0 tons of other nitrogen
salts. By this means her old, wornout fields were made to yield greater
harvests than our fresh land. Germany and England were like two duelists
buying powder at the same shop. The Chilean Government, pocketing an
export duty that aggregated half a billion dollars, permitted the
saltpeter to be shoveled impartially into British and German ships, and
so two nitrogen atoms, torn from their Pacific home and parted, like
Evangeline and Gabriel, by transportation oversea, may have found
themselves flung into each other's arms from the mouths of opposing
howitzers in the air of Flanders. Goethe could write a romance on such a
theme.

Now the moment war broke out this source of supply was shut off to both
parties, for they blockaded each other. The British fleet closed up the
German ports while the German cruisers in the Pacific took up a position
off the coast of Chile in order to intercept the ships carrying nitrates
to England and France. The Panama Canal, designed to afford relief in
such an emergency, caved in most inopportunely. The British sent a fleet
to the Pacific to clear the nitrate route, but it was outranged and
defeated on November 1, 1914. Then a stronger British fleet was sent
out and smashed the Germans off the Falkland Islands on December 8. But
for seven weeks the nitrate route had been closed while the chemical
reactions on the Marne and Yser were decomposing nitrogen-compounds at
an unheard of rate.

England was now free to get nitrates for her munition factories, but
Germany was still bottled up. She had stored up Chilean nitrates in
anticipation of the war and as soon as it was seen to be coming she
bought all she could get in Europe. But this supply was altogether
inadequate and the war would have come to an end in the first winter if
German chemists had not provided for such a contingency in advance by
working out methods of getting nitrogen from the air. Long ago it was
said that the British ruled the sea and the French the land so that left
nothing to the German but the air. The Germans seem to have taken this
jibe seriously and to have set themselves to make the most of the aerial
realm in order to challenge the British and French in the fields they
had appropriated. They had succeeded so far that the Kaiser when he
declared war might well have considered himself the Prince of the Power
of the Air. He had a fleet of Zeppelins and he had means for the
fixation of nitrogen