact that it would be well for their ships to avoid entering this zone, for, although the German naval forces are instructed to avoid all violence to neutral ships, in so far as these can be recognized, the order given by the British Government to hoist neutral flags and the contingencies of naval warfare might be the cause of these ships becoming the victims of an attack directed against the vessels of the enemy."
This was the beginning of the submarine controversy between Germany and the United States and resulted in a note from the United States Government in which it was stated that the latter viewed the possibilities created by the German note