a fights, sea raids, and the hourly expectation of a great naval
battle--a struggle for the control of the seas between modern
armadas--held the attention of the world during the first six months
of the Great War. These, with the adventures of the _Emden_ in the
waters of the Far East, the first naval fight off Helgoland, the
fight off the western coast of South America, the sinking of the
_Lusitania_, and the exploits of the submarines--held the world
in constant expectancy and threatened to involve neutral nations,
thus causing a collapse of world trade and dragging all the peoples
of the earth into the maelstrom of war.

This chapter will review the navies as they gather for action. It
will follow them through the tense moments on shipboard--the days
of watching and waiting like huge sea dogs tugging at the leash.
Interspersed are heroic adventures which have added new tales of
valor to the epics of the sea.

The naval history of the great European conflict begins, not with the
first of the series of declarations of war, but with the preliminary
preparations. The appointment of Admiral von Tirpitz as Secretary
of State in Germany in 1898 is the first decisive movement. It
was in that year that the first rival to England as mistress of
the world's seas, since the days of the Spanish Armada, peeped
over the horizon. Two years before the beginning of the present
century, Von Tirpitz organized a campaign, the object of which
was to make Germany's navy as strong as her military arm. A law
passed at that time created the present German fleet; supplementary
laws passed in 1900 and 1906 through the Reichstag by this former
plowboy caused the German navy to be taken seriously, not only
by Germans but by the rest of the world. England, jealous of her
sea power, then began her maintenance of two ships for each one
or her rival's. Germany answered by laying more keels, till the
ratio stood three to two, instead of two to one.

Two years before the firing of the pistol shot at Sarajevo, which
precipitated the Great War, the British admiralty announced that
henceforth the British naval base in the Mediterranean would be
Gibraltar instead of Malta. Conjectures were made as to the significance
of this move; it might have meant that England had found the pace
too great and had deliberately decided to abandon her dominance
of the eastern Mediterranean; or that Gibraltar had been secretly
reequipped as a naval base. What it did mea