that these great cruisers accomplished anything that justified the expense and the trouble which were involved in building them.

III

This, then, was the type of warfare which the German submarines were waging upon the shipping of the Allied nations. What were the Allied navies doing to check them in this terrible month of April, 1917? What anti-submarine methods had been developed up to that time?

The most popular game on both sides of the Atlantic was devising means of checking the under-water ship. Every newspaper, every magazine, every public man, and every gentleman at his club had a favourite scheme for defeating the U-boat campaign. All that any one needed for this engaging pastime was a map of the North Sea, and the solution appeared to be as clear as daylight. As Sir Eric Geddes once remarked to me, nothing is quite so deceptive as geography. All of us are too likely to base our conception of naval problems on the maps which we studied at school. On these maps the North Sea is such a little place! A young lady once declared in my hearing that she didn't see how the submarines could operate in the English Channel, it was so narrow! She didn't see how there was room enough to turn around! The fact that it is twenty miles wide at the shortest crossing and not far from two hundred at the widest is something which it is apparently difficult to grasp.

The plan which was most popular in those days was to pen the submarines in their bases and so prevent their egress into the North Sea. Obviously the best way to handle the situation was to sink the whole German submarine fleet; that was apparently impossible, and the next best thing was to keep them in their home ports and prevent them from sailing the high seas. It was not only the man in the street who was advocating this programme. I had a long talk with several prominent Government officials, in which they asked me why this could not be done.

"I can give you fourteen reasons why it is impossible," I answered. "We shall first have to capture the bases, and it would be simply suicidal to attempt it, and it would be playing directly into Germany's hands. Those bases are protected by powerful 15-, 11-, and 8-inch guns. These are secreted behind hills or located in pits on the seashore, where no approaching vessel can see them. Moreover, those guns have a range of 40,000 yards, but the guns on no ships have a range of more than 30,000 yards; they are stationary, whereas ours would be moving. For our ships to go up against such emplacements would be like putting a blind prize-fighter up against an antagonist who can see and who has arms twice as long as his enemy's. We can send as many ships as we wish on such an expedition, and they will all be destroyed. The German guns would probably get them on the first salvo, certainly on the second. There is nothing the Germans would so much like to have us try."

Another idea suggested by a glance at the map was the construction of a barrage across the North Sea from the Orkneys to the coast of Norway. The distance did not seem so very great—on the map; in reality, it was two hundred and thirty miles and the water is from 360 to 960 feet in depth. If we cannot pen the rats up in their holes, said the newspaper strategist, certainly we can do the next best thing: we can pen them up in the North Sea. Then we can route all our shipping to points on the west coast of England, and the problem is solved.

I discussed this proposition with British navy men and their answer was quite to the point.

"If we haven't mines enough to build a successful barrage across the Straits of Dover, which is only twenty miles wide, how can we construct a barrage across the North Sea, which is 230?"

A year afterward, as will be shown later, this plan came up in more practical form, but in 1917 the idea was not among the possibilities—there were not mines enough in the world to build such a barrage, nor had a mine then been invented that was suitable for the purpose.

The belief prevailed in the United States, and, to a certain extent, in England itself, that the most effective means of meeting the submarine was to place guns and gun crews on all the mercantile vessels. Even some of the old British merchant salts maintained this view. "Give us a gun, and we'll take care of the submarines all right," they kept saying to the Admiralty. But the idea was fundamentally fallacious. In the American Congress, just prior to the declaration of war, the arming of merchant ships became a great political issue; scores of pages in the Congressional Record are filled with debates on this subject, yet, so far as affording any protection to shipping was concerned, all this was wasted oratory. Those who advocated arming the merchant ships as an effective method of counteracting submarine campaigns had simply failed to grasp the fundamental elements of submarine warfare. They apparently did not understand the all-important fact that the quality which makes the submarine so difficult to deal with is its invisibility. The great political issue which was involved in the submarine controversy, and the issue which brought the United States into the war, was that the Germans were sinking merchant ships without warning. And it was because of this very fact—this sinking without warning—that a dozen guns on a merchant ship afforded practically no protection. The lookout on a merchantman could not see the submarine, for the all-sufficient reason that the submarine was concealed beneath the water; it was only by a happy chance that the most penetrating eye could detect the periscope, provided that one were exposed. The first intimation which was given the merchantman that a U-boat was in his neighbourhood was the explosion of the torpedo in his hull. In six weeks, in the spring and early summer of 1917, thirty armed merchantmen were torpedoed and sunk off Queenstown, and in no case was a periscope or a conning-tower seen. The English never trusted their battleships at sea without destroyer escort, and certainly if a battleship with its powerful armament could not protect itself from submarines, it was too much to expect that an ordinary armed merchantman would be able to do so. I think the fact that few American armed ships were attacked and sunk in 1917 created the impression that their guns afforded them some protection. But the apparent immunity extended to them was really policy on Germany's part. She expected, as I have said, that she would win the war long before the United States could play an effective rôle in the struggle. It was therefore good international politics to refrain from any unnecessary acts that would still further embitter the American people against her. There was also a considerable pacifist element in our country which Germany was coddling in the hope of preventing the United States from using against her such forces as we already had at hand. The reason American armed merchantmen were not sunk was simply because they were not seriously attacked; I have already shown how easily Germany could have sunk them if she had really tried. Any reliance upon armed guards as a protection against submarines would have been fundamentally a mistake, for the additional reason that it was a defensive measure; it must be apparent that the extremely grave situation which we were then facing demanded the most energetic offensive methods. Yet the arming of merchant ships was justified as a minor measure. It accomplished the one important end of forcing the submarine to submerge and to use torpedoes instead of gunfire. In itself this was a great gain; obviously the Germans would much prefer to sink ships with projectiles than with torpedoes, for their supply of these latter missiles was limited.